A new lizard parasite is the first known to move from mom to baby
For Nathalie Feiner, it was just another day in the lab. As part of her work on understanding how the common wall lizard is adapting to a changing climate, the evolutionary biologist was observing one of its eggs under a microscope when she caught a strange sight. “Something was moving in there,” says Feiner, who was at the University of Oxford at the time. Inadvertently, she had found a parasitic worm that can move from a mother lizard to her embryos, Feiner, now at the University of Lund in Sweden, and her colleagues report in a study in press in the May 2020 issue of The American Naturalist. Parasites moving across generations have been well-documented in mammals. But this is the first evidence of such transmission in any egg-laying amniote, a group that includes birds and reptiles, says Daniel Noble, an evolutionary ecologist at the Australian National University in Canberra. The study “establishes some critical natural history, and opens up a whole new...