Today I would like to bring your attention to a pretty amazing, cool, and disgusting creature. I am talking about the fascinating Sacculina Carcini.
The female creature inserts itself into a host crab and grows throughout the body and parts of itself emerge underneath the crab(See picture on the right)
When a male Sacculina Carcini mates with it(through an opening the female creates in the hosts body) the host crabs body is filled with million of eggs. The crab itself is still alive, and in fact, somehow, it's behavior is altered, where it cares for the eggs as if they were it's own young!
Somehow this parasitic creature makes the host behave how it desires! Not only does it change it's behavior, but if the host crab is a male crab, it alters it's host physically to appear as a female crab, to help it care for it's own young.
Neat stuff, here are some links if you want to read up on it.
6 comments:
"The notion that tiny creatures we've largely taken for granted are such a dominant force is immensely disturbing. Even after Copernicus took Earth out of the center of the universe and Darwin took humans out of the center of the living world, we still go through life pretending that we are exalted above other animals. Yet we know that we, too, are collections of cells that work together, kept harmonized by chemical signals. If an organism can control those signals--an organism like a parasite--then it can control us. And therein lies the peculiar and precise horror of parasites."
-Do Parasites Rule the World?
God, this is frightening. Puppet Masters! I'm scared I'm a parasite.
UGH. I searched for other pictures, thinking this sounds so interesting. I had to stop looking because it was grossing me out. Pukey pukey. The world wide web was pulling up other random parasite pics too, like I needed to know. But this Sacculina is way ick-o.
I am so glad my parasite doesn't look like that.
Yea, I like it too.
BTW, why doesn't this go under your "wish it were breaded and fried" catagory?
I have never eaten crab, I have no idea what it tastes like, not to mention if I do, it will kill me.
I intend to each a meal of crab when I am much older 80+ and either accept death, or be rushed to the hospital.
http://www.michaelcastellon.com/2007/01/parasitc-worms-attack-snails-create.html
You should watch this about parasites in snails, ewww gross. but cool
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