Has anyone watch this video?

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festivus5

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https://youtu.be/jhzFh_hs5Oc

Has anyone watch this video of this mysterious parasite coming out of the pray mantis? I can imagine this video has already been posted on this site before, but I'm curious about what kind of parasite that is? I'm new to this site and I couldn't figure out how to directly upload the video to my post, so forgive me for posting a link to the video :mellow: :mellow:

 
It's a horsehair worm. They adult worms live in fresh water, but in order to spread to new areas their larvae are parasitic in the guts of insects. After being ingested, the larva grows to adult size inside its host and then messes with its brain and compels it to seek a source of fresh water and leap into it, allowing the larva to escape. I'm not sure if the host survives if it manages to avoid drowning or if the worm has caused too much damage.

Something interesting about horsehair worms is that even though they resemble some kind of large nematode, they have their own phylum. (Which is called Nematomorpha because they look so much like nematodes.)

Sometimes if you dig through the mud at the bottom of a stream you can find they adult worms, which are really big. Once I came across a small brook that was drying up, leaving a bunch of isolated pools that were turning stagnant. In one pool there were probably dozens of adult worms that had died and were projecting from their burrows.

I wonder if the praying mantis ate they larva by itself or ate a recently infected insect?

 
I just did some research. Turns out that how it works is that the adult worm releases larvae into the water, which burrow into small aquatic insect larvae such as mosquitoes or chironomids, which are then either scavenged or preyed on by their next host.

So the only danger from horsehair worms is feeding mantises insects that were aquatic as larvae.

 
festivus5 said:
https://youtu.be/jhzFh_hs5Oc

Has anyone watch this video of this mysterious parasite coming out of the pray mantis? I can imagine this video has already been posted on this site before, but I'm curious about what kind of parasite that is? I'm new to this site and I couldn't figure out how to directly upload the video to my post, so forgive me for posting a link to the video :mellow: :mellow:
Click to expand...
I seen that video once, it disturbs me lol. Oh btw, to add videos, you just have to remove the period between the "u" and "b" in "youtube".

 
I have read that some tribe in south america called mantids what translates to mother of snakes in their native language. They call them this because they thought the worm coming out of the mantis is a snake.

 
phew glad to know these parasites cant infect my mantis. Can mantises get tapeworms from grasshoppers and crickets? :wacko:

 
Mantis Man13 said:
phew glad to know these parasites cant infect my mantis. Can mantises get tapeworms from grasshoppers and crickets? :wacko:
Click to expand...
possibly. once i caught a grasshopper with a strange bulging abdomen and i tried to feed it to my adult female carolina. she would grab it then a few seconds later drop it. I decided to feed it to a mismolted mantis so i took of the abdomen and hundreds of tiny white worms were inside. I believe those were nematodes.

 
Tapeworms are more or less exclusively parasites of vertebrates.

According to the diagram I posted a link to above mantises get horsehair worms from eating mayflies.^

 

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