Sci-Fi
cwilcox | August 24, 2009Ah, the joys of a tropical getaway. There's warm, clear waters, soft, sandy beaches, and of course, a whole ton of amazing parasites waiting to gorge on your delicious flesh.
Anyone who has traveled out of the US has been told horror stories of the disgusting creatures that await them. Take a nice trip to Brazil for some sightseeing, for example, and you might find yourself at the mercy of a small, intracellular protozoan parasite of the genus Leishmania.
There are many species of Leishmania living all over the world, from Saudi Arabia to Texas. No one's entirely sure how the parasites ended…
cwilcox | May 28, 2009Ah, the parasitic flatworms called trematodes. There's a lot of them, and many have very strange and impressive life cycles involving many specific hosts. Just about any of them is sci-fi worthy, but this one, in particular, is a real eye-catcher.
Meet Leucochloridium paradoxum, also known as the green-banded broodsac. Like similar flatworms, its lifecycle involves two hosts. The adults, found in the guts of birds, lay eggs which land on the ground in the bird's droppings. The unfortunate host to follow, a snail (Succinea or Oxyloma), then eats the eggs, which hatch in its digestive system…
cwilcox | May 18, 2009 Ah, there's nothing that makes a good horror movie or sci-fi flick like the living dead. So it's no wonder that this little fly makes it on my list of sci-fi-worthy parasites. It's claim to fame is that it eats the brains of ants while turning them into living zombies for a bit before decaptating the unfortunate insects and moving onward.
Yeah, they're pretty bad ass.
These flies, from the genus Pseudacteon, are small and resemble fruit flies. They are quite different, though, in life cycle and behavior. As adults, they've earned the name "scuttle fly" because they tend to run on a surface…
cwilcox | May 13, 2009Ok - I confess. There's only one reason this parasite is even remotely sci-fi worthy. Though, to be fair, it's a pretty good one: it kills you by eating your brains.
Meet Naegleria fowleri. A happy, free-living protist that lives in warm fresh water - at least until a very unlucky person dunks their head in it.
Naegleria has three stages of its life: a flagellate, and amoeba, and a cyst. In the water, it is in its infectious, flagellate form called a "trophozoite". It reproduces asexually, and swims around quite happily if the water is fresh and warm (over 75 degrees). If conditions are poor…
bioephemera | May 13, 2009OMG! This Chris Beckett story is totally about me!
You can read the title story of The Turing Test online, and it's well worth checking out. In a dystopian future, Jessica runs a gallery where art increasingly involves human body parts and is designed to shock and appall bystanders.
Now I have to go read it. . .
via iO9
cwilcox | May 4, 2009So I've had unicellular parasites, metazoan parasites, even fungi parasites featured every week here. But there is one kind of parasite I haven't talked about: parasitic plants.
The classic example of a parasitic plant is the ever-loved Christmas favorite: Mistletoe. "Mistletoe" is actually a fairly large group of hemi-parasitic plants in the order Santalales. They're called "hemi-parasites" because, in fact, they can produce some of their own food and nutrients, and aren't 100% dependent on their hosts for survival.
Mistletoe is dependent upon birds to spread from host to host. The berries…
cwilcox | March 30, 2009So you're sitting there, reading the paper, when you notice your head's a bit itchy. Dry skin? Maybe. Irritated scalp? It's possible. Of course it could be something far more sinister...
It could be every parent and school teacher's worst nightmare: Lice.
Lice, the kind that is the bane of elementary schools everywhere, are a kind of wingless insect. They're members of the order Phthiraptera, which is classically broken into two groups, the chewing lice and the sucking lice - the latter is where our lovely head louse, Pediculus humanus, belongs.
Why did I pick the measly little louse for my…
cwilcox | March 16, 2009There's something about brain-altering parasites that is just creepy. This is doubly true when the parasite makes the host attempt suicide - which is just what Spinochordodes tellinii, the hairworm, is best at.
Hairworms are free-living aquatic organisms as adults, who, as nematodes, eek out an existence in the mud. As a larvae, however, they're nasty little buggers. Hairworms infect Orthopteran insects (aka grasshoppers and crickets). The adults reproduce in the water, and produce little larvae which are eaten by their unlucky hosts. By the time the little sucker is full grown, it can be…
cwilcox | March 8, 2009Ok, I'm a little late, so I figured I'd make this one extra-disgusting to cover the time you weren't cringing.
Meet the Screw Worm: Cochliomyia hominivorax. "Hominivorax" means "man-eater", just for your edification.
The screw worm actually isn't a worm at all - it's a fly larvae. Like other maggots, it likes to eat flesh. But unlike other maggots, it doesn't just eat dead flesh. It specializes on eating the nice, healthy flesh surrounding where it hatches, whether that be in an animals' wound or a newborn baby's bellybutton. They can't live off carrion like other maggots do.
So the mother…
cwilcox | February 21, 2009This isn't the first time I've mentioned Parasitic Wasps. They're a rude sort of parasite, laying their eggs inside unwitting hosts to grow up and eat them from the inside out. While it sounds gross and, frankly, a little evil, it makes them also really good at one thing: biocontrol.
When Sarah Palin made her off-putting remark about research on fruit flies, everyone assumed she meant the bio model Drosophila. But she was actually referring to research on the Olive Fruit Fly, Bactrocera oleae. The pest infiltrated Californian olive groves in the late 1990s, and has been wreaking havoc ever…
cwilcox | February 13, 2009Happy Valentine's Day! Though, I doubt this post fits well into your lovely romantic images of the day...
I promised another vertebrate, so here it is, a parasite so cruel it's sure to make you cringe: The Candiru.
It looks innocent enough. It's a little catfish. Heck, it's so little it's known as the "toothpick fish", and yet it's more feared in the Amazon River than the fierce Piranha.
To understand why, you have to understand what this parasitic catfish does. It's intended hosts are other fish. When it finds a host, it burrows its head in to its gills and eats the blood, tissues, or mucus…
cwilcox | February 6, 2009OK, OK, I know I already did one sci-fi worthy parasite this week. But they published a paper about a parasite! Ed and other people already beat me to the punch, but I have to write about it! It's a parasite! I love parasites!
So anyway. Here it is.
Maculinea rebeli, the Mountain Acon Blue Butterfly, is a rather pretty creature as an adult. It's young, however, are gluttonous, lazy pigs. They don't like to feed themselves, or even move around much. They just want to sit there and have someone wait on them hand and foot. So, of course, like any master con artist, they found a nice family to do…
cwilcox | January 27, 2009What could be more sci-fi than a case of replacing body parts? Sure, we might figure to do it with machines or cloning instead of another species, but fish don't get that luxury. Snappers have a wonderful parasite that works with them, to a point, to replace a part of their bodies.
Of course, the parasite - a crustacean (Cymothoa exigua) - first causes the part it's replacing to die - so it's not exactly a voluntary procedure. And what part does this lovely parasite replace?
The tongue.
Cymothoa exigua enters the fish's mouth through the gills and latches on to the base of the tongue. From…
cwilcox | January 20, 2009If you're a fan of once-a-week info bites like my Sci-Fi Parasites or Doses of Cute, you should check out Biochemical Soul's new Adaptation of the week. It's sure to be a great new weekly digest of adaptations at their finest!
cwilcox | January 15, 2009Most parasites are really, really small. Especially the ones that mess with brains - they tend to be able to fit in them. But not all parasites that can do some fun jedi mind tricks are so itsy-bitsy. Take, for example, the Rhizocephalans - the parasitic barnacles.
Yes, I did just say parasitic barnacle. Although you probably wouldn't recognize it as a barnacle when it's an adult. The adult parasites look like a sac where a female crab would have eggs. It's classified as a barnacle, however, due to its larval forms, specifically the cypris larvae (left), which neatly place it in the class…
cwilcox | January 5, 2009Many parasites alter their hosts behavior by small manipulations in the brain that go largely unnoticed by the host until its eaten by another. But not all use so much finesse. This week's parasite is probably the rudest as far as mechanisms go - luckily, their hosts are cockroaches, so we don't hold it against them.
I'm talking about the Emerald Cockroach Wasp. As with many parasitic wasps, it needs to inject its eggs into the host to incubate. When the eggs hatch, they'll feed on the host, cocoon, and emerge adult wasps. But most parasitic wasps paralyze their hosts and drag the bodies…
cwilcox | December 27, 2008One of the largest groups of parasites, the trematodes, have all kinds of strategies to trasmit between hosts. The genus Microphallus causes its hosts like shrimp, to swim upwards or otherwise endanger themselves so that they are eaten by the parasites next host - birds.
Sure, it looks harmless.
But perhaps the coolest trematode is Dicrocoelium dendriticum. It has a very unusual lifecycle, which is between grazing animals like sheep, snails, and ants. The adults in the sheep's liver reproduce and shed eggs into the feces. The eggs are then picked up by snails, which apparently are fairly…
esiegel | May 8, 2008Let's say we're having a nice day here on Earth; the Sun is shining, the clouds are sparse, and everything is just looking like a peach:
And then Lucas goes and tells me,
Oh my God, Ethan! It's Armageddon! An asteroid is coming straight for us! You've got to stop it!
Really? Me? Well, how would I do it? Let's say we've got some reasonably good asteroid tracking going on, and we've got about 2 months before the asteroid is actually going to hit us. We'd like to do something with the situation on the left, to avoid the situation on the right:
Well, what we really have to do is change the…