Brain Jacking Parasites - Three examples [View All]

[Xipe Totec]

Preemptive answers to anticipated questions:

1.- No, these are not Republicans.

2.- No, they do not work on AM radio.

3.- No, they do not work at Faux News.

How far would you go to survive? Consider a parasite--an organism that lives on or inside another organism, or "host." The lancet fluke, for example, is a leaf-shaped flatworm, and this deceptively simple-looking species--Dicrocoelium dendriticum --has a wildly elaborate life cycle. Adult flukes naturally live in and dine on the livers of grass-eating mammals like cows. The parasites shed their eggs in cow manure (see diagram, right).
Hungry snails--host number two--then devour the egg-infested dung. Fluke eggs hatch in a snail's intestines, and the larvae (immature worm-like forms) penetrate the snail's organs, eventually spawning an army of young parasites. Breaking out of the organs, the parasites now cause the snail to produce fluke-filled slime balls, soon left behind in a slime trail in grass.
Parasite Voodoo
Along comes an ant, host number three. It swallows a slime ball teeming with hundreds of baby lancet flukes. Most flukes just hang out in the abdomen, but one or two "scouts" locate and high jack the ant's command center: nerves below the throat that control the ant's movements. The scouts then perform parasitic voodoo on the ant's nervous system.
As night approaches, an infected ant climbs up a blade of grass--instead of heading back to its colony. As the air cools, the ant clamps down on the tip of a grass blade and waits to be eaten by a cow or other grazer. If the ant should sit the whole night without being eaten, the flukes let the ant loosen its grip on the grass--if the ant were to bake in the morning sun's heat, the parasites would die along with the ant.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1590/is_9_57/ai_70872766/

Thorny-headed worms begin their life cycle inside invertebrates that reside in marine or freshwater systems. Gammarus lacustris, a small crustacean that feeds near ponds and rivers, is one invertebrate that the thorny-headed worm may occupy. This crustacean is predated by ducks and hides by avoiding light and staying away from the surface. However, when infected by a thorny-headed worm it becomes attracted toward light and surfaces itself. Gammarus lacustris will even go so far as to find a rock or a plant on the surface, clamp its mouth down, and latch on, making it easy prey for the duck. The duck is the definitive host for the acanthocephalan parasite. In order to be transmitted to the duck, the parasite's intermediate host (the gammarid) must be eaten by the duck. This modification of gammarid behavior by the acanthocephalan is thought to increase the rate of transmission of the parasite to its next host by increasing the susceptibility of the gammarid to predation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acanthocephala

Scientists say they have discovered a horrific flesh-eating fungus which is able to infect living creatures and turn them into "zombies".
The hapless victims are then compelled to shamble away to a location where their immobilised bodies - as they are gradually consumed from within, acting as food supply and nest to the ghastly fungal offspring - can spray out more spores to seize control of more hosts.
For now, the terrifying Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus appears to be focusing its zombie extermination campaign primarily on carpenter ants of the sort found in the jungles of Thailand.
“The fungus accurately manipulates the infected ants into dying where the parasite prefers to be, by making the ants travel a long way during the last hours of their lives,” says Dr David Hughes of Exeter and Harvard universities.
Having successfully taken over an ant, the fungus compels it to leave its normal haunts high in the forest canopy and directs the unfortunate insect down into the dark, moist basement layers of the jungle. There the luckless creature is compelled to clamber onto the underside of a leaf in the O unilateralis' favoured location for reproduction - some 25cm above the ground, on the northwestern side of the tree or plant in question.
Once in such a location, the dying ant is made to clamp its mandibles - jaws - firmly shut onto the leaf, and then hangs lifelessly from them to become a food supply and home for the burgeoning, ghastly fungus-children within. Most of the insect's innards are gradually converted into food and consumed, but the muscles holding the mandibles shut are cunningly left alone.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/12/ant_zombie_fungus_horror/