The worm breeds in the bird’s guts, releasing its eggs in the bird’s feces, which are happily eaten up by another snail to complete the whole bizarre life cycle. It’s an existence that’s ...

It's an odd quirk of nature that birds - even chickens ... that typically lays five eggs per clutch, all of which hatch on the same day. Early hatchlings catch the worm - and then some.

The researchers said that if the birds ate the ants, they could spread the worm's eggs in their droppings. These eggs would then be gathered by other ants who then feed and unwittingly infect ...

They don’t have teeth, but they do have a gizzard, where small rocks that the worm has eaten help grind up food. (Some birds do this as ... ready for producing eggs whenever conditions are ...

But this is the first evidence of such transmission in any egg-laying amniote, a group that includes birds and reptiles ... Of those, the parasitic worms showed up only in eggs of some lizards ...