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.

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 people think tapeworm medicine has to be repeated in three weeks to end the life cycle and kill all of the worms. This is not the entire truth.

After eight years spent scouring the vertebrate bowels of the Earth, Janine Caira has published the world's most comprehensive census of the 4,810 known species of tapeworm.

While humans are the main host for T. solium, pigs are the intermediate host, and an essential step in the tapeworm's life cycle. If a pig eats the eggs then, as in humans, the eggs hatch in the ...

Consider Schistocephalus solidus. Like many tapeworms, this one has a complicated life cycle. It reproduces in the guts of waterbirds, which excrete its eggs in their droppings.

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.

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. It reproduces in ...

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.

Helminth high? To mimic the tapeworm’s natural life cycle, Dellerba shows me how the team feeds infected rat faeces to mealworm beetles.

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 ...