Innovation on the fly: 100m-year-old parasite found in Myanmar injected larvae into hosts so they could eat them from the inside out
Chinese team claim ‘bizarre’ zhenai xiai is world’s oldest recorded fly to feast on its hosts, suggesting these were among the first parasitoid insects in the history of evolution
A winged insect that was trapped in amber nearly 100 million years ago is believed to be the earliest known parasitic fly to grow up inside a foreign host and then eat it from the inside out, according to a new study by Chinese scientists.
The researchers described the creature “bizarre” because it had features never before seen in flies from this period in history.
This suggests the fly - which belongs to the insect order Diptera - had likely developed a sophisticated system to exist as a parasitoid at a time when dinosaurs still roamed the earth.
A parasitoid spends a large chunk of its life attached to, or within, a single host organism in a relationship that is basically parasitic. The chief difference is that later sterilises or kills, and occasionally eats, the host.
The one-centimetre-long specimen has been named zhenia xiai after the Chinese words for needle (zhen) and summer (xia), but with Latin suffixes added.