Q.Describe the various adaptations shown by parasites for a parasitic mode of life.
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →Living permanently on or inside another organism is such a different way of life from being free-living that parasites have evolved a distinctive set of specialised adaptations.
Many parasites show a loss of unnecessary sense organs — a permanent internal parasite living inside a host's gut has little practical use for eyes, since it does not need to actively search for food or avoid predators in the same way a free-living organism does.
Most parasites possess adhesive organs, suckers, or hooks that let them cling firmly to the host's tissue — this is essential to avoid being dislodged and expelled by the host's own movements or by digestive/immune processes actively working to remove them.
Intestinal tapeworms show a particularly extreme adaptation: they have completely lost their own digestive system. Because a tapeworm lives bathed in the host's already-digested food within the intestine, it can absorb nutrients directly across its body surface, making a separate digestive system unnecessary.
Parasites typically also show a very high reproductive capacity, producing enormous numbers of eggs. This compensates for the very low probability that any single egg will successfully make its way out of one host and into a new one — with the odds of any individual egg's success being so low, the parasite's persistence as a species depends on producing eggs in bulk. …
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