Name: These Hairworms Eat a Cricket Alive and Control Its Mind | Deep Look
Uploaded: 2019-02-13T06:47:57.000Z
Duration: 4 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

The day starts normally enough. You give your pet some food and water. But later ...

... in your pet's water dish, you find this.

It came out of a little cricket. Don't believe me?

They actually control a cricket's mind to get to their home: the water.

The hairworm's journey starts innocently enough, in a river, as an egg ...

The eggs grow into squiggly larvae, which get eaten by a mayfly larva that also lives in the river.

And inside the mayfly is exactly where the hairworm needs to  be.

The hairworm uses this pointy part to burrow into the mayfly's flesh.

Because, really, it's not after a mayfly.

So it sits tight, while the mayfly larva turns into an adult and heads to dry land ...

where it just might get eaten by a cricket ...

Inside the cricket the hairworm goes at it, eating all the cricket's stored-up fat, for about a month.

The cricket loses its chirp, but the hairworm doesn't kill the cricket ...

... because the worm needs a lift back to the water.

Crickets usually avoid bodies of water. They're not great swimmers.

So the worm takes over, boosting chemicals in the cricket's brain, which make the cricket

walk around mindlessly until it happens to reach water.

Scientists in France watched this infected cricket make a beeline for the pool.

But don't worry. They don't target humans.

This one at the University of New Mexico ...

... has a whole lot of hairworms inside it.

They don't waste any time, curling around each other to mate ...

even before they're fully outside the cricket.

But it's more than a gruesome spectacle of nature.

Learning about these hairworms could help scientists ...

If they don't drown, most of them survive their ordeal.

At least that's what scientists have seen in the lab.

They go back to being crickets and hopefully stay on dry land.

Hi, it's Lauren. Who's hungry for more after that?

We'd love to make more videos of amazing critters up close all year round.

We're a member-supported PBS show from KQED, in San Francisco.

That means to grow, we need you, our YouTube fans, to support us on Patreon.

Are you in? Link is in the description. Thanks.