Dr_Rez

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Freebase Dali

I'm shocked.

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Guybrush

Most lampreys with this behaviour are considered parasitic although many of them do cause a lot of damage to their hosts to the point where the parasite / host relationship is perhaps better described as a predator / prey relationship.

Anyways, I'm done with fish for now. Judging by the yet more feeble attempts at derails, I think it's time to put the scare in ya. Let's talk about one of the most commonly known parasites that also attack humans, the pig tapeworm Taenia solium.





Tapeworms are segmented worms that in some cases can get very long. On their heads, they have a row of "teeth" or "hooks" that they use to hang onto your intestinal wall. Tapeworms are usually hermaphroditic - the first segments are males and the last ones are male. The top segments can then release sperm which travels down your (f.ex) digestive system until they meet the female segments which can then get pregged. The female segments then detach and come out with your poo.

Now, if someone eats your poo, they can get these "eggs" in them. There are other ways, you can eat them yourself if you don't clean your hands or you can live in an area where sewage mixes with drinking water. When you eat these eggs, they will hatch and become the tapeworms second stage, small oncospheres, come out. These invade your tissues where they form cysts.





In the picture above, you can see such cysts found in a slaughtered pig. Humans also get them - and the spooky thing is you don't know where. They could form in your muscles or your liver, but most terrifyingly, they have a tendency to form in the brain and eyes of their human hosts.

Such formation will lead to you losing your brain gradually, leading to a loss of functionality, loss or altered personality, epilepsy and eventually death. Getting them in the eyes causes blindness.

Here's a picture of cystericosis in an eye :





And here's a scan picture of a brain with lots of cysts. It's like a swizz cheese.




The cycle is complete when something eats tissue which has cysts in it. They then acquire the first stage, the intestinal worm part of the lifecycle.

So the next time you travel to someplace where there might be tapeworms, beware. Taenia Solium is not the only one. We have one even up in the arctic on Svalbard called Echinococcus multilocularis which has a vole / fox cycle, but it can also in rare cases survive in humans.

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Farfisa

I'm a little paranoid now... it feels as if I've been slowly losing my ability to process things over the past few years. Or maybe it's because I was a pothead... who knows.

Guybrush

Once cysts start growing in the brain, they take weeks to mature, not years - so you would probably know about it .. Although I guess in some grotesque cases, maybe you could have one or just a few cysts up there and you could live with a worm or two in your brain - just at reduced functionality.

Dog owners who's dogs could get tapeworms might wanna be careful with the poo. I have a friend who's a sled dog guide and she sometimes gets medication against tapeworms just to be on the safe side.

Don't get paranoid, though, tapeworms is something you should worry about when you are in areas where they are known to exist (then you might wanna avoid drinking water you haven't boiled first f.ex) or if you spend time with animals that could have them. Oh, and cook your food.

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LoathsomePete

Is it mostly in pigs? Or can it be found in beef products too? I really like my steak blue-rare and now I'm thinking it may not be the best idea.

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Guybrush

Sure, you have lots of tapeworms that infect many different animals. Taenia saginata is commonly known as the beef tapeworm and people get it from eating beef that hasn't been sufficiently cooked. These can become very large, some over 20 metres. However, I don't think they are quite as dangerous as the pork tapeworm. Infection rates in the US are described as "low".

In either case, the stage you get from eating meat in both of these cases should be the "intestinal stage" where you have a worm or more living in your intestines, eating whatever it is you eat. The other stage (which might be much worse) comes from gettings eggs in you and, as I wrote, these eggs come out with feces. If you handle animal poop or drink water where animals (or people for that matter) could go poop, you need to be careful. Of course, someone could smear poop on your beef, but that's unlikely.

Next parasite up will be Wuchereria bancrofti which causes much swelling of limbs and scrotums, but I will leave that for tomorrow.

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WWWP

I really like this thread, tore. It's extremely interesting. The pictures might give me nightmares but I'm going to keep reading.

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Thrice

Tore, if you dont like this you can remove it.





Ive done some diving and snorkeling alot in the Florida Keys, and these fascinate me. I always thought they were parasites as they are attached to a host and feed off of it, but only after beginning to write this post I learned they are actually not considered parasites, but I shall continue anyways.

I also heard a rumor while in the Keys when I was younger, that people used them to catch turtles, fisherman would tie a string aroung the tail of the remora and cast it out. The remora would attach itself to a turtle and the fisherman would reel them both in due to the vacuum capabilities of the remoras 'vacuum like' organ.

"Some remoras associate primarily with specific host species. Remoras are commonly found attached to sharks, manta rays, whales, turtles, and dugong (hence the common names sharksucker and whalesucker). Smaller remoras also fasten onto fish like tuna and swordfish, and some small remoras travel in the mouths or gills of large manta rays, ocean sunfish, swordfish, and sailfish."

"The ancient Greeks and Romans had written widely about Remoras and had ascribed to them many magical powers such as the ability to cause an abortion if handled in a certain way. Shamans in Madagascar to this day attach portions of the Remora’s suction disk to the necks of wives to assure faithfulness in their husbands absence."

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Bulldog

Besides this thing this little critter's what comes to mind when I hear the word parasite...

The Bot Fly

Pretty nasty thing this. I know it comes from tropical areas (I forget exactly where though), but the coolest thing about it is that the female bites cattle and horses and lays her eggs under their skin which in turn, naturally, live as parasites under the skin staying warm from the host mammal's body heat until they hatch. There's a species of bot fly which does this with humans too, like so;




Pretty neat huh