Once the insect becomes an adult, it begins to wander and doesn’t really seem to recognize environmental dangers anymore. This is probably their best known, and also most misunderstood feature. The adults aren’t parasitic, so they need to find water to bring about the next generation, and they accomplish this through mind control. Once it’s eaten, it develops into an adult which takes up the entire body cavity of the insect. They need a first host which will leave the water as an adult, because it needs to be eaten by an insect on land. Specifically, they look for insect larvae…usually a fly of some sort. After they hatch, their larvae seek out an initial insect host. Gordian worms, or nematomorphs, are parasitoid nematode-like critters which have complicated lifecycles, usually revolving around water.

It’s not often that I hear a new medical claim, so this was absolutely something I wanted to check out. Rick Vetter-one of my personal heroes-made a long career out of simply pointing out that diagnosis of brown recluse bites do not correlate with the known range of the critters…a series of mistakes which likely masked the rise of community acquired antibiotic resistant flesh-eating bacteria. When it comes to doctors and invertebrates, I’m notoriously skeptical because there’s a long history of doctors misdiagnosing brown recuse bites. Could it get into my cats digestive system and do harm?

A lot of them seem to be infected with nematomorphs. Like this one:Ĭan a nematomorph from the abdomen of a preying mantis infect a dog or cat that attacks and chews the insect? My cat keeps killing mantises on my deck it’s mortifying because I love them. Most of them, we can’t answer because doing so would amount to giving medical advice…but every so often we get a question completely out of left field. We get a lot of weird questions in our inbox about parasites.

Download gordian worm