Parasites: The Wonder of God

The Guinea Worm

  • the guinea worm. It starts small, really small. It begins life as a microscopic larva tiny enough to fit inside of the common water flea. Like the elderly residents of Florida, water fleas love to hang out in stagnant pools of water, gossiping and doing water exercises until they are unknowingly ingested by big, thirsty, humans.

    So you go swimming and the flea makes its way down your throat. Now, not being adequately equipped to survive the harsh environment of the human stomach, the water flea is dissolved away, leaving the guinea worm larva behind. It finds a soft, fleshy cavity to burrow into and starts growing.

    And growing.



    About a year after infection, the full sized guinea worm is no longer microscopic, but instead measures two to three goddamned feet long. As long as a three year-old human child.

    Being so large, a cramped human body is no longer adequate real estate. So the worm wants to get out, and here's where it gets even weirder. The worm burrows to the surface of the skin and creates a blister, and causes a burning sensation. It does this on purpose, because the worm has figured out that a burning feeling in a limb makes humans want to dunk it in water.

    This is exactly what the worm wants. It pokes its wriggling head out of the blister, and releases its foul, milky brew into the water, containing hundreds of thousands more larvae. They are promptly eaten by water fleas and the whole thing starts all over again.

Horsehair Worm

    Imagine you're a happy grasshopper for a moment, joyfully kissing your grasshopper wife and kids goodbye as you leave the house, tiny briefcase in hand, ready to hop to work for the day.

    Suddenly, on your way to the office, a sudden urge overtakes you, an urge that cannot be ignored. You obediently follow the siren song to the nearest body of water, and promptly fling yourself in. For weeks afterward, your widowed wife and friends will wonder what could have possibly made a perfectly happy and content grasshopper tragically commit suicide, by drowning no less. Depression? An affair gone wrong? Crushing gambling debts? No, it turns out it was just another strike from the soulless and evil menace known as the horsehair worm.

    Resembling a coarse, thick horse hair (well, duh) the horsehair worm infiltrates insects, and sometimes even crabs, as a larva when the insect drinks tainted water. From inside the aforementioned grasshopper, the worm goes to work.

    It weasels its way into the body cavity, and nourishes itself on the insect's tissues, sometimes growing up to a foot long. After a time, when the worm has matured, it starts to get horny, as teenagers do, and decides that the time has come to find himself a sexy mate. The problem is, all of the sexiest female worms hang out at the swimming pool club, and he's stuck inside of a prudish grasshopper.

    That's a problem easily and dickishly solved by the horsehair worm, however, by simply reprogramming the insect's brain to seek out the nearest body of water and to hop right in, despite the sad fact that grasshoppers, like many other insects, can't swim. As his former host panics and gasps its last breaths of sweet life, the worm casually slithers out of its anus, bids adieu to the drowning grasshopper and swims in search of the orgies of knotted up worms he's heard so much about.

Filial Worms

    Mosquitoes. As if there weren't enough reasons to hate these living dirty needles, the bastards are responsible for yet more horrifying diseases thanks to the multitude of parasites they unwittingly inject into us every time they feed.

    One such parasite is the almost too-weird-to-be-real filarial worm and, yes, it does affect humans.

    Nature's douchebag.

    After a year spent bumming around in our bodies, the worms mature into adults and finally take up the job they were born to do, by moving into the lymphatic system. Doesn't sound so bad...

    Well, here's the thing. The lymphatic system keep excess fluids moving out of your body. It's one of those unnoticed bodily tasks that you don't appreciate until it stop working. Like if, say, a bunch of worms clogged it up. The filarial worm does just that, bunches of them all working hard in the vessels near the lymph nodes, causing those vessels to become obstructed and inflamed. Shit starts backing up, and the tissue starts inflating like a freaking balloon.



    Finally, you wind up with massive and debilitating enlargements of the legs and genitals, a condition commonly known as Elephantitis. Goddamn mosquitoes.

Luey

    Leucochloridium paradoxum is a parasite that has an impossible dream. Luey, as it shall henceforth be known, begins life literally in a puddle of shit. But Luey dreams of flight, and the method by which it achieves it is both complicated and fucked-up beyond comprehension.

    First, knowing how much some animals love to eat shit, Luey lies in wait in his fecal puddle until the vacuum cleaner of nature, more commonly known as the snail, comes around to slurp it up.

    Once inside the snail, Luey enacts the next part of his ingenious plan. Knowing that birds aren't too fond of eating slimy snails, he migrates to the snail's eyestalks and begins to stretch and change them into something that looks much more appetizing to birds: caterpillars.

    The eyestalks that are usually so well-guarded and often retracted by the snail, are now pulsating, swollen and brightly-colored morsels of imitation caterpillar meat. Wait, it's not done.

    Now is when Luey hacks into the snail's brain. It takes complete control, driving it like a little, slimy car out into the open so all of the hungry birds in the sky can see and swoop down on the irresistible caterpillar-like eyestalks.

    Once inside the luxuriously spacious and soaring bird, Luey is free to feed on its insides, grow into an adult and reproduce knowing that soon, his babies will be shat out of the bird like he was, to start their own rags-to-riches lives. Meanwhile, the poor and confused snail is less one eyestalk, but has learned the hard way that eating shit is always a bad idea.

Jewel Wasp

    The emerald jewel wasp is a marvel of evolution. And evil. The female, not being content with just laying her eggs in a hole and hoping the larvae find a way to survive like other insects, makes sure that her larvae will hatch right on top of their preferred food source: a cockroach. The problem with that is a typical cockroach is aggressive, and two to three times larger and beefier than the female. She has found a way around this. An inventive, terrifying way.

    Like a surgeon, the wasp uses her long stinger to penetrate the surprised cockroach, to paralyze and anesthetize the front section of its body. Now, she can take her sweet time, to make sure the second injection of her stinger is perfectly placed into a specific area of the roach's brain. She injects more venom directly into it, precisely blocking very specific receptors of neurotransmitters that essentially destroy the roach's fight or flight responses and leave it zombified. Yes, the wasp knows how to do this.

    Now in control of her very own cockroach, the wasp leads it back to her burrow. Once inside, she finally lays her egg on top of the cooperative cockroach, bites off its antennae in order to drink the roach's blood and replenish her energy, then exits the burrow, sealing it off with rocks and pebbles.

    After a few days, the eggs hatch and the larvae slowly consume the insides of the roach until they form a cocoons and the roach is finally allowed to embrace the sweet relief of death. Eventually the adult wasp emerges from the cocoon/dead roach husk to begin its own life of surgical zombification.

Hookworm

    As larva, the Hookworm forces entry by burrowing into its host's skin, usually through bare feet, and from there it travels through the body to the intestine, at which point it grows into an adult worm. Although all but eradicated in America's South, where it infected a large proportion of the population during the early 20th century, the Hookworm remains a major threat to children in the tropics, causing retarded growth as well as cognitive and intellectual impairment.



    As many as 740 million individuals are thought to be infected by Hookworm today. With something that gets under the skin like this, rarely has a better case been made for good footwear.

Ascaris

    A larger cousin of the Hookworm, Ascaris is a giant sized roundworm that can reach as long as 40cm, as opposed to little over 1cm. It too sets up shop in its host's small intestine, using its characteristic mouth, which is surrounded by three less than luscious lips.

    Ascaris is in fact the parasite most familiar to us humans, though the fact that up to 25% percent of the world's population is infected certainly doesn't make it any more welcome in our bowels. Sickness, fever, and heavy infestations with severe intestinal blockages kill up to 20,000 people a year.



    Like the Hookworm, the Ascaris likes warm, damp conditions with poor hygiene, and is a particularly severe pain in the backside for young people. Yet while the larva of Ascaris' smaller relative tends to penetrate the skin of prospective hosts, infection in this case occurs through consuming food contaminated with faeces containing Ascaris eggs. The larva then hatches and migrates through the gut and respiratory system, before eventually being re-swallowed and allowed to mature, anchored snugly to the intestinal wall. The female Ascaris may then lay hundreds of thousands of eggs a day. Distinctly unsanitary food for thought.

The Moral of the Story

    This is what David Attenborough was talking about when he repled to the little old ladies who wrote in and complained that he never thanked god for the 'wonders of nature' on his shows. Attenborough said that seeing the agonies that little kids went through as a parasite exited through an eyeball over a period of weeks made him extremely cynical about the idea of a kind and benevolent god.

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