Parasites

philo

I have just listened to a Radio programme on the BBC about parasites, which it made my flesh crawl.

Imagine a parasite that invades an ant, but which does more than feed from its bodily nutrients, it interferes the ants nervous system. It does this to cripple the ant. Why do that? It must infect a bigger animal, a grazing herbivore, and for this, it must disable its host above ground during the warmth of the day. When the ant's body gets to daytime temperature it attacks the nerves, crippling it. The crippled ant gets eaten by the herbivore and the parasite continues it lifecycle from inside the herbivore. But more often nothing happens to eat it. So to increase it chances of reproduction, later in the day, the parasite releases its grip on the ant's nervous system, allowing it to return to the nest until the next day. Well this isn't imagined, you guessed it's real.

I don't want people throwing up on their keyboards, so I haven't mentioned human parasites. I don't even have any great point to make here. I simply want to thank God for these marvels of his superlative parasitic creativity. As He joked with Adam after the fall, "next time you bite an apple, son, check for worms"

philo

bboyneko 2

Yup, sounds like a scary sci-fi horror movie huh? I also have heard of this little 'body snatcher'

I will name it the JayDub parasite. It invades the host and controls its every action.

I CANNOT RESIST telling one fluke story which borders on the dizzy horrors of science fiction. [A fluke is a wormlike parasite that is evolved from the flatworm and a brother to the tapeworm.] This concerns the sheep-liver fluke, Fasciola hepatica. Until 1963 it was generally accepted that this animal used only the mud snails as intermediate host. However, it was discovered that the fluke as a cercarian [larval or immature] form does not willingly leave the snail's body. It is ejected.
The snails embed the cercariae in balls of mucus and expels them. These balls of mucus are devoured by another intermediate host, the ant.
In this insect they encapsulate in the abdominal cavity and mature to the form that is so dangerous to the sheep's liver. The question is, how do they get from an ant's stomach to a sheep's liver?
Clustered together, the infected ants hang for hours, offering themselves to be eaten by sheep or cattle, who of course oblige.
By a very strange process indeed. A single cercaria works its way to the brain of the ant and "takes over." Henceforth the ant is an automaton of a kind it was not intended to be. Under the direction of the primitive creature dominating its nerve center, the ant is compelled to do things it would never dream of doing. It climbs to the very tips of grasses and weeds and waits there. Clustered together, the infected ants hang for hours, offering themselves to be eaten by sheep or cattle, who of course oblige. The rest is routine for the fluke.
One needs to know more about the process of how a single larval trematode [fluke] is able thus to physically hypnotize an insect as sophisticated or as occupied with its own deep instincts as an ant, since it introduces a new dimension in entomology as well as parasitology. It offers perhaps the ultimate in puzzles as to the workings of instinctive behavior. [And is a lesson for those of you who need yet another reason not to eat someone's boogers... ;>)]

Scorpion

Interesting!

philo

Thanks Neko, spot on as usual. It makes a nice bedtime story.

philo

JanH

Hi Philo,

Isn't it wonderful how God the all-wise and all-passionate created all those ingenious creatures?

- Jan
--
Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. [Ambrose Bierce, The Devil´s Dictionary, 1911]

TweetieBird

I remember a talk by a CO by the name of Clayton Peace. He brought out that children are nothing more than parasites, always taking, taking, taking. He also stated that as soon as a baby is brought home from the hospital, you should start the discipline. He then told about when his brother brought his baby home, the baby did not like the dark, so his brother went into his room and gave him a little pop on the butt. As a mother with a small baby at the time, I was highly offended and enraged. I was not alone.

"By doubting we come at truth" -Cicero