Jose presents … Parasitology *

* (restored/Halloween countdown post #4)

Parasites live in a warped version of the outer world, a place with its own rules of navigation, of finding a food and making a home. Parasites often act as architects, casting a biochemical spell to make flesh and blood change into the form they desire.

 

 

Sacculina Carnici

Castration is a strategy that any number of parasites have hit upon independently Sacculina does it to crabs. Males normally develop a narrow abdomen as wide as females, wide enough to accommodate a brood pouch – the knob that sacculina forms on a crab sits exactly where the brood pouch would be, and the crab treats the parasite knob as if it were its own pouch – a male crab acts as if he has the female’s brood pouch, grooming it as the parasite larvae grow and bobbing in the waves to release them.

Unable to waste energy on building eggs or testes, on finding a mate, or on raising young, a host becomes, genetically speaking, a zombie: one of the undead serving a master.

 

 

watch a snail under parasitic mind control

 

 

Cymothoa Exigua

The Spotted Rose Snapper Fish, which lives off the coast of California, is plagued by what must be one of the most disturbing parasites in all of nature. The crustacean parasite, called Cymothoa exigua, enters the fish’s mouth and leeches blood from the fish’s tongue until the muscle atrophies and dies. The parasite then attaches itself to the withered tongue-stump, and acts as a working replacement for the organ, spending the rest of its life living off bits of food that enter the fish’s mouth.
read more

 

 

Trymansomes

Parasitologists who spend enough time looking at Trypansomes in laboratories tend to fall in love with them. In an otherwise sober scientific paper, I came across this sentence: “Trypansoma bruccei has many enchanting features that have made this parasite the darling of experimental biologists.”

Their name comes from trypanon the Greek word for an augur.

They enter the body when bitten by a tsestse fly. As the fly drinks blood the trypansomes pour in, they begin to steal oxygen and glucose from the body, multiply, invade the organs and slip into the brain. Trypanosomes live extracellularly by a process known as antigenic variation; they evade the pursuit of immune cells by tossing off their coat and putting on a new one.

Sleeping sickness gets its name from the way trypansomes disrupt people’s brains, wrecking the biological clock and turning day into night.

 

 

Cellular Warfare

Plasmodium enters a healthy blood cell, pushing aside the membrane skeleton. The parasite blasts out sheets of molecules, which join together and form a shroud around the parasite as it goes in. Plasmodium has a mouth of sorts, a port that can swing open. A little dollop of haemoglobin oozes into the maw, which then twists shut. The hemoglobin floats in a bubble inside the parasite, which contains molecular scalpels that slice it apart, letting it fall into smaller pieces and capturing the energy that had been held in those bonds. Plasmodium can neutralize the toxic heart of its meal.

A red blood cell is a good place to hide, because they don’t have any genes they cant make any MHC molecules, so they have no way of showing the immune system what’s inside of them. For a time plasmodium can enjoy perfect camouflage inside the cell.

The root knot nematode of the genus Meloidogyne hatches in the soil and crawls to the tip of a root, it carries a hollow spike in its mouth which it stabs into the root, its saliva makes the outer cells burst, freeing up a space through which the nematode can slip.

The job of a root cell is to pull in water and nutrients from the soil and pump them into the plant’s circulatory system. But under the spell of the nematode, a root cell starts to work backwards. It begins to suck in food from the plant. The nematode spits molecules into the altered cells, which form the selves into a sort of intercellular straw, which the nematode uses to suck up the food being pumped in from the rest of the plant.

 

 

History

The word literally means ‘beside food’ and the Greeks had something very different in mind when the used it, referring to officials who served at temple feasts. Eventually the parasite became a standard in Greek comedy with his own mask. The parasitus’ garment was long with doubled long sleeves and a pallium, his clothing was either black or grey.

When napoleon took his army to Egypt, the soldiers began to complain that they were menstruating like women, actually they had been infected by flukes, these were shed by snails and swam up through the water looking for human skin. They ended up in the veins in the abdomens of the soldiers and pushed their eggs into their bladders.

 

 

Movies

A young woman who survived a mysterious parasite outbreak at Cuttyhunk Island Research Facility that killed most residents, returns twenty years later with hopes of selling her family’s property.

 

In a post-apocalyptic USA, a doctor/scientist infected with a new strain of parasite ends up in a small desert town, trying to find a cure.

 

The film is set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future in which the United States has been taken over by a criminal organization who unwittingly create an uncontrollable deadly parasite and set it loose on the population.

 

Sexual Parasite opens in a remote jungle near the Republic of Botswana. A group of explorers run across a tribal group, and a female explorer ends up infected with a rare parasite. A Sexual Parasite!

 

The humanity is suffering from murders all over the globe, called “Mincemeat murders”. High school student, Izumi Shinichi has a parasite living off him, having replaced his right hand, and he might be the discoverer of truth.

 

After an alien spaceship crash-lands in the middle of the desert, the town starts to fall victim to a parasite that is spreading faster than it can be contained, turning the residents into deadly killing machines

 

A team of local scientists discover alien parasites when they investigate a mysterious, three-story-tall, cone-like object that has appeared outside the small town of Riverdale, Illinois. It becomes obvious that the parasites’ first victims, whose minds have been taken over, are the town’s leading citizens…

 

 

These videos show what a parasite does once in the human body (not for the squeamish)

Parasites Eating Us Alive

93-year-old eaten alive by parasites at Georgia nursing home

Man’s Face is Eaten Alive

Woman’s Arm Literally Eaten Alive by Flesh-Eating Bacteria

 

***NOTE: The annotations for today’s report came mostly from the book Parasite Rex by science author Carl Zimmer.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I’ll be stuck in Paris for Halloween because Zac and Sabrina Tarasoff and I present our “walk-through” virtual haunted house project on the 27th. But happily the people who do the great, year-round Paris haunted attraction Le Manor de Paris are doing a huge event with 4 haunted houses and 5 scare ones and so on, and that should be amazing, so I think I’ll be there. And Parc Asterix is doing its Halloween makeover this year, and it was great last year, so I’ll do that too. So, it’ll almost be like a real Halloween. What are you planning? Does Budapest have any haunted attractions this year, for instance? That you for that love. I am covering  that tricycle. Love like an eternal anti-parasite immunity in the form of a haute couture outfit of your choosing, G. ** David, I guess you’re there. I hope it’s blowing you away. ** Sypha, Surely $6,750 would be worth the looks on your family’s faces when you turn that sucker on. Yes, I’ll endeavour to pry the XBox out of Zac’s hands. Hopefully he’s not in the middle of some epic game. ** Bill, Me too, on the spiderweb gun, and I think the ceiling headbanger might be my favorite of the lot. But, yes, a bit pricey. I hope you came out the other side of your weekend feeling ship shape. Ooh, that ‘Positano’ link is of vast interest! Thank you a million billion! ** _Black_Acrylic, I skipped Nuit Blanche because (1) it was shitty, and (2) it was pouring rain. So you didn’t miss nothing. ** Grunge, Grunge! You? Hi! Oh, you’re way too kind, but, yes, Maryse is great, and she’ll be here so we can do it in-person, which is obviously much, much better. Visa stuff, urgh, but, yeah, just handing it over to the expert is surely worth it. Excellent news about the story collection in progress!!! Ha ha, well, I have a big something maybe. Love, me. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. I’m not sure until we have whatever budget we’ll have. Also we’ll be devising the home haunt in consultation with actual home haunt builders, so its makeup is still a bit up in the air. In the version we’ve sketched out, there’s only one animatronic in the front yard. Fun indeed, not! I look forward to having a NYFF overview, not to mention by you. Everyone, Should you be curious as to what the New York Film Festival will be like this year, it’s Mr. Erickson to the rescue with this overview. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Good thing you’re so rough and tough. Pretend you’re me and do every haunted attraction within a two hour drive. That’s not an order. Thank you for telling about your friend’s liking of ‘I Wished’. Stuff like that means a lot to moi. xo, Moi. ** Okay. Since it’s Halloween I decided to restore this highly Halloween-appropriate old post by a long lost blog d.l. by name of Jose. Makes sense, right? See you tomorrow.