This is my first post so hope everything is set up correctly. I had to relate this story.
Many many years ago, I think I was about 11 or 12, I was down at the local creek looking for minnows, frogs, crayfish, etc... and not having much luck, when I saw this cricket kicking about in the water. There were 2 horsehair worms directly beneath and in contact with it. I netted the group and put the worms into my bucket and tossed the cricket into the grass up on shore. I didn't know much about horsehair worms back then except that they lived in water and were called horsehair worms. I assumed these had swum up to the cricket to feed on it and that I had just saved this cricket from certain doom. Drowning while being devoured alive by worms what a horrible fate.
Anyhow, I went back to my search for aquatic critters, and after several minutes, noticed a cricket kicking about on the surface again. I thought this was a strange coincidence, and netted it out, tossed it up in the grass and resumed my previous activities. Several more minutes went by when a cricket appeared kicking about in the water. By now I'm starting to half wonder if there's someone upstream playing a joke on me and tossing crickets in the creek.
This was too much of a coincidence so I netted the cricket and placed him on the shore next to the water to see what he would do. He promptly hopped back in. I took him out again and set him down again making sure he was facing away from the water when I let go and sure enough he turned around and hopped back in the creek. I had found a suicidal cricket!
I thought to myself "if you're just going to drown yourself anyay, I'm going to feed you to my new horsehair worms that were going to eat you in the first place." I put the cricket in the bucket and headed home. About 20 minutes or so after getting home I went out to take a look at them, and was horrified to discover that I now had a 3rd horsehair worm that was in the process of emerging from this poor cricket who had somehow managed not to drown in all this time. This 3rd worm was much larger than the 2 I had netted. I measured it right at a foot. The other 2 were about 7 or 8 inches.
The image of this foot long worm emerging from the cricket made a bit of an impression on me and I remembered it for a long time.
Then one day in a freshman biology class in college, the professor was talking about parasites and mentioned the fact that some parasites can alter the concious behavior of their hosts. He used the example of snails as some snail parasites change the behavior of the snails they inhabit to make them more suceptible to predation by birds, the parasites next host. At the time I was a bit skeptical, thinking that more likely, the snail was just weakened by having a parasite, and had to spend more time feeding etc... and that made it more likely that a bird would find and eat it. Then I remembered my "suicidal" cricket and suddenly his actions made sense.
TW
Minnesota
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