The spaghetti-like puppet masters are even weirder than scientists thought.
“What we found, which was very surprising, was that both hairworm genomes were missing about 30 percent of a set of genes that are expected to be present across basically all groups of animals,” said Tauana Cunha, a postdoctoral researcher at Chicago’s Field Museum and lead author of the study
Cilia are the fuzzy hair-like threads found on eukaryotic cells that help with moving fluid, debris and other materials from one place to another. “Animals use ciliary structures to move, to clean their cells, as sensors , in sperm cells. Sponges use these structures to move water and feed, we use them for many of the things,” says co-author Bruno de Medeiros, research associate at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and assistant curator of insects at the Field Museum.
The lineage of hairworms has historically been understudied. Hairworm experts are limited, and delving into their genome is an expensive and uncommon process. But, these findings open up a new series of questions over what other creatures may have lost “such a fundamental cell-level structure as the cilia,” Mederios says.
“So this major lineage of animals was neglected so far. There are others, still. We definitely do not have yet aHow a peculiar parasitic plant relies on a rare Japanese rabbitWhile humans don’t need to live in fear of a mind-controlling worm, knowing how these parasites operate is crucial to protecting environmental and human health. For example, the saltwater species sampled was found in a deep-sea lobster, which can be caught for human consumption.
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