PARIS - A remarkable parasitic worm that lives in insects can wriggle to safety even if it is inside a host that is swallowed by a predator, French scientists say.
The gordian worm, Paragordius tricuspidatus, does a double escapology act, escaping from inside its host, the cricket, and then emerging via the mouth, nostrils or gills of the fish or frog that ate the insect.
A team led by Fleur Ponton of the National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Montpellier, southern France, set up a gordian-watching lab and observed 477 events in which a cricket was grabbed by a predator.
On 72 occasions, the little worm found its way to safety.
"If a worm did not start to emerge from the mouth, gills or nose within five minutes, it failed to escape -- dying, presumably, in the hostile environment of the predactor's stomach," they report on Thursday in Nature, the British weekly science journal.
"To our knowledge, this escape response by a gordian worm is the first example of a parasite or any organism surviving predation in this way."
Gordian worms owe their name to the way they mate in water, as a knotted mass of individuals.
04/05/2006 18:00 GMT