Question: how do parisites get on to animals????

Marisol Collins answered on 10 Nov 2016:

Hi miamyd2007! Parasites have many very clever ways to get onto and into animals! I’ll give you some cool examples: Fleas can jump several metres from the ground onto a dog, or from one dog to another.
Ticks will climb up to the top of a blade of grass, stretch their little legs out and wait for an animal to brush past, and then they cling on tight! This is called ‘questing’.
The malaria parasite will infect a mosquito, which will then fly around, and when it bites an animal to feed off its blood, the parasite will cross into the animal from the mosquitos’ mouth.
Probably the cleverest of all is a tiny blood parasite called Toxoplasma. It infects mice, finds its way into their brain, changes the messages in the brain to make the mice no longer afraid of predators, such as cats. This makes the mice easy for cats to catch and eat because they no longer run away, and the cat then becomes infected with the Toxoplasma! Clever, huh?