This might be on par with those pimple-popping videos — or maybe not. Nonetheless, RJ Millena, an entomologist and PhD candidate, shared a video of herself pulling a twisted-wing parasite out of an insect.
In the video, Millena uses a pair of tweezers to tug at something sticking out from under the bug's shell. The more she tugs, the longer the thing gets. Finally, she completely pulls out that something and you're left asking yourself: how did that fit in there?
Please enable Javascript to view this content View this post on Instagram
Millena explained in the caption that the parasite develops within the abdomens of their hosts. "I call them the bug-butt parasites sometimes," she wrote, adding that "they appear like little lumps peeking out of the segments of wasps, bees, ants, katydids, crickets, true bugs, mantises, cockroaches, flies, and even silverfish!"
Millena said that the parasites "have wild life cycles!" and added that males only live for about four to six hours, so they have to find a female bug butt immediately to mate.
These parasites are "notoriously difficult to find and collect, since you have to know where their hosts are (and only a few of those are parasitized)," Millena said. "The neat thing is, entomologists have been catching strepsipteran host insects for ages and storing them in museums!"
