Parasite of the Day

Pea crabs are a type of tiny crabs that live mostly in bivalve shellfish such as mussels, oysters, and scallops. Scientifically known as pin...

On this blog, we like to revel in the obscure and bizarre, and it doesn't get much more obscure and bizarre than dicyemids  - a group of...

The bay scallop ( Argopecten irradians ) is a highly prized shellfish, but it has suffered through a rough history from overharvesting, habi...

Pearls may look beautiful to us, but for some parasites, they represent a slow and claustrophobic death. Pearls are secreted by the soft and...

Apicomplexa  is a diverse phylum of single-celled parasites. They are found in a wide range of different animals, and includes some well-kno...

Mantis shrimps ( Stomatopoda ) are some of the most formidable crustaceans in the sea; armed with trinocular colour vision , and a pair of p...

Being on top of the food chain sounds like it'd be pretty awesome - all the other animals in the ecosystem are potentially your food and...

Scallops are highly prized as seafood because of their tasty adductor muscle and roe, but humans are not the only ones with a taste for scal...

A few months ago, I wrote about a snail that forms galls in the spines of sea urchins , and while most people might not think of snails as p...

Snails are host to a wide range of parasites, especially parasitic flukes  that turn snails into clone factories to pump out streams of para...

Vampires have undergone a lot of image change over the centuries and they are a common part of many culture's mythology. But vampires ar...

Life as a pea crab seems pretty sweet, you spend most of your time sitting snug and protected within the armoured shelter of a shellfish, wh...

There are many parasites that castrate their hosts - the parasitic barnacle that feed on the velvet belly lantern shark, the nightmarish Sa...

Those who have been reading this blog for a while might recall that this time last year, I featured some guest posts written by students fro...

Photo of infected Janolus fuscus used with permission from Jeff Goddard If you ever find yourself down by the sea, you may come across ...