The Conversation

You scratch my back... the beneficial (and not so beneficial) relationships between organisms

Author: Andrew Taylor-Robinson, Professor of Immunology/Haematology & Research Coordinator, Infectious Diseases, CQUniversity Australia

Fleas get a free ride - and there's not much in it for the dog. Kristian Niemi/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

To call someone a “parasite” is an insult. But the word has rather a different meaning in biology.

Etymologically speaking, the earliest known record of the word parasite in the English language was in 1539, when it was defined as “a...

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