10 Creepiest Parasites In The World.
Number 10.
Cordyceps fungus actually grows into the brain of insects, progressively devouring the host's
brain until the insect dies.
Once this occurs, Cordyceps grows as a fungis out of the head of its dead host.
Some Cordyceps are known to even force their insect hosts to crawl to the top of plants
before they die.
That way once the Cordyceps emerges out of the insect host it can rain down spores on
the ground floor, infecting even more insects who will also become fungi.
Oddly enough, some people eat the mushroom product of Cordyceps as a soup.
Number 9.
If you see a snail with two beautiful eye stalks, pulsating with emerald- and olive-green
stripes and dappled with charcoal grey flecks capped off with a maroon dab, be impressed.
You're not just looking at a pimped-out snail, you're looking at a snail infected with a
parasitic flatworm.
The green-banded broodsac first squirms its way into the stalks of the snail, so that
they look like juicy, pulsing, brightly-coloured caterpillars.
This is just the kind of snack nearby birds are in the mood for.
Then the worm manipulates the snail's behaviour.
It is found that the infected snails behaved differently from their apparently non-infected
counterparts.
They positioned themselves in more exposed and better-lit places, situated higher in
the vegetation.
This probably makes the snails more conspicuous for foraging birds.
Once eaten by the bird, the worm can reproduce, and the cycle continues.
Number 8.
Sacculina, a genus of barnacles that contain multiple species, would definitely be at the
top of our list if it affected humans.
The barnacles find an unsuspecting crab and then form a sac right where the crab's own
eggs would be (if it's female), sterilizing the crab and preventing it from ever producing
its own offspring.
The sac is fertilized by a male Sacculina and when the Sacculina eggs are ready to hatch
out of the sac, the crab actually tends to them as if their her own offspring, performing
normal crab birthing procedures.
The really scary thing is that if the crab host is male, the barnacles mess with the
crab's hormones making it more feminine so it can better lay the eggs.
The crab then acts like a female crab and even performs mating gestures associated with
females.
Number 7.
This parasitic insect glyptapanteles is quite unique in the way it plays with its food.
The wasp finds a caterpillar and injects its eggs into its body cavity where they grow
into larva and begin to eat the caterpillar's insides.
Here is where it gets interesting.
The caterpillar continues to act normal, going about its business until around 80 larva drill
holes in its body and crawl out of it.
The larva create cocoons around the caterpillar who remains around the cocoons until the wasps
emerge and the caterpillar dies.
This behavior was a mystery until scientists recently discovered that the larva somehow
turn the caterpillar into a bodyguard.
The caterpillar defends the cocoons against anything that comes near it, swinging itself
violently against nearby insects that frequently fall off branches onto the ground.
Number 6.
This parasitic crustacean, cymothoa exigua does something you probably didn't know was
possible: it replaces fishes' tongues.
The process begins when cymothoa exigua swims into the mouth of a fish and begins to prey
on its host's tongue.
The parasite sucks all the blood from the tongue until the tongue withers from atrophy
and falls off.
After cymothoa exigua has fed off the original tongue, it attaches its claws to the tongue
muscles and proceeds to actually replace the tongue in the fish's mouth while feeding off
blood and mucus.
The host fish is now able to permanently use this crustacean as a completely functional
tongue.
Number 5.
This wasp has an odd way of giving birth.
The female parasitic polysphincta gutfreundi will find a spider on its web and lay an egg
on its abdomen.
A larva then emerges out of the egg and begins drinking the spider's vital fluids for nourishment.
That's not even the worst of it.
Not only does the larva drink up the spider's insides until it dies, the larva secretes
a chemical into the spider that completely changes the spider's instinctual behavior.
Instead of tending to its own web, the spider creates a stronger, chemically-enhanced web
with a different pattern designed for the growing wasp larva.
After the spider is nothing but a shriveled shell, the larva attaches itself to the new
web and creates a cocoon in which it matures into a grown wasp, high above potential predators.
Number 4.
Also known as the Lancet fluke, Dicrocoelium dendriticum essentially makes ants offer themselves
to be eaten.
When an ant becomes infected with the Lancet fluke, the parasite takes control of its nerves
and controls the ant's behavior.
Every night, the ant will now crawl to the top of a plant where the parasite forces it
to clamp down tightly and wait, the perfect place to be eaten by some grazing cattle.
The Lancet fluke puts its ant host on a metaphorical platter, because it can only carry out its
life cycle in the gut of the large grazers that typically prey on ants.
What's also interesting is that since the ant, and thus its parasitic friend, would
die from sun exposure if it was on the leaf during the day, the lancet fluke allows the
ant to act normally when the sun is out.
Although humans can contract the Lancet fluke, it usually just leads to bowel discomfort.
Number 3.
Vandellia Cirrhosa, also known as the candiru or vampire fish, is scary not so much because
it drinks your blood from inside you, but because of how it can get inside you.
Normally the Amazon's candiru, a type of catfish that is typically a few inches long, follows
the smell of ammonia to larger fish, where it climbs into their gills.
When there it shoots out its sharp spine, lodging itself in its host's gills where it
proceeds to engorge on blood.
Here's the really scary part: when humans urinate we also excrete ammonia and there
have been confirmed cases of the candiru swimming up a urine stream into the victim's penis.
Once there it will drink your blood until you have the very invasive and very painful
surgery to get it out.
Number 2.
Loa loa also known as the "eye worm" is a parasitic worm that lives within humans and
other mammals' bodies specifically, as you might suspect, eyes.
Loa loa is contracted from certain flies and after an infected fly bites its victim, the
worm begins floating around tissue of the bitten host.
The worm travels along the tissue, moving through the body until it stops and causes
swelling and irritation in that spot.
The creepiest thing about Loa loa is that if it gets up to your eye tissue, you can
actually feel it moving around in your eye.
It can also be seen flowing around in there if its big enough.
Luckily the worm is easily killed using antibiotics or extracted through relatively minor surgery.
And by the way, this worm can live inside a human for up to 17 years.
Number 1.
Toxoplasma gondii is a feline related parasite that is only able to reproduce inside cats
and is commonly found in cat feces.
How does it get there you ask?
When rats and mice are infected with T. gondii they actually become attracted to cats, specifically
their smell, which is obviously supposed to trigger fear in the rodents.
This effect is beneficial to the parasitic protozoa because cats easily kill the infected
rodent and become the new host of Toxoplasma gondii.
Humans don't become attracted to cats when infected, but we do contract taxoplasma from
the parasite which can cause brain damage to fetuses.
This is the reason pregnant women are advised to stay away from cat litter.
Perhaps scarier, new studies have shown that taxoplasma may be related to schizophrenia
in humans.