Unsoft's List

j u s t a f l u k e

The following post is about parasites, reproductive cycles and sheep. You know you can't resist.

It's a new one on me, but it seems there is a flatworm called the Lancet Fluke which lives one of the earliest stages of its development cycle in the body of an ant. It just stays in there doing what parasites do until it matures and finds need to progress to the next type of host it requires - a sheep.

Scientists (isn't that a catch-all these days? what scientists? name two, I dare ya.) believe that the fluke actually manipulates the ant's genetic makeup (turning genes on and off) when the time comes to pack up and move to sheepville. The ant suddenly breaks from its normal pattern of behavior, however complex it may be, and climbs to the top of the tallest blade of grass it finds. Once there, it locks down on the tip of the blade with it's jaws and does not let go again until it either dies of natural causes or (and this is what the wormy is fishing for) gets eaten by a grazing sheep!

Other parasites use tricks like this, too. The thorny-headed worm lives a portion of its larval stage in the body of a pillbug, and later uses a peculiar cross-tolerance reaction of similar hormone compounds to overcome the bug's natural aversion to light. The hormone-crazy pillbug is willing to stray out into the dangerous sunlight in order to attempt to satisfy the spanish-fly hormonal urges, but usually instead of finding a piece of pillbug ass it ends up in a bird's belly. Stage two for little Mr. thorny-head is then underway.

This is a dirty trick for sure, but its not so far out there when you consider that lots of animals use feigned mating behavior to score food. Whether the flood of hormones is initiated by internal or external stimuli is not so much of a sticking point. The fluke thing is a little scary, though. Manipulating the actual DNA of the host to gain a stranglehold on the central nervous system is a lot more complex than finding a way to give him a boner and whacking him during the universal lack of decent judgment that follows.

It's in our literary archetypes. How many episodes of Star Trek spin-offs have revolved around the control of an animal or human central nervous system by an (alien) organism apparently less complex by biological definitions. (Think Futurama - Brain Slugs). Doesn't something like the existence of the lancet fluke challenge our basic biological classification systems? I mean (and you scientists out there help me out), we evaluate complexity through things like the number of elements comprising the CNS, and the formation of higher functioning structures (like legs and fingers and forebrains)...But, if a "simple" organism (no matter how many segments or whatever it has) can gain control of six legs and a jaw of an organism we consider more complex, maybe our ideas of biological complexity need to be revamped a little.