In the body of a snail, a war is waging. It’s so violent that the only reason there isn’t blood everywhere is that the combatants don’t have any blood. The fighters are flatworms, simple parasites that have taken over the snail. Its body is now theirs, a shell in which they mate, cooperate, and produce more flatworms. But they don’t have it all to themselves – other colonies, and even other species of flatworms can invade the same snail. When that happens, war breaks out and the flatworms wage it with something more commonly associated with ants or humans – a caste of soldiers.

Many animal societies have specialised castes that do different jobs. Ants, for example, have soldiers who defend