Parasites - Tumblr Posts
Didn't think I'd have the time but got my entry for the refugium creature contest done! Down to the wire as usual. More info on the life cycle found below!
I wanted to do a fun Squilloid line, but as fun belly worms! The life cycle is the host eats the eggs which hatch inside the digestive tract, once there the young attack each other and any other parasites they find. They 'eat' through absorption through their tails so their mouth parts are only for clearing out their living space, as a result most hosts generally feel a lot better once they are infected. The fools!
Once the role of top worm has been decided, the individuals morphs into the feeding stage of their lifecycle. Their tail sprouts a multitude of fringes to aid in absorbing food and gas exchange, while the mouth parts remain for dealing with any would be room mates! This stage of their life is by far the longest, lasting decades.
The burrowing phase is where the fun begins, this sub adult form can be brought about by age, stress, or most commonly lack of space within the host. In this phase they begin swelling grotesquely and once they reach maximum size, turn their mouth upon their host. They chew their way out to the surface, sometimes resulting in death, sometimes not! But they only stop once they are able to smell open air and then settle in to begin their final metamorphosis.
The dispersal phase adults only live for a few days, climbing out of the wound created in their host to fly off and find suitable places to lay their eggs. If their host died during the last phase they will generally lay their eggs onto the body, but some are always out looking to lay a trap for the next poor unsuspecting creature.
Hope you enjoy! There are so many fun entries, def go check them out!
Footnote: Might recognize this? Feel like seeing more? This is my new blog! Due to some technical issues with the old one, I will be rblging the original MMM and CFF posts on this account, as well as continuing both lil series!
Creacher feature friday 1: Let’s talk ladybug 🐞 STDS
That’s right! Oh, you thought the there was somehow an animal phylum that could get into risk-free unprotected hanky panky left and right as they pleased? Think again!
So, why focus on ladybugs? Turns out they’re one of the most promiscuous types of insect out there, like, insanely so, and in being.. that and also swarming our rosebushes every summer, they have notified me of a fun example to share.
Let’s kick off with the reveal of my third favorite parasitic fungus, and the only one I’ve actually been lucky enough to see a case of in person: Hesperomyces virescens
This species is one of quite a few actually that really likes to hang out on the exoskeletons of hard-bodied beetles. It mainly transmits between hosts during the shell-to-shell contact during mating. Predictably so, infected male ladybirds will often end up with a case in their underside, while females will usually catch it on their backs and heads. The success of this disease in their populations makes a lot of sense when you keep in mind that ladybirds go at it for anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 entire hours once they find a partner. Two-spot ladybirds have even been reported to be able to engage in copulation for up to around 8 hours on few occasions. And quantity is just as accounted for as quality. Many breeds of ladybug will mate multiple times in a single day, with the females laying eggs several times over the season. Makes you wonder how they have time for anything else, but yes, back to this fungus-
It’s actually not particularly harmful to them in most mild-moderate cases, but it can cause trouble if a really bad infestation damages their eyes or wings. It also technically lives inside the beetle’s own blood once contracted, but emerges on the outside into these contagious (thankfully not to us) yellow patches. Here’s some good photo examples I snatched off of the Google:
Yeesh, this little hardshell horndog seems to have gotten it pretty rough, my respects.
So yeah, just another thing that happens sometimes. My conclusion- awful as human STIs can be I’m just glad that yeast is about the only sort of fungus we gotta look out for in that respect, and not mushrooms in our blood and sprouting out where the sun won’t shine.
Tune in next week, and maybe we will have a chance for a part two where I can get into that OTHER sexually transmitted fungus that hijacks the brains of male cicadas and makes them bottom for other males. You know, neat stuff; Till next time!
Footnote: Seen this before? Feel like seeing more? This is my new blog! Due to some technical issues with the old one, I will be rblging the original MMM and CFF posts on this account, as well as continuing both lil series! Another reason to bring this back was because since I let this particular write-up one rip, one of y'all @poor-reconstruction off-handedly mentioned something in the tags and I haven't been able to go more than a week or two since without thinking about it. So I have no choice but to subject more people to the horrors of knowledge now.
Creacher Feature Friday 3: Mushrooms that Turn the Fricken’ BUGS Gay!!
Let’s have a bit of real talk for a second. The fungi kingdom is… weird. Really, really weird. Borderline alien weird, to me, least, relative to the rest of this planet. People kind of slot them in their minds somewhere next to plants as the default for the superficial resemblance, but in a lot of fundamental ways they’re actually way closer of a comparison to bacteria or animals.
I collect parasitoid wasps as a hobby, and the concept of fungi, especially the more microscopic sorts, still personally freaks me out, in that kind of “this feels like a far fetched sci-fi idea but somehow is just casually a part of the mundane world” way. And know, I’m glad it seems that modern writers and media seem are catching up and agreeing with that sentiment. Resident Evil 7 and Discover My Body both tapped into the horror potential of mycelium with amazing results, and cordyceps (the infamous “ant zombie” mushrooms) straight up inspired the entire premise of the Last of Us.
And as interesting as the cordyceps group is, i think by now enough people have given their own 2 cents and reaction to what they do and how they hijack host behavior in order to propagate; well, how’d you feel if I instead stepped in to tell you they actually aren’t quite so special, exotic, or even a fluke? What if there was another, even more stranger-than-fiction, parasitic spore potentially prowling temperate backyards, and you never even knew it?
Strap in, and get ready to get learnt all about the bane of periodical cicadas, and appropriately named Massospora cicadina!
Graphic sourced by Wikipedia
So in breaking some of this down, I need to let you know something neat about cicadas themselves first.
There’s thousands of individual species and they are broadly categorized into one of two groups: the annual cicadas, which emerge and reproduce along a unsynchronized yearly cycle, being spotted each spring-summer in parts of North America, and then there’s the periodical cicadas. This handful developmentally synchronizes within their own species and live a surprisingly long time, spending most of their lives as underground nymphs and then emerging only once in over a decade! 13/17 years about, depending on the variety. Now there’s a cool bug fact.
Since they line up their development to have effectively the entire population emerge and breed at the same time, it follows that they make massive swarms when the occasion arrives. It’s a reproductive strategy formally called Predator satiation and it works like this: “well they can’t eat all of us!” I.e. Safety in overwhelming numbers without giving their predators a large enough window to accommodate the boom by also reproducing and swelling their own population in turn. While this few and so far in between baby-boom strategy is fantastic at outpacing predation, you know what it’s vulnerable to?
Sexually transmitted fungus. Massospora cicadina happens to be a very picky pathogen, and so it specializes to only target these periodical cicadas rather than annual ones.
My mutuals might have already caught on that this is a bit of a sequel to my first Creacher Feature piece I wrote up, about promiscuous ladybugs and their own relationship with a similar, mostly cosmetic, but not that detrimental “STF”.
That benign organism doesn’t have shit on Massospora cicadina. This stuff almost makes cordyceps look tame by comparison.
Once a cicada contracts these spores, either through the act of mating or by contact with contaminated soil as unlucky nymph, it’s game set and match for that bug. Situated inside the abdomen of an adult specimen, the pathogen gets straight to work just underneath the surface, quietly hollowing out the insect’s abdomen and replacing once healthy organs and reproductive equipment with little more than a big, chalky mass of nothing but more fungus. The cicada’s own genitals and terminal body segments, useless to the infection’s goals, will fall off entirely, which means that the host is rendered completely sterile.
Though, this won’t stop them from still trying to mate with healthy cicadas, in fact, more than the opposite. Once pieces of the abdomen begin to fall away they will reveal the fungal “plug” to be able to spread spores in the cicada’s wake as it drags along the ground, looking something like this
^ As I call ‘em, Nature’s Forbidden salt shaker✨
To help encourage even further reach, Massospora cicadina will also crank up the host’s drive to breed even higher, with a creative twist that makes males particularly effective spore spreaders. In typical courtship, a male cicada uses his singing as a way of attracting females, who then signal their receptiveness by doing a flicking sort of gesture with their wings. Males infected with a parasitic fungus will actually mimic this behavior, actively inviting other male cicadas to mount them, even while they themselves are also still seeking to copulate with any available females. Eventually, this host is basically left a shambling husk, only serving to pass along the contagion to both members of either sex, all while its own innards are still sloughing and flaking out of its underside. Indeed, it will continue to be this up until it finally succumbs and dies. Cicadina’s evolution seriously decided “what if we did Syphilis, but also zombies?”
Now I’d like to see a screenwriter with some balls give a crack at getting a THAT concept greenlit for a large production, but also not really that sounds… EuGH, if you know what I’m saying. But also hilarious.
“Witness the terror of the living dead as you never have before! Horny Rabies, swarming into theaters this summer! Rated PG-13“
If there’s any further thoughts I have aside from the potential jokes, it’s that this is really another one of those fascinating things to rather be respected than only feared at the end of the day (unless you’re a cicada which, sucks for you I guess). Even for a strategy as crafty and potentially destructive as an insect’s 17-year periodic spawns, nature does find a way, no matter how bizarre, to keep its systems in check from being overwhelmed. But damn if I’m not glad there’s no equivalent pathogen specialized for our neck of the evolutionary tree.
Until next week, don’t be afraid to offer up some suggestions for future rambling!
Second card of the invertebrate tarot set, The Magician!
This project is on hold for a moment while I sort other things out, but I can't resist sharing another peek for InverteFest
Symbiosis isn't just mutualism. Parasitism is symbiosis. It's uncomfortable to confront parasitic relationships if you want to see your human ideas of good and bad reflected in Nature.
But gazing into something huge and utterly Other, being uncomfortable means you're engaging your mind with it. "Uncomfortable" is actually a whole spectrum of emotions that become a vivid and satisfying rainbow.
There was a post a while back with some artwork of Dendrogaster, a crustacean that parasitizes starfish, and its body is like this branching fractal of fleshy lobes made to fit inside the body of the starfish mirroring its structure, and I was absolutely horrified to look at this, and this horror was the same emotion as a strangely visceral wave of sympathy for this parasite.
Creative works about parasites often invoke the horror of bodily invasion, which is visceral and strong for me, but this artwork inverted that horror, instead showing the horror of being made so perfectly for fitting within someone else that you lose everything you are and become unrecognizable.
I also think of the post about the cowbird chick. It's awful that the bird pushes its siblings out of the nest as it grows, and the mama feeds it because she instinctively must feed her chick, but the cowbird is just a baby. Was it wrong for him to hatch, to be alive, to be hungry, to be a baby and to need love?
Symbiosis is intensely beautiful, and sometimes it's beautiful because it's grotesque and terrible. Of course, the symbiosis between two organisms isn't an allegory for a relationship, it just is a relationship, but looking at the way organisms become entwined feels like you're seeing things that, if words described them, would also be human experiences.
Being invaded by a parasite is a horror of powerlessness and loss of autonomy, but being a parasite is also defined by powerlessness. In many cases, the parasite will die without the host, but the host can live without the parasite. I wonder why it is expected to sympathize with one and not the other.
Your immune system fights against internal parasites like a tapeworm...Imagine being a tapeworm. The body of your host is your universe. Do you find your world to be kind? Benevolent? Does your god love you?
Sometimes people call disabled people "parasites." When I think about my future sometimes I'm uncertain and afraid.
But when a rare non-photosynthetic orchid blooms in the forest, this is not the forest's weakness and failure, but its crowning glory.
Genuinely worried for OP if they ever find out about parasitic barnacles…
things that scare me in an existential way:
barnacles
tunicates (now resolved)
diatoms (recently discovered)
The salt in my wounds will turn into pearls, as parasites always do.
Cuphead and Mugman in "Space Parasite" AU
