MACABRE EVOLUTION

How's this for making your flesh crawl? A resident in London was preparing a red snapper for lunch when he found...something...in the mouth of the fish. He contacted the Lewisham Council's Environmental Health Department who brought in the expertise of the Keeper of Natural History at Horniman Museum in Forest Hill. The expert managed to identify the creepy crawlie as Cymothoa Exigua, an isopod (crustacean) that's indigenous to the Gulf of California and preys only on the Lutjanus Guttatus or Spotted Red Snapper. He speculated that either it was imported together with the fish in it's mouth or it has started to appear in European seas. Now i have to tell you just what this little freak does in the mouth of the red snapper...

If you would kindly direct your attention to the left, you can see the little parasite occupying the space where the tongue should be. What it does is that it attaches itself to the base of the snapper's tongue with its claws and drinks from the artery which supplies the blood to the organ. As the parasite grows, it diverts more and more blood from the tongue to itself, therefore causing the tongue to atrophy and eventually wither away. Cymothoa then attaches itself to the remaining stub of a tongue and floor of the mouth by little hooks. What's amazing is that it then functions as a replacement tongue and manipulates the fish's food, which the parasite feeds on as well.

As far as we know, this is the only case of a parasite being able to eat and fully replace an organ of its host and is thus, unique. Still, imagine the situation faced by the fish....it's probably not even aware that there's a living parasite in its mouth. It goes on with life, doing whatever it is that Red Snappers do for years to come, completely unsuspecting. Now imagine ourselves with a similar situation...it could be our own tongues that have been displaced by an impostor lifeform in our sleep. Injecting an anaesthetic into our tongues, it quickly and painlessly draws all the lifegiving blood from it. Perhaps it attaches itself to the stub as well and thrusts its little appendages down to our little bundle of nerves deep within the red flesh it so cozily rests upon. Through some heightened sensitivity to nerve signals or muscular contractions, it reacts accordingly as a tongue would, drawing sustenance from that with sustains us. Farfetched as it may sound, sometimes truth is far stranger than anything fiction can concoct. If something like this is/has happenend, i pray that i will never find out and that my ignorance lasts till my dying day. The thing can detach and crawl away AFTER my body is cold and uncaring.

There are a number of 'body snatchers' though that not only infects the host, but is able to affect their behaviour and thus, end the life of its host. Now this one particular parasite (non-human host only, thank the High Heavens) i found disgusting. It's Leucochloridium varidae, a parasitic worm that could possibly be a snail's worst nightmare.

Once it passes into the body of a snail, it sprouts several tubes that it sends into the eye-tipped tentacles of the snail. These tubes swell and expand, changing colors and pulsating at the same time to attract predatory birds by fooling them into thinking the tentacles are big, fat wriggling caterpillars. The swollen protuberances also prevent the snail from retreating into its shell. Even more disturbingly, the behaviour of the snail is affected as well, causing it to crawl into the open instead of shelter. This makes it easier for birds to spot the colorful tentacles and rip them off, taking the entire thing into its body. The bird then contracts the parasite, which scatters its eggs into the bird's dropping to be eaten by more snails.

I cannot even begin to imagine the circumstances that could force something to evolve a manner of procreation as bizarre as this. It boggles the mind to imagine the hit-and-miss evolutionary path these tiny creatures have crawled. I feel a twinge of compassion for the hosts of these parasites (the pain these pitiful creatures must feel) and hope that through my continued accumulation of good merits, that i never fall into the Apaya realms of the animals. May my suffering be limited to deciding on which restaurants to eat in...*bow*