Look out, Pasco: Here come giant African land snails
A gardener in Pasco County recently found a giant African land snail—or what Florida officials call "one of the most damaging snails in the world."
A gardener in Pasco County recently found a giant African land snail—or what Florida officials call "one of the most damaging snails in the world."
Plants & Animals
Jun 30, 2022
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Parasites that cause severe diarrhea are likely to become more virulent because of the speed at which they are exchanging their DNA and evolving—according to new research from the University of East Anglia.
Ecology
Jun 30, 2022
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10
An international team of scientists found that sociality is not linked to intestinal nematode infection in Asian elephants. The researchers looked at loneliness and characteristics of the elephants' social groups and found ...
Ecology
Jun 28, 2022
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4
As we know, our genes can greatly affect our health. We can inherit genetic disorders and defects as well as positive traits from our parents. But our genes are not the only players contributing to our health.
Plants & Animals
Jun 23, 2022
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14
Microscopic mites that live in human pores and mate on our faces at night are becoming such simplified organisms, due to their unusual lifestyles, that they may soon become one with humans, new research has found.
Evolution
Jun 21, 2022
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675
The sex and sexual characteristics constitute key aspects of an organism's life and are determined by a biological process known as sex determination. These ever-evolving mechanisms are broadly classified based on the type ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jun 21, 2022
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22
A team of researchers from Portugal, Israel, Poland and Spain has found the gene that prompts the parasite Trypanosoma brucei to change from its normal long, slender shape to one that is short and stumpy. In their paper published ...
Birds of a feather flock together, but when guppies gather, they get really bad worms.
Evolution
Jun 15, 2022
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A study conducted by the research group SEAaq (Ecosystem and Aquatic Animal Health) of the Department of Animal Biology, Plant Biology and Ecology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and published in the journal ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 14, 2022
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35
North Carolina State University researchers show that the shape of flowers has the biggest effect on how parasites are transmitted to bees, an important consideration for declining populations of our prodigious pollinators. ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 13, 2022
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379
Parasitism is a type of symbiotic relationship between two different organisms where one organism, the parasite, takes favor from the host, sometimes for a prolonged time. In general, parasites are much smaller than their hosts, show a high degree of specialization for their mode of life, and reproduce more quickly and in greater numbers than their hosts. Classic examples of parasitism include interactions between vertebrate hosts and diverse animals such as tapeworms, flukes, the Plasmodium species, and scabs. Parasitism is differentiated from parasitoidism, a relationship in which the host is always killed by the parasite such as moths, butterflies, ants, flies and others.
The harm and benefit in parasitic interactions concern the biological fitness of the organisms involved. Parasites reduce host fitness in many ways, ranging from general or specialized pathology (such as castration), impairment of secondary sex characteristics, to the modification of host behaviour. Parasites increase their fitness by exploiting hosts for food, habitat and dispersal.
Although the concept of parasitism applies unambiguously to many cases in nature, it is best considered part of a continuum of types of interactions between species, rather than an exclusive category. Particular interactions between species may satisfy some but not all parts of the definition. In many cases, it is difficult to demonstrate that the host is harmed. In others, there may be no apparent specialization on the part of the parasite, or the interaction between the organisms may be short-lived. In medicine, only eukaryotic organisms are considered parasites, with the exclusion of bacteria and viruses. Some branches of biology, however, regard members of these groups as parasitic.[citation needed]
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