If you’ve been online at all these past few weeks, you probably heard about Luis Ortiz, a 26-year-old man in California who had a “still wiggling” tapeworm pulled from his brain—shudder.

Most tapeworms have an obligate parasitic life cycle involving two or three hosts. They have no mouth or digestive tract, and absorb nutrients directly from the intestines of their hosts.

In so doing, it appears, they stepped into the life cycle of Taenia tapeworms. Tapeworms that might have ended up in the gut of a hyena or a lion ended up in the gut of our ancestors instead.

Tapeworms are flat and are about the length of a grain of rice. ... Most people think tapeworm medicine has to be repeated in three weeks to end the life cycle and kill all of the worms.

Like many tapeworms, this one has a complicated life cycle. It reproduces in the guts of waterbirds, which excrete its eggs in their droppings. After the tapeworm eggs hatch, the larvae infect ...

The bird tapeworm Schistocephalus solidus, like many parasites, has a complicated life cycle. As its name suggests, it infects birds, and particularly those that live by water.

To mimic the tapeworm’s natural life cycle, Dellerba shows me how the team feeds infected rat faeces to mealworm beetles. When the beetles consume the eggs, ...

Tapeworms are famous for the enormous lengths they reach and their ability to grow thousands of segments, called proglottids. During their normal life cycle, they shed large parts of their body and ...

Tapeworm life cycles are quite complex. As adults, they live in one host, but the larvae must go through two or three intermediate hosts in a particular order for the worms to complete that cycle.

Ferguson said Alaska fish already carry several species of tapeworm — creatures with a "complex life cycle," beginning when tapeworm-infected birds and mammals excrete tapeworm eggs into water.

A vaccine for pigs which targets a gruesome parasite could save 50,000 people a year in poor countries. The vaccine, developed by a team in Australia, targets tapeworm. The adult form, caught from ...

Most tapeworms have an obligate parasitic life cycle involving two or three hosts. They have no mouth or digestive tract, and absorb nutrients directly from the intestines of their hosts.