
I mentioned a while back that an animal’s parasites are an overlooked part of what makes them unique; people think about what foods their favorite animals eat or their defenses or their calls but hardly ever appreciate the things that live on them. I think another cool example of that are these parasitic snails dailyparasite talked about - they’re totally unique to mantis shrimp! It’s not even normal for other kinds of crustaceans to have parasitic snails, but mantis shrimp do, and they’re related to non-parasitic snails that just harmlessly share mantis shrimp burrows, so that tells you how this came about in their evolution!
These snails have separate sexes, with smaller males and larger females, and they form monogamous pairs that live permanently on the same shrimp!





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