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Parasitic worms 'manipulate' praying mantises onto asphalt roads:
Japan researchers

November 16, 2024 (Mainichi Japan)

Japanese version

[6]
This image provided by associate professor Takuya Sato of Kyoto
University shows a Harabiro mantis walking on asphalt.

OSAKA -- Every autumn, dead mantises can be seen lying on the asphalt
of roads. A type of parasitic worm may be leading the creatures to
their deaths there, researchers at Kyoto University and others have
determined.

Horsehair worms are parasites that hatch in water and first attach
themselves to water-borne insects. They grow inside mantises who
devour their hosts, and manipulate the latter into jumping into
water. From there, they exit the mantises' abdomens and lay eggs in
water grasses and similar places.

It is believed that infected mantises are attracted to water by the
light reflecting off the surface, which contains a lot of polarized
light with horizontally inclined electromagnetic waves.

A group including Kyoto University associate professor of ecology
Takuya Sato and the same university's then-graduate student Yuna
Sawada hypothesized that the infected mantises could be mistaking
asphalt for water. When they measured the amount of horizontally
polarized light reflecting off of it, they found it was of a similar
strength to water surfaces that infected mantises would jump into. In
an indoor experiment using light sources, it was found that infected
mantises were attracted to sources with stronger horizontally
polarized light.

In order to confirm the creatures' actual behavior, the group
released infected mantises onto asphalt and cement roads painted
three different colors. The infected mantises more frequently walked
on the asphalt.

Furthermore, researchers caught over 100 specimens of Harabiro
mantises, or Asian mantises, from on trees and on asphalt surfaces at
four locations in Taiwan and Japan, and found that those taken from
trees had a low rate of infection, compared to over 80% of those
taken from asphalt.

"Horsehair worms have evolved to skillfully manipulate mantises, but
conversely by human activity they are strangling their own necks,"
Sato said.

The research results have been published in the U.S. scientific
journal PNAS Nexus.

(Japanese original by Mai Suganuma, Osaka Lifestyle, Science &
Environment News Department)

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