Corynosoma australe

Most parasites are very picky about what host they infect. Even those that can infect a number of different host species usually parasitise a selected bunch from the same family or order. But sometimes circumstances can bring together unlikely parasite and host pairings. The parasite featured in this post is Corynosoma australe, and it is an acanthocephalan - a group of prickly parasites commonly called thorny-headed worms. Corynosoma australe usually infects pinnipeds, the group of marine mammals that includes seals and sea lions. But in the study featured in this blog post, researchers found this worm living in the gut of a decidedly non-mammalian host - specifically the Magellanic penguin. So how did penguins end up acquiring parasites that usually infect seals?

(A) Adult male Corynosoma australe, (B) Adult female C. australe, (C) spiny proboscis of an adult worm
Photos from Fig 4. of the paper

For this, we need to look at the life-cycle of this parasite. Like other acanthocephalans, C. australe infects an arthropod as their first host, in the case of Corynosoma, this is usually tiny shrimp-like crustaceans called amphipods. For other acanthocephalans, the life-cycle is complete when the infected arthropod is eaten by a vertebrate predator, which can be a mammal, fish, bird, reptile or an amphibian, depending on the species of acanthocephalan in question. But during the life-cycle of C. australe, it also infects what is known as a paratenic host - a host animal which is not vital to the completion of the parasite's life-cycle, but can act as a vehicle to get it to the final host. In this case, the paratenic host is a fish.

The reason why they need a paratenic host is that seals and sea lions do not usually go rummaging through the the mud for tiny thumbnail-size crustaceans. But there are fish that do, and it is those fish that seals and sea lions eat. By using fish as paratenic hosts, C. australe can bridge the ecological gap between tiny amphipods and seals. But having fish as paratenic hosts also open up other possibilities because pinnipeds are not the only marine animal with a taste for fish. This is where penguins enter the story.

Even though taxonomically, birds and mammals are on very different branches of the vertebrate animal tree, because seals and penguins lead comparable life-styles, sometimes they can also end up with similar (or in this case, the same) parasites. In this case, Magellanic penguins end up with what is usually a seal parasite because they have been eating the same fish that the seal usually feed on, and they are physiologically similar enough to seals and sea lions for C.australe to go "Eh, good enough.". In fact, C. australe seems to be a fairly versatile parasite - it has been reported from 16 different types of marine mammals and birds. However, those previous reports also indicate that the parasite can only produce viable eggs while living in pinnipeds, and in the evolutionary game it all comes to nothing if you can't reproduce. Which means while C. australe can stay alive in those non-pinniped hosts, those other hosts are effectively dead ends.

But, this study shows that not only can C. australe survive perfectly fine in penguins, they can also reproduce while living in a bird host. From the samples that the researchers examined, 19 out of the 20 seals and sea lions they looked at were infected with C. australe. In comparison, only 18 out of the 87 penguins they examined were infected. Female worms grew bigger in the gut of Magellanic penguins, yet at same time they did not produce as much eggs as those living in pinnipeds. Also for some currently unknown reason (s), the sex ratio of C. australe in penguins is highly skewed - whereas seals and sea lion have an almost one-to-one ratio of male versus female worms in their guts, females worms vastly outnumbered male worms in the gut of Magellanic penguins.

Judging from egg production and prevalence, Magellanic penguins are not exactly the most ideal or reliable hosts for C. australe. Pinnipeds remain the hosts with the most for C. australe, but at least penguins can serve as a viable (if not ideal) substitute. For C. australe living in penguins, this might be a case of ecological fitting, whereby an organism can survive and (and even thrive) in a habitat which different to the one that it usually live in because it just so happen to have the right set of adaptations that allows it to survive in this new and novel environment.

But there is another twist to this story. While most species of Corynosoma live in marine mammals, it seems that they had evolved from ancestors that originally lived in aquatic birds. So perhaps Corynosoma already has the latent ability to survive in the gut of a bird, and when circumstances brought them together, C. australe was ready. When it comes to this thorny worm, what is good enough for the sea lion is good enough for the penguin.

Reference:
Hernández-Orts, J. S., Brandão, M., Georgieva, S., Raga, J. A., Crespo, E. A., Luque, J. L., & Aznar, F. J. (2017). From mammals back to birds: Host-switch of the acanthocephalan Corynosoma australe from pinnipeds to the Magellanic penguin Spheniscus magellanicus. PloS One 12(10): e0183809.

Steinina ctenocephali

Cat fleas (Ctenocephalides felis) is a parasite that everyone would be familiar with one way or the other. It is found worldwide and is the bane of cats, cat owners and basically anyone who does not like getting their blood sucked by tiny insects. But cat fleas are themselves just another animal and are host to their own parasites, such as Steinina ctenocephali; a single-celled parasite that lives in the gut of cat fleas. In that sense I guess one can regard S. ctenocephali as a hyperparasite - a parasite that parasitise a parasite.

(A) Female cat flea infected with feeding stages of Steinina ctenocephali (indicated by white arrow heads), (B) Male cat flea infected with feeding stages of Steinina ctenocephali (indicated by white arrow heads), (C) Scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of the parasite's feeding stage, (D) SEM of oocysts infective stages in a flea's gut wall, (E) oocysts of the parasite as seen through a hematocytometer. [all photos from Fig. 1. of the paper)

Steinina ctenocephali belongs to a group of single-celled "protozoans" call gregarines. They are parasites of arthropod and other invertebrate animals, and despite being single-celled, they are comparatively large, with some species having cells that reach almost a millimetre in length. They also have some rather unusual shapes for a large single-celled organism, with some species shaped like worms and there's even a genus that looks kind of like a rubber chicken. Steinina ctenocephali is not nearly as oddly shaped those species - it is roughly pear-shaped, which is pretty generic for a gregarine. However, far more noteworthy is the way that this parasite has thoroughly integrated itself into the flea's life-cycle.

Fleas are holometabolous insects that undergoes complete metamorphosis. This means much like butterflies and wasps they have larval stage that looks radically different to the adult form.
Newly hatched baby fleas look somewhat like bristly worms with chewing mouth parts and they are not at all equipped for blood-sucking. So what do baby fleas eat? Until they become fully-fledged jumping vampires, they mostly feed on organic detritus - some of that include poop from the adult fleas, which also contain undigested blood.

Steinina ctenocephali uses this cycle of poop-eating and blood-sucking to infect each subsequent generations of cat fleas and propagate in the flea population. In the adult flea, S. ctenocephali attaches to the gut wall as a feeding stage, eventually producing infective spores called oocysts which are released into the environment with the flea's faeces. Then, along come the flea larvae that gobble them up and inoculating themselves with S. ctenocephali. In the flea larva, the parasite take up residence inside the cells, eventually moving into the gut tract when the flea metamorphose into an adult and take its first blood meal.

Being infected with parasites usually carry some kind of cost for the host, in fact that is the very definition of parasitism. But the paper being featured in this post reveals another side to this gregarine-flea interaction. For their study, the researchers obtained flea eggs from a captive colony and raised them in microwells filled with a type of powder which is kind of like baby food for fleas. When the larval fleas hatch, they feed on this powder mixture until they metamorphose into blood-sucking adults. For the experiments, half of the fleas were raised on powder which had S. ctenocephali oocysts mixed in, while the other half were raised on a parasite-free diet.

The researchers did not find any differences in the survival of infected and uninfected fleas, but there was a difference in their growth rate. Parasites usually divert resources away from the host itself, and by doing so reduce the hosts' growth rate. But instead of what one might have expected, the researchers found that fleas raised on food dosed with S. ctenocephali actually grew faster than their uninfected counterparts. The infected fleas became mature adults a few days earlier than uninfected fleas. In fact, the more parasites they've been dosed with, the faster they grew. On average uninfected fleas took about 19 days to reach adulthood, whereas fleas that got a high dose of S. ctenocephali took only 16 days to become adults.

The researchers suggested that this faster development could be due to hormonal manipulation on the part of this (hyper)parasite. The sooner the infected fleas become adult, the sooner it can start pooping S. ctenocephali spores that can go on to infect even more fleas. Alternatively, it could be some kind of compensatory growth response by the fleas, and the cost of this accelerated growth may manifest later in life in other ways (such as reduced egg production or immune function)

Given that S. ctenocephali seems to give its host a competitive edge (at least when it comes to reaching reproductive maturity earlier) over their uninfected counterparts, is it really a parasite? One thing to keep in mind is that parasitism is just a another type of symbiosis. Terms like parasitism, commensalism, and mutualism are just categories that we have come up to place such interactions into some kind of context which are more convenient for our own understanding. But nature does not care about our categories and all symbiotic relationships exist along a gradient - in the natural world the line between friends or foes is fuzzy and may change at any time.

Reference:
Alarcón, M. E., Jara-f, A., Briones, R. C., Dubey, A. K., & Slamovits, C. H. (2017). Gregarine infection accelerates larval development of the cat flea Ctenocephalides felis (Bouché). Parasitology 144: 419-425.