Chemical trails and the parasites that follow them

摘要

Parasitic relationships constitute an important ecological association, responsible in large part for controlling the population of all living things. Parasitism spans the entire breadth and depth of the tree of life from viruses to 40-foot-long tapeworms living in the intestinal lumen of 40-foot-long whales. Infectious agents keep evolutionary pace with their hosts by natural selection, becoming increasingly more adapted to restricted (i.e., host species-specific) associations. Well known examples include medically important pathogens, such as the human malarias, down to our innocuous pin-worm, Enterobius vermicularis.