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Last week I took a look at some sci-fi parasites and their real-life analogues. Today, it’s the other way around — real-life parasites that sound like something out of a movie. With this one, though, I just couldn’t keep it to five.
That’s no tongue. That’s a parasitic crustacean pretending to be the fish appendage it sucked dry earlier. It’s just one of the many bizarre creatures in the animal kingdom that carry out hellish relationships with their unsuspecting hosts.
Chuck and I have talked extensively about what happens to a body after it loses that 21 grams, mainly because I’m twisted and Chuck coddles me. In the rigor mortis podcast, we mentioned the bottlefly, which forensic investigators use to make ballpark estimates of time of death and the like. These investigators take samples of the maggots and larvae, measure them and so on to figure out how long they’ve been ingesting the dead flesh of a corpse.
Cool enough, but what if a fly laid eggs and they hatched and began feasting on flesh of a person who was still walking around and could be really upset by this? My friends, it can happen! Lemme tell you about the botfly.
I spent a couple of years early in my career writing about food safety, so whenever anybody says the word “parasite,” my thoughts usually leap to food-borne critters that can spawn all manner of digestive discomfort. But if you pair “parasite” with “fiction,” I go straight to the big ones — like vampires or mynocks. There are plenty of littler life forms that can take over human hosts and wreak all kinds of havoc in science fiction and fantasy, though. I called on the office’s sci-fi brain trust, and we hashed out a list of our five favorites.
No seriously, I’m fine — as is my car and (presumably) my cat. But this is just the sort of claim you might hear a lot of in the future if researchers at Charles University in Prague are really onto something.
Sure, the idea of cats using the toilet may sound efficient, but California sea otters and other marine animals could be paying the price for your scoop-free lifestyle. The parasite Toxoplasma gondii shows up in cat feces and, sadly enough, an alarming number of sea otter corpses as well.
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