Females tend to have a rounded and “slightly swollen” posterior while males don’t.A very close look at it’s head shows a head with a small light-sensing hole and two fleshy mandibles for latching onto things.It looks like a piece of string or a shoelace that wants to live in your insides.It’s a long, thin, wriggly black or brown worm. Still, the journey from egg to host isn’t an easy one and the worm pays its dues to get a free ride through Life, Death, and Taxonomy. The horsehair worm is a parasite that bears no ill will, but it will make an unfortunate mantis very ill. But is there such a threat in the kingdom Animalia. But more on that later.”īy now you may have heard of Cordyceps, the fungus among use that can take over the brain of an ant. “…and today we’re talking about a parasite on the prowl. We can guess-fairly accurately-that the park provides habitat for numerous other strange invertebrate animals that are yet to be studied.Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 36:25 | Recorded on March 21, 2023 They are fascinating, but rarely encountered. Horsehair worms have also been seen in the caves of Carlsbad Caverns National Park and in streams in the Guadalupe Mountains. Occasionally, they are found after a cricket or cockroach is killed by someone crushing the insect, at which time the worm begins to wiggle out of the insect's body. When mature, it leaves the host insect to start the process again.Įmergence from the host occurs only when the host is near water. There, it digests and absorbs the surrounding tissue. If the cyst is eaten by a suitable insect, the protective covering dissolves and the released larva bores through the gut wall and into the body cavity of the host. After the eggs hatch, scientists believe that each larva forms a protective covering or cyst. The adult "worms" mate in water and females lay long gelatinous strings of eggs. These interesting creatures are not parasites of humans, livestock, or pets, and pose no public health threat. When mature, they leave the host to lay eggs. The immature stages are parasites in the bodies of grasshoppers, crickets, cockroaches, and some beetles.
Horsehair worms are the aquatic adult phase of little-known invertebrate animals. A horsehair worm in the phylum Nematomorpha.
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