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Anand Varma

An adult worker honeybee, Apis mellifera, foraging in an almond flower.

An amphipod invaded by the larva of a thorny-headed worm.

The larva of the trematode worm infects the tadpoles of an American bullfrog.

Larvae of the horsehair worm infiltrates a cricket and grows inside.

In a home lab Varma has been raising moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita).

This photo shows pupae developing into adult bees. When 10 days old, bees secrete wax, which they then use to build honeycomb in perfect hexagons. Why the hexagon? It provides the most amount of space using the least amount of wax.

Commercial beekeepers, like Bret Adee in this photo, truck their thousands of hives all over the U.S. to pollinate different commercial crops. Honeybees are responsible for bringing $15 billion to the U.S. economy.

Each has one queen. After she hatches, she goes on her mating flight and stores up to six million sperm in her abdomen. She will then lay 2,000 eggs a day, controlling whether the egg will turn into a female or male.

As bees visit flowers to collect food, pollen from one flower sticks to the hairs on the bee’s body and gets left behind at the next flower. This helps the plants reproduce.

A woolly false vampire bat flaps into a moonlit night. The mission: get dinner. For rodents and other small creatures of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, the night is an especially dangerous time, as meat-eating bats leave their roosts seeking prey.