It’s not just ants and naked mole rats that organize into eerily intelligent colonies, Discovery News says. Worms are getting in on the action, too:
The study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is the first to determine that any worm lives in a colony with organized division of labor. In this case, trematode flatworm parasites exist in cooperative colonies consisting of big reproducers, which release hundreds to thousands of clonal offspring daily, and specialized soldiers that defend the colony.
“The soldiers use their relatively large mouth parts to bite enemies,” lead author Ryan Hechinger told Discovery News. “They sometimes swallow enemies whole.”
“Soldiers sometimes rip open the body wall of the enemy and then suck out the insides,” added Hechinger, an assistant research biologist at the Marine Science Institute at University of California, Santa Barbara. “You can sometimes see the eyes of the enemies’ progeny inside the soldiers’ guts.”
There is, no lie, a picture of that at the link.