The Dexter of Parasites

We call it parasite to hyper parasite, and it's about parasites that prey on parasites. M go on, kids, tell me more about it. Well, it's actually real. It's not just an item of science pic. It sounds like hyper parasite does, sound like it would be the sequel to a parasitic movie. But it comes down to an interesting question parasites. All right, there's a simple view of looking at the world of parasites. You have us, normal organisms, and then you have the organisms that prey on us,

the criminal element in the world right there. Speak Yeah, they're stuck in our blood. They're they're they're getting into our cells. All these various heinous acts out there. Are they getting away scott free or are the other parasites that prey on them? And then and then how would that work? Do those parasites have parasites as well, So

it's kind of like a parasite. This hyper parasite is sort of like Dexter, the serial killer of serial killers, though instead of killing to fulfill a need for I guess sating the impulse to destroy and exacting a kind of justice at the same time, these hyper parasites, I'm gonna guess are doing this all for the energy force. Yes. Yeah, it's it's easy to sort of to go to like the Dexter example or like a roman Hood example or Omar little example from the Wire where it's like, all right,

these are the thieves, but this guy's thieving from the thief. Uh, these are the serial killers. This guy's killing the serial killers. But but really, when you get get down to you really look at the the economy aspect that we've talked about this before, and cannibalism and animals where it all comes down to the energy. All right, there's in nature we have this this ecological pyramid at the bottom, the very bottom level of the pyramid, you have vegetation that's growing,

depending largely upon solar energy. And then every level moving up from that bottom level of the pyramid is some

sort of organism eating another. You eat, something's eating the grass, something's eating that, and something else is eating Matt swooping in until at the very top, enthroned on this mountain of bone and flesh, you have the apex predators, who are just fortunate enough to to be above all of that, at least until they, you know, get old or break a leg and topple down the pyramid to where a scavenger can rip them apart. So, I mean, it really

comes down. All this comes under the fact that nature is this this hellish world of competition, and it's all about the economy of energy, the energy required to pass on your genes, and anybody and everybody in this pyramid will eat another, one will steal energy if they are able to, if there is any opportunity, and that's just

the brutal truth of it. It's like a it's like some sort of a crime movie where there's like a gym or a you know, a suitcase full of gold or something and every criminal in the picture is uh is screwing over the next one to get it, until there's just nobody actually has possession of the football anymore. Well, it's interesting as humans. On top of that, the heap of bones. You know, we tend to look at parasites is this, you know, it's this thing that might be

invading me and causing disease. And I'm a host for this, I'm at the top, I'm at the apex. How can this be? And so when you hear about these hyper parasites, is parasite on parasite action going on? You tend to think of them, as you say, it's sort of like these avengers. Yes, this robin hood bacteria is is on my side. He's going after the thing that's after me. So the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right right.

But in fact, these hyper parasites are just these sort of brilliant criminal minds, because what the doing is they're looking at, uh, these instances in nature in which other parasites are really successful, and they're sort of riding on the coattails of this. And as you say, they're going for the big energy leap here. It doesn't happen anything to do with avenging the host of that that the

parasite is taking advantage of. Yeah, I mean, it's an old adage that for successful criminal their biggest enemy isn't law enforcement but other criminals. You know, if you have like an amazing grow house operation going, like somewhere in Canada was reading les about, then you do. Uh, we're reading articles about this a while back, and um, you know, they get to the point where they don't have to worry about about law enforcement. They've got that figured out.

But it's the it's the other criminals that are gonna come and snatch your crops or or steal your money or or something like that, and use your underground tunnels. Yes, use your underground tunnels for whatever you use it for. And if you're not smuggling through drugs and money, it's just kind of it's annoying sometimes, That's all I'm saying. Uh, yeah, no, I mean, I kid, but this is this parasite on parasite examples that we see in nature. Fascinating stuff and

it's very chilling too at the same time. Can't help but ant morphies it. Um, So we're gonna take a look at a couple of examples here in nature. All right, First up, we're gonna talk a little about wasps. Now, we've talked about wasps a lot, especially parasitic wasps. I'm always talking about them. I wrote an article about how wasps work on How Stuff Work several years ago, and

and I can't stop thinking about them ever since. I hate to kill them, even if they're even if they're a nuisance in the house, do you really respect them? I respect them. They're they're brutal, but they're they're they're honest in their brutality. And you know, and they haven't sold out like the honeybee and taken on this, uh, this sigrarian lifestyle. They are still out there living a life more or less. Yeah, but the honey bees all like, yeah,

everything would collapse without me. You guys are just being jerks out there and showing off. Well, all right, well that's an argument for another day. Yeah, Okay, let's not reignite that. Let's not reignite that. Believe we have an episode on that, So go back and study that if you want more on that particular debate. But parasitic wasps, Uh, basically we're talking about the ultimate deadbeat moms. In a sense. They don't want to raise that larva that raise that

egg as their own. So what do they do? They plant inside another critter. It wakes up inside of its food source, it's living food source. They suppress the host immune system, they control its growth, it's metabolism, all for their own benefit. Sometimes they even hijack the host organism, such as the particular parasitic wass that we saw where the larva takes over the ladybug. It makes it it's zombie master while it grows into maturity. Um. But there's

even more to that. There are parasitic wasps that are hyper parasitic. Yeah, and it all starts with g l vs. We've talked about this before, which are green leaf volatiles. That's the chemical produced by a leaf that is munched on by a caterpillar. Right, releases a signal to predators. Uh, and says, hey, you know there's there's a there's a

caterpillar on me and he's eating me lunch. Yeah, it would be great if some some wasps were to come by and plant some larva inside of this moocher y. That's right, And so the caterpillar, you know, unbeknownst has limited time here because pretty soon one of two different types of wasps we're talking about the cotes at Rubicla and the Cocheesia glomarata will heed that call from those g l V chemicals and swoop down on the caterpillar.

Now that's where the stinging and the implanting comes into play. The eggs are deposited using that ovipositor as a stinger, which of course is an egg laying organ. All wasps that are out there stinging those are female wasps. And so what you have is you have a caterpillar which is now reduced to the status of a wasp incubator. Now that in itself is sort of Ninja level waspery. Yeah, if that's worried, but I'm gonna go ahead use it. But that's that's nothing compared to this hyper paris sidic

wasp that comes into play. Yes, this particular wasp was studied by Eric Polman of Waganagan University in the Netherlands, and that this particular hyper parasoid uh Lazibia Nana or l Nana as we shall henceforth college, which I'm now thinking about a Nana like nana wasp. Yeah, well, in a sense, you know that the nana is bringing the larva. So what l nana does is it sniffs out the particular distress calls of the plant that is being chewed on by larva that are hijacked by these particular These

are two particular wasps. That's right, because now that chemical uh signal has been changed yet again because is different in inside the caterpillar that has been hijacked. So the signal that is going out from the plant is no longer saying hell if I'm under attack from caterpillars, that's saying help, I'm under attack from a caterpillar that has also been hijacked by a wasp. Yeah, so al nana comes along and says, well, don't mind if I do.

They're here. This daycare center has already been a stabbed wished saves me the trouble. So what I'm gonna do is in the lay one of these eggs in every wasp grubber pupil I can find, and when they hatch, they're not only going to eat the host caterpillar, They're also gonna eat any other daycare attendees inside of that organism. It's really brilliant right, because, as you say, the other wasps have done the work. All they have to do is swoop in deposit and it's a very successful way

of trying to get that food source easily. Of course, they do have an enemy, these hyper parasites, these wasps, and that would be another hyper parasitoid. Usually this is other females of the same species. And sometimes a caterpillar may host two, three, maybe even four tiers parasites within it. It's tough. It's tough being a caterpillar. Uh And but again this really drives home just what a violent battle

royal life on Earth really is. It's just any anybody who can will try and get larva inside of that caterpillar. It's kind of like with the whole the l like spying thing that came out, you know recently, we're you know, talking about the US eavesdropping on phone calls over the world, and people are outraged by it. And you know, I'm not saying that there's not a certain amount of acceptable outrage, but I couldn't help to think, well, you know, this

is what countries do. Countries are kind of awful and spying. Everybody, hasn't everyone been reading the same books and seeing the same James Bond films that I have over the years, they would know that. So it's kind of the same thing in the animal world. Anybody that can and has the ability to will get in there and steal some energy,

steal the opportunity and wasper grade at this. I mean, there are other species of wasps that will also slip their young into a into another wasp nest and let it to grow to maturity there, and then the same thing. It'll it'll jump, it'll leap frog over the other young and then eat them and then emerge from the washing. There. There's just wonderful evil creatures on nature. It's beautiful. It is all right, let's take a quick break and when we get back, we are going to talk about the

zombie And all right, we're back. Now you've heard us talk about court a steps before. Um, these are the fun guy that we discussed in our Zombie Outbreak episode. This is one where we we pretended we put on a little radio play here in which Atlanta was was taken over by a zombie outbreak zombie apocalypse, and we uh decided in this particular episode that we were gonna pin the zombie hood on a court a step. This is a fungus that takes over a creature uh, generally

an insect uh. And while I'm exclusively insects, and it takes over their bodies, turns them essentially into a zombie and and hijacks their responses and what makes them do something like go to a particular area, climbed to the top of a leaf, or or go into and form a mass grave somewhere so that they can continue to grow. Yeah, and it also creates very clumsy movements by that insect.

Because again, what they're talking about here with the Cortceps is this toxin which is taking over from the body and creating this sort of strange machinations. Now, um, largely this the zombie ant fungus is a story of Afio Cortceps, this parasitic fungus, and the campo and a tiny carpenter ants that infects. But of course there's another player in here,

and we'll talk about that in a moment. But what we're talking about here is, you know, one day, nearing noon, you have this carpenter ant, let's say, in the rainforest in Brazil, veering off course, right, Um, it's leaving the dry tree canopy and then it descends into the humid force floor and it's staggering over debris and plants, and David Hughes, he's an assistant professor of entomology and biology

at Penn State, describes it as a kind of drunkard swalk. Okay, again, we're talking about this toxins taking over the brain here, and even convulsion occurring. And then the ants, by the way, who have been dissected at the stage of infection, reveal heads already full of these fungal cells. Okay. Then the ant clumsling makes its way to the main vein of a leaf and it chops down, which is just weird.

Ants don't normally do this, they don't chop onto leaves, but unfortunately here it does this, and it's mandible walk into place as the ant dies, because now what's also happening is that it's beginning to atrophy, like smuscles are beginning to atrophy within the ant, and so that means that those mandibles are not going to pry themselves open at all. It's locked into place, and the death grip is there, and a couple of days later this ant actually dies, and what happens The fungus sprouts out of

its head and deliver spores down onto the ground. Yeah, and it's a it's a real killer. You know, this is the kind of thing that can wipe out an ant colony. The ants, of course there have to have evolved respond wants to this if they see signs that happening, and they kind of a d rigorous grooming regime takes place where they're just they're taking extra care of who's who's acting a little funny, exact and weird get him out of there. Yeah, I mean, it's it's a very

dramatic thing playing out here. If you if you look at it like this, you know, I mean, if this happened among our population, Um, can you imagine us trying to actually take that person out of the group, or the ways in which it would behave we'd say, why why do you keep wandering into traffic? That's weird behavior, right. Yeah. So, as it turns out, as Hughes in a two thousand and twelve study highlighted, there is a high preparasite involved here.

There's not just a matter of this particular court to set wiping out these different ant colonies looking at examples of it, and found that some of these colonies actually survived rather well. There were still a lot of dead bodies, a lot of dead soldiers, a lot of carnage, but they but in some cases they had a much better uh survival rate. And the reason he discovered is a

hyper parasitic fungus that effectively castrates the courtist fungus. It reduces the viability of its sport producing organs to six point five. Yeah, this is amazing because you have this other fungus that's basically taking notes and stalking the opio court asps. And according to Katherine Harmon writing for Nature, Sandra Anderson, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen, they found a different breed of that fungi growing over the ant corpse in the emerging fungus stock, and by covering

that fungus in the stock, it effectively sort of sterilized it. Yeah, that basically, this hyper parasitic fungus comes in and says, hey, what you got going there? It seems like a pretty good operation. I just want enough to to wep my beak, so let me let me take over this particular ant this particular pile of ants, and oh, yeah, you're not gonna be spreading your franchise anymore because this is my business now. Is that kind of your good guys a

little bit fellas? Yeah, I like it. Yeah, it's good. Um. Yeah. So it is a good example of how the waste management guys kind of come in and say, I like what you're doing here. Yeah, all right, we're going to look at a five tier example of hyper parasites in action from Vanderbilt microbiologists Seth borden Stein, who may sound familiar because we just did an episode on the Hall of Genome and borden Stein was very much involved in

one of the studies there. Yeah, because he was looking at the sony a wasp, which were featured here as well, and he was looking more at their microbiota, their gut microbes and how they made it. But here he's looking really at what I think of as the tree Ducan of the hiper parasite world. Because, as you said, this is a five tier operation going on. Yeah, and it's and it's again it's very much in a sort of a like a like a no Country for Old Man

kind of scenario where one guy's got some money. Somebody else comes and kills them all and takes the money, and then somebody else is trying to kill him, and everybody's trying to get that get that commodity, get that energy, get that money, and the case. This is how it goes. First, blowflies infest a bird's underside with blood sucking larva. Next larva drop off, they fall to prey to parasitic wasps. Then these wasps carry a parasitic bacterium called Wabaccia, which

has evolved to modify its host reproductive system. And then the bacteria in turn are subject to their own invasion from a tiny virus is known as bacteria phages, which hijack Walbackia is cellular machinery to expand their own population. Okay, bird, blowfly, wasp, Wolbachia, and then the bacterio fage. Just you can see how it gets smaller, is it as it goes down? Right? Yeah? As we go down that list. Yeah, And Wolbachia is really interesting on its own, right because it hijacks the

wasp immune system and it's still being studied. But that it all breaks down along these lines, all right. It kills infected males. It feminizes infected males as they develop as females or infertile pseudo females, and induces partheo genesis the reproduction of infected females without males, and it makes the sperm of uninfected males incompatible with the eggs of uninfected females or females infected with a different Wolbachia strain. Yeah,

Wolbachia is serious stuff. We talked about it and river Blindness our episode on that and and humans. I thought this was fascinating nematodes that that when humans contract these nematodes. The nemotodes actually contain the Wolbachia bacteria and they have something called neutrophills, and these are specialized white blood cells that are unable to attach to the worm itself, but it forms a ring around the bacteria and it tacks it.

So then you have something called eosinophils, which is basically like a cleanup crew that would come in. You know, if you have this this nematode and it can't get to the worm because these neutrophiles are essentially cloaking it. I mean it has I think that's a fascinating sort of power that this has, this wolbachia, because then it's modulating the host immune system response. It's just sitting there

in the body, undetected at least in humans. Yeah, and borden Stein is really interested in wall back here because he believes that one day we might be able to add some genes to the wall back here and use it to control insects the vector human disease diseases like malaria and den gay fever. Yeah, and this is really important because it really is one of the most successful parasites in the animal kingdom um in It evolved one million years ago, so this is a pretty significant presence.

So you're probably thinking, that's it, right, It can't get any nuttier than this. Yeah, we surely we've reached the tiniest Russian doll and this uh, this parasitic relationship, Oh no, because there's one single parasitic gene that exists out there. We're talking about transposon, yes, transposable elements TE or retro transposons. It's a DNA sequence that can change its position within the genome, sometimes creating or reversing mutations in altering the

cell's genome size, Yeah, they have been. These transposones have been and discovered inside viruses that infect other viruses, which in turn affect ambas that in fact human beings and borde Stein says, I think it's difficult to see where

one organism begins and another one ends. We are only beginning to appreciate how intertwine these layers of organisms are in large flora and fauna, which again we come back to that whole holo genome sort of question, like where what is what is the barrier between one organism and then in the next to what extent are all organisms?

As we think that all individuals really just a ship with a crew, right, Yeah, you've got your mitochondrial DNA, you've got genes, you've got bacteria, you've got have a genetics going on, Just conglomerates of organisms just walking about and going about their business and then trying to consume other organisms in the process. It makes me feel like I'm dripping like some sort of genetic material off of me,

or actually I am sumping little microbes off myself right now. Yeah, I mean, really, this whole episode should dry of home the fact that we're all kind of gross. We're called these big piles of bacteria, and then the whole world is just this nasty battle royal of parasites engaging with

each other, parasites and predators. And then pray actually makes you feel a little bit good about the human species sometimes, I mean just a little right, Yeah, too cous to a certain extent, we kind of rise above that, or at least tell ourselves that we've risen above it. Yeah, all right, why don't you take us on out, Robert Lamb, I think you got something for us. Yeah. This is just a little bit from Victorian mathematician August de Morgan

which ties in nicely with today's topic. He said, great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bitem, and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitem. And the great fleas themselves, in turn have greater fleas to go on, while these again have greater still and greater still to go on. Here you go, so that you

have it. Parasites, hyper parasites, hot parasite on parasite action as promised, have something you'd like to throw in on this another example of hyper parasites in action are just your general response to this. This view of the world as this violent battle royal of criminal elements. Let us know we'd love to hear from you. You You can find us in all the usual places, the mother Ship and

stuff to Bow you mind dot com. We're also on Tumbler, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, we're mind Stuff Show on YouTube and Julie. If they want to send us an old fashioned email, how might they go about it? Oh? Well, it's really quite easy, Robert. All you have to do is send an email to you blow the mind at discoveries dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it How stuff works dot com