A louse is rarely a welcome visitor. And if one louse is bad, a load of lice is, well, lousy. Not only do they cause itching, but body lice can be responsible for the spreading of disease. To combat ...

In the course of studying wrasse skulls, an evolutionary biologist found a parasite hiding inside a fish’s mouth. And not only had the louse eaten the fish’s tongue – it effectively replaced it. The ...

Few parasites have a life story as unsettling as the tongue-eating louse. This small marine crustacean enters a fish through the gills, makes its way to the mouth, and destroys the fish’s tongue, then ...

A tongue-eating parasite is just one of the many charming wonders of nature. | Marco Vinci, Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0 While we wonder about what exotic and potentially hostile alien species ...

Vesk’s Plant-louse (Acizzia veski) was discovered in 2007 within the Stirling Range National Park, a biodiversity hotspot of southwestern Australia. It is not a true “louse” but is a species of ...

Louse-borne relapsing fever is caused by the spirochete bacterium Borrelia recurrentis, which is transmitted by body lice (not head lice). The disease was first described by Hippocrates (460–370 B.C.) ...

A new study seeks to determine how one parasitic species can give rise to two drastically different outcomes in its host: The human body louse (Pediculus humanus) can transmit dangerous bacterial ...

Like an unwelcome houseguest or itinerant squatter, the human body louse shows up when times are bad and always makes them worse. Now a multi-institutional team reports that it has sequenced the body ...