Question: How do parasites work and are they just in animals

Rebecca Jones answered on 19 Jun 2015:

Parasites work in such a large number of ways. Sometimes they infect one animal and reproduce inside that animal or they use a number of animals for different stages of reproduction. Some are really cool and change the behaviour of the animal they’ve infected in order to be eaten by another animal so they can finish reproducing. One example of this is a parasitic worm that causes the bums of ants to go really red and swell up so they look like holly berries. Birds then come along and eat them and the worm is able to reproduce in the bird before it drops out in the birds poo!

Parasites can be found everywhere, in humans and animals and humans and animals can actually pass parasites between them! Some good examples of human parasites include the malaria parasite and currently the Ebola crisis which was passed from bats to humans.