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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."
This could explain George W. Bush...
Here you go.
Fortunately, those parasites are only found on Seti Alpha V.
Sorry couldn't help it.
An "interested observer", was asked to comment on the ramifications of the mind-controlling insects. The observer simply looked at the reporter and said, "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!"
Behold the evolution of the Goa'uld!
Kinda reminds me of the plot of Resident Evil 4. :) I'm sure I read some research notes in that game that mentioned something like this as validation of the palagas taking over people's minds.
We call these things "politicians".
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
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
That is just incredible, especially when you think about the fact that it is able to control multiple species. Wow. It would be very interesting to see if other species not as closely related would behave in the same way, various beetles, for instance.
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
Sometime the mechinsim is not the important part; just the discovery. What if Newton didn't publish gravity because he didn't understant the mechignism by which it works?
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
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.
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.
branwashing? is this committed by a cereal killer?
It's been known for years, if not decades, that parasites can influence their hosts' behavior to the benefit of the parasite. There are flukes (genus Leucochloridium)with a life cycle that involves being transmitted from snails to other animals—the fluke affects the snail's brain and causes the snail to become light-seeking rather than light-avoiding, which means the snails climb to the tops of plants, where they are easy prey for birds—the next host in the fluke's life cycle. More about that (and the evolutionary logic behind it) here. Another fluke has a similar life cycle involving ants, which it drives to the tops of grass blades where they can be eaten by sheep (which again become its next hosts).
A more obvious example might be rabies—animals with rabies ("mad dogs", most famously) have an irrational tendency to attack and bite other animals, unprovoked—which is how rabies is spread.
This is mentioned in a chapter intro in the book "Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind", by Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen.
I can't recommend that book enough.
If this isn't a sign of intelligent design behind live the universe and everything, what is? ;)
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....
From TFA you quote (right after your quote, no less)
Now Biron and his colleagues have shown that the worm brainwashes the grasshopper by producing proteins which directly and indirectly affect the grasshopper's central nervous system.
Ignorance is not a crime; neither should it be a way of life
Congress control $ = inmates run the asylum
There's a parasite that does similar things to snails. It makes the snails move to exposed places where they are visible to birds, get eaten, and the parasite gets distributed by bird excrement. Aditionally, the worm pulsating inside the eye stalk looks really gross.
...drives humans to water for pain relief- not exactly mind control, but the same result:
from Guinea Worm Disease Facts...
What are the signs and symptoms of Guinea worm disease?
A few days to hours before the worm emerges, the person might develop a fever and have swelling and pain in the area where the worm is. A blister develops and then opens into a wound. When the wound is immersed in water, the worm begins to emerge. Most worms appear on the legs and feet, but they can occur anywhere on the body. After the worm emerges, the wound often becomes painfully swollen and infected.
http://www.astdhpphe.org/infect/guinea.html
Guinea Worm Disease Facts
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
Found another interesting example, a parasite ( Toxoplasma gondii ) that infects cats and rats—rats are infected by eating cat feces, then the parasite affects their brains to make them less fearful, and more likely to be eaten by cats. Toxoplasma can have neurological effects in humans, too (especially those with weakened immune systems), though fortunately people tend not to get eaten by cats.
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.
Oh my gosh, you're right! We'd all start floating upwards!
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
I'm just curious, why is the topic image for this a vacuum cleaner!?
1) Find grasshoppers and/or crickets randomly plunging to their watery graves.
2) Show some friends and explain why they're doing it. Bet them money when they don't believe it.
3) Show them the newscientist article on this.
4) Profit!!!!!!
Or it will torment the cat using various tricks, tripwires, and other items. In rare cases, it will even involve other members of its genus (i.e. "country cousins"). Cf. "Anvils and ironing boards in the rodent-cat dialectic", authors Tom and Jerry.
In rare cases, the cat becomes immune to death, so that the rodent can torture it indefinitely (e.g. "Amateur surgery at Mouse Hospital" by Dr. Itchy).
Ewald's book "The Evolution of Infectious Diseases" describes how pathogens ( particularly single strain airborne pathogens which can only propagate in a host for a few days or weeks before the host becomes immune) often evolve to manipulate host defenses in such a way that the host gets what it wants (self defense) and the disease gets what it wants (transmission to a new host.)
This dynamic changes, however, with fluid borne pathogens where multiple strains are transmitted at once, and it's this latter case that Ewald focuses on the most.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
"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.