in tribute to TheVoid, who seems to have left us ....
Some worms are far more socially complex than thought, according to scientists who have just discovered one species that forms social castes, including armies of warrior worms.
The study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is the first to determine that any worm lives in a colony with organized division of labor. In this case, trematode flatworm parasites exist in cooperative colonies consisting of big reproducers, which release hundreds to thousands of clonal offspring daily, and specialized soldiers that defend the colony.
"The soldiers use their relatively large mouth parts to bite enemies," lead author Ryan Hechinger told Discovery News. "They sometimes swallow enemies whole."
"Soldiers sometimes rip open the body wall of the enemy and then suck out the insides," added Hechinger, an assistant research biologist at the Marine Science Institute at University of California, Santa Barbara. "You can sometimes see the eyes of the enemies' progeny inside the soldiers' guts."
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In the future, the soldier worm armies may benefit humans, too.
"Hundreds of millions of people are infected by blood flukes," he said, adding that flukes (a common name for trematodes) can also attack the liver and lungs.
"Trematodes with soldier castes have a biomedical application because they may be used in the biological control of these problematic parasites," he continued. "Soldiers may also help to keep human disease-causing trematodes out of snail intermediate hosts, preventing infections in humans."
more at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...e-science/
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