the.com/parasitism
Nature's worst roommate: eats your food, skips the rent, sometimes steals your brain.
means A relationship where one organism lives on or in another, feeding off it and harming it, while giving nothing useful back.
from From Greek 'parasitos' — 'para' (beside) plus 'sitos' (grain, food) — literally 'one who eats beside/at another's table.' In ancient Greece a parasitos was originally a respectable temple official who shared sacred meals, but the word curdled over time into a jab at the flattering hanger-on who schmoozes his way to free dinners. Biologists later borrowed that image of the moocher-at-the-table wholesale to describe organisms that do the same thing, just with blood, nutrients, or a host's nervous system instead of wine and bread.
- mind control
- toxoplasma makes mice fearless near cats, on purpose
- zombie wasps
- some wasps inject larvae that eat hosts alive, organ by organ
- tongue swap
- a crustacean replaces a fish's tongue, then becomes the tongue
- everywhere
- roughly half of all known species parasitize something else