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Parasites That Can Control Insect Minds
Ant writes to tell us that NewScientist is running an article about an interesting parasite that apparently has the power to 'brainwash' its host. From the article: "The parasitic Nematomorph hairworm (Spinochordodes tellinii) develops inside land-dwelling grasshoppers and crickets until the time comes for the worm to transform into an aquatic adult. Somehow mature hairworms brainwash their hosts into behaving in way they never usually would - causing them to seek out and plunge into water."
VERY scary, very science fiction. What if this happened to people, but the behavior was at least passable, until it was 'too late'?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Basically, a parasite in cats passes to humans and a research study revealed that...f ected-your-brain-yet.html
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"...women infected with toxoplasma spent more money on clothes and were consistently rated as more attractive. "We found they were more easy-going, more warm-hearted, had more friends and cared more about how they looked," he said. "However, they were also less trustworthy and had more relationships with men." "By contrast, the infected men appeared to suffer from the "alley cat" effect: becoming less well groomed undesirable loners who were more willing to fight. They were more likely to be suspicious and jealous. "They tended to dislike following rules," Flegr said."
Here's the first link I could find that refers to the story I first read in the UK Times a while back (the link to the Times in the blog is broken but the best bit of the Times story was some suggestion that this parasite might explain the behaviour of the cat-loving French): http://althouse.blogspot.com/2005/06/have-cats-af
and another to the Guardian (UK) on a similar vein: http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/thisweek/story/0,1
CATS MUST BE STOPPED!
A similar thing occurs with wasp larvae and spiders. The spider basically flips out under the control of the larva's venom and spins a web unlike anything it would normal have spun but which has a little protective pouch. The spider would then go into the pouch and wait until the larva kills it at which point it would be eaten. Here's a link to the abstract at nature.com for anybody who has a subscription there.
-Pinkoir
It's quite common for parasites to change a host's behaviour. There are parasites which change the behaviour of their human hosts.
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e.g.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/thisweek/story/0,1
There are others.
Deleted
There is a parasitic wasp that paralyzes and lays a larva on a certain kind of spider. The larva survives by feeding off the fluids of the spider. When it comes time to mature, the larva induces a spider to spin a different kind of web that better supports the wasp cocoon. It then, of course, consumes the spider.
I posted this on my ant message board as well in this thread. It has more comments.
Ants have parasites as well according to this thread/discussion : "There is a parasite that cause behavioural change in ants. It's called lancet fluke. The parasitized ants become "ant zombies". They're influenced to cling to grass, until eventually eaten by herbivores. I sometimes find decapitated ant heads clinging to grasses. These may well be such cases."
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The Lancet Liver Fluke, Dicrocoelium dendriticum behaves in a similarly creepy way. It starts out infecting snails. When it infects them, the flukes mature for a while, then at a certain point they cause the snail to expel slime balls containing the flukes. The slime balls are eaten by ants. The fluke infects the ants, and change their behavior, causing them to behave normally until evening sets in, when they climb to the top of grasses and clamp on to the leaf with their mandibles, causing a higher lileihood of cows eating them. They then migrate to the liver of the cow, where they live until they deposit eggs, which are pooped out and eaten by snails starting the whole cycle again.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
Doesn't the rabies virus sort of do the same thing? By making the animal agressive, it makes it more likely that the host will bite another animal, and the virus will be passed on.
I few examples of this were discussed in The Selfish Gene. Its not the parasite that's self but its genes or so goes the thesis.
Reptile husbandry is incredibly difficult. Enticing animals to eat in the first place is often tricky, and their environmental requirements can be surprisingly complex. Finding out that undiscovered infections cause problems wouldn't surprise me.
For our pet birds, we've just found out that a treatment for giardia stops feather plucking and mutilation in the lovebirds -- even though the birds do not show up in lab tests as having a giardia infection. The thought is that the values the labs look for is designed for humans, and avian species may be affected at much lower levels.
I've blogged a peliminary report of our findings at UnSpace.
The drug does not stop plucking in cockatiels, african greys, and mitred conures.
(BTW: We switched from keeping reptiles to keeping birds because of the difficulty in keeping the reptiles healthy.)
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
Newton didn't discover gravity. You might be surprised to know that people weren't floating around the planet before 1600. Really, it's true. Newton discovered a simple mathematical model that describes the workings of gravity (i.e., the mechanism by which it works).
After all, I am strangely colored.
There are viruses that have strange effects on our own psychology, such as Rabies.
Rabies can cause hydrophobia, which means people or animals infected with it develop a fear of water and an inability to swallow liquids without great difficulty (hence lots of drooling). In animals this often causes death by dehydration.
"The Puppet Masters" by Robert Heinlein is an early example, then there are a handful of Star Trek episodes and at least one X-Files episode. At a stretch you could even add every vampire and werewolf movie to that list (the spread of vampirism and lycanthropy seem to mimic the spread of parasitic infection).
This one has been milked dry in fiction. Doesn't make it less interesting when you see it happening in real life though.
The cat parasite in question is toxoplasmosis, and where I am (the UK) about 30% of the population are thought to be infected. Which is presumably excellent news for armed forces recruiters.