The worms appear to activate hundreds of insect genes when driving hosts to drown themselves
Adult horsehair worms look about how you’d expect given their name: They’re long, noodlelike creatures that resemble wiggling horse hairs. They live and reproduce in water, but their young only develop inside the bodies of other animals—usually terrestrial insects such as praying mantises. Once they’ve finished growing inside their unwitting vessel, the worms must convince their hosts to drown themselves to complete their life cycle.
They focused on horsehair or gordian worms, a group of parasitic animals related to nematodes. Many have complex life cycles involving multiple hosts, and the ones that live in freshwater must generally find their way into an insect to finish developing into adults. The genus Mishina, Sato, and their colleagues specialize in, known as, infect mantises and can grow to nearly 1 meter long inside the palm-size insects’ abdomens.
Such horizontal gene swapping is something of a mystery. Viruses, so-called jumping genes, and a few other mechanisms are thought to be involved. But in previously documented cases of transfer, clues to the interspecies movement have been obscured. In the worms, some of the transfers apparently happened long ago, allowing the worm and mantid sequences to diverge from one another by 5% or more. But others were nearly or totally identical, suggesting these gene transfers were relatively recent.
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