Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/30/baptizing-praying-mantises-for.html
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Well that was horrible. Thanks for the nightmares, bb!
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Just a minute, Jim. I have to take a massive Trump.
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NOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPE
(ever had a tapeworm?)
NOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPE
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These guys make Cordyceps look cute.
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I’d ask for a unicorn chaser, but I’m afraid to discover what sort of worms infest it.
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The greatest act of mercy on a praying mantis you’ll ever see a human perform.
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Thanks Internet…I’ll go drink myself out now
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Not often I feel pity for an insect.
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These harmless, curious creatures writhe slowly, contorting their hair-like bodies into intricate knots.
That preying mantis disagrees.
Nature is metal as fuck.
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I’m not at all squeamish about anything, I photographed my last stitches going in and gut fish no problem. But fuck parasites, be they mosquitoes, leeches or these nightmares. I love mantids too.
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Ah, Nematomorpha. When they’re ready to leave, they convince the host to go drown itself.
There are a few cases of accidental parasitism in vertebrate hosts including dogs[9] and humans. Several cases involving Parachordodes, Paragordius, or Gordius have been recorded in human hosts in Japan and China.[10][11]
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Rainbow gummy worms
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This makes me think of the USian health care system. As a way of keeping people in happy, productive, healthy condition, it’s a total cock-up. But as a means of social experimentation, development of new strains of MRSA, and wholesale insurance fraud, the system seems perfectly optimized. We’ll all wish we could have as clean an ending as this mantis, after we’ve been plugged into the brood comb by the machine!
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But can any of us really know for sure that we aren’t being controlled by worms right now, that the thoughts that we think we are having aren’t actually the worm’s thoughts?
Be careful next time you go swimming.
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Have you read about toxoplasmosis?
personality of infected men showed lower superego strength (rule consciousness) and higher vigilance (factors G and L on Cattell’s 16PF). Thus, the men were more likely to disregard rules and were more expedient, suspicious, jealous, and dogmatic. The personality of infected women, by contrast, showed higher warmth and higher superego strength (factors A and G on Cattell’s 16PF), suggesting that they were more warm hearted, outgoing, conscientious, persistent, and moralistic. Both men and women had significantly higher apprehension (factor O) compared with the uninfected controls.
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Worst prayer study ever.
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