Viruses/Parasites

[Tsikura]

Some cool stuff




This parasite is crazy.

It starts as eggs in cattle dung. Snails eat this. The eggs hatch and the parasites wind up in the slime trail.

Then ants eat the slime trail, which also makes them eat the parasites. The parasites then TAKE OVER THE ANT. At night, it makes the ant go attach itself to some grass, so cattle will eat it. If it fails to get eaten, the ant reverts to normal and returns to the colony at sunrise.

In the cattle, the parasite becomes an adult and lays eggs, which wind up in the dung.

AND THE CYCLE REPEATS.

[Tsikura]

'Sacculina infestation (yellow globules) on a crab. (Courtesy of the University of Hong Kong)

Sacculina Carcini. This barnacle, possibly the crowning glory of earth's biota, can castrate and quite literally zombify the Green River crab. The female floats in the water, finds a crab, drills a hole in its leg, and injects a small amount of her innards. These cells wander around inside the crustacean and eventually lodge in its belly. Possession tendrils begin to infest the entire creature, forcing it to stop growing. If male, the crab is feminized; the parasitic barnacle's egg sac replaces the original reproductive system.

But the process isn't over yet. The female Sacculina punches numerous holes in the neutered crab's body so that male barnacles can get in and fertilize its eggs. Once that's accomplished, the tendrils take over the crab's nervous system, making it autonomously guard, care for and clean the parasitic egg sac as if it were its own. And once they hatch, a repeat performance is in order.''

[Tsikura]

Dicrocoelium dendriticum life cycle:
adult worms (5-15 mm long and 1.5-2.5 mm wide) live in the bile ducts
of herbivorous animals where they lay eggs that are eliminated with faeces;
the eggs, ingested by various species of land snails (genus Helicella),
hatch in the digestive tract of the first intermediate host releasing the miracidium;
the miracidium then trasforms into sporocyst,
daughter sporocyst and finally into cercariae (0.7 mm).
Landsnails release the cercariae in slimeballs
on the grass where the ants eat the cercariae,
that develop into metacercariae within their abdominal cavity.
Herbivourus animals (definitive hosts) ingest the grass
containing the infected ants; after rupturing of the cyst wall
of the metacercariae the youngs adult migrate
to the biliary tree where they develop to adult flukes.
Egg of D.dendriticum: 1.000 X, wet mount preparation; the operculum is well visible.

[Yuberr]

And yet more reasons while i'll never eat escargo, or however you spell it!!!