Parasites have a leisurely lifestyle — set up camp at someone else’s place, live off their food, profit (evolutionarily speaking). But new research shows that sometimes the parasite gets a taste of its own medicine, and from an unexpected source.

Scientists studying wasps that target oak leaves found that a second parasite, a vine, can get its tendrils into the homes set up by the wasps, called galls, subverting their diversion of the host’s resources. After that, things don’t go so well for the wasp.

Galls are like in-law apartments for parasites: swollen masses of plant tissue that route nutrients to wasp larvae, which grow and develop safely within until they are mature enough to leave.

The researchers behind the new paper, published last week in Current Biology, study gall-forming wasps all over the Southeast. But when they first encountered a gall with small woody suction cups dug into it, it looked so strange they wondered if it had been collected by mistake.