Let me think for a minute.
It's kind of like asking to choose between your children.
Like, they're all important.
There’s, you know, space to explore,
There’s the deep ocean. That's for suckers.
Parasites are just this untapped frontier of
we don't know.
We're really just scratching the surface to understand the critical role
parasites may play.
At this point, it would take more than 500 years
to describe what we estimate to be out there.
They're everywhere.
They're this kind of silent force in ecosystems.
What we found was it looks pretty bad for parasites.
What if we actually took this seriously and we did this the way we do conservation
for everything else?
What if we save the parasites?
This is a tapeworm from a human,
from a person, that was collected in 1939.
And by the looks of the jar, hasn't opened in quite a while.
This is all one worm.
It's about 12 feet
and the label said
it was passed spontaneously without medication.
My name is Anna Phillips.
I am a research zoologist and curator at the National Museum of Natural History.
These are the research collections with the National Parasite Collection.
This is a part of the museum that the public doesn't necessarily get to see.
These are chunks of tissue, but underneath you can kind of see the the worms.
These are nematodes.
And they're from a porpoise from the Albatross Research vessel.
This was collected in 1887.
It is still a good research specimen.
Parasite is more verb than a noun.
There are parasitic animals, there are parasitc plants and fungi.
It's a really convenient strategy if you can get it right.
So parasitism isn't about being a particular kind of thing.
It's about cheating the system.
It's about living at the expense of a host.
My name is Colin Carlson.
I am a global change biologist.
So I think about what life on this planet will look like in the future.
There are parasites in in every creature around us.
There are parasites in every species on earth.
Parasitism is -- it's more of a lifestyle
than a taxonomic group.
Parasitism has evolved multiple times in the tree of life,
but in the scope of parasite diversity, the number that infects or infest
humans is actually quite small compared
to the vast number that are infecting wildlife.
A very small percent of species can infect us.
A very small percent of species
are responsible for the majority of the global burden of disease.
We've got to get rid of those.
We've got to do something about that, right?
That goal does not change if we start to think about parasite conservation,
because those are probably not the species that are holding ecosystems together.
Many parasites, especially parasitic worms, have complex life cycles
that involve multiple hosts that they have to enter in the correct order
and at the right time in order to complete that life cycle to reproduce.
If the parasite is completing its lifecycle, it shows that those host
animals have been playing that role in the ecosystem for a long period of
time and it’s an indicator of ecosystem health and stability.
Lemurs are an incredibly important case study
not only for studying
primate parasite interactions, but also just conservation in general.
We often refer to parasites as being on kind of a spectrum
from being a very specialized parasite, meaning that it only infects maybe one
or two host species to being a generalist, meaning it can infect multiple.
So when you think about the lemurs of Madagascar, they arrived
on an isolated island, probably 60 million years ago
and their lice and mites have been evolving along with them all that time.
So just as unique as those lemurs are,
So are there mites.
I'm James Herrera.
I'm the program coordinator here at the
Duke Lemur Center and specifically the SAVA Conservation Initiative.
They're among the most threatened mammals in the world.
There are a number of pressures
on their natural habitats that are causing their populations to shrink.
And so this is potentially going to be throwing off those balances
between the hosts and their parasites.
So we can create this kind of matrix
where we understand
which hosts are infected by which parasites.
And then from there we create the network.
I started to think about it kind of in terms of that kid's game called Kerplunk,
where you've got all those sticks that are holding up the marbles
and you start to pull the sticks out and one or two
doesn't really seem to make a difference.
But as you start to pull out those really critical sticks,
all of a sudden all the marbles could just totally fall at once.
And I thought to myself,
Well, could that be what happens with the primate parasite network?
If we start by removing those really well connected hosts,
we see that the secondary extinctions of parasites
would increase very rapidly.
This is a species of worm that's adapted host is actually the possum.
It has a lifecycle that requires an intermediate host and in our case
it's cockroaches.
And our lemurs love to eat the cockroaches.
So when they eat cockroaches, they get stomach worms.
It seems odd to think about worrying about parasite extinctions, however,
because these organisms have evolved together for millions of years,
we really just don't know what the effects would be of losing
those parasite connections.
They’re this kind of dark matter.
They move energy around and they connect species that otherwise have no connection.
And all of that holds ecosystems together.
These are your hosts.
We started thinking, okay, what does the data tell us about
how parasites go extinct, about whether they're vulnerable to climate change?
And it turned out people hadn’t thought about it a lot.
Parasites sort of face this double jeopardy.
There are two ways a parasite can go extinct.
Up to the point where we started doing our research.
The big one people talked about was co-extinction.
So your host is gone,
you're out of the game.
But parasites are also directly vulnerable to the environment.
With parasites,
the biggest data source we have is collections.
It's data that you can hold in your hand.
In this study, we brought together data from multiple museum collections
for parasites.
What they didn't have
was coordinates attached to them because 90% of that data is from before
hand-held GPS.
And so what we did was we tried to figure out
what we could go back and very easily assign coordinates to.
And that meant that we could take a very large view to predict
the extinction risk of parasites in changing climate scenarios.
We took each of those parasite species.
We simulated the kind of environment they need to live in.
So, what temperature, what rainfall?
We mapped that and then we look at where that would go in a changing climate.
We know the probability that parasites go extinct from climate change,
but we also know the probability their hosts go extinct.
And that lets us get at that issue of double jeopardy.
What we found is that about probably one in ten parasites faces
extinction risk from climate change over the next 50 or so years.
That number, if you account for the fact that many of their hosts are threatened,
probably closer to one in three parasites, and that is
that is a really alarmingly high extinction rate.
That is a level of extinction
that would take hundreds of years to get in some groups.
We are talking about hundreds of thousands of parasitic worms of vertebrates.
We're talking about 80 million potential parasites of arthropods.
And you're talking about a third of them vanishing.
We have no idea what that would do to ecosystems.
And so what we wrote about was an idea.
What if we looked around the world and we all worked together
and we tried to describe, you know, half the parasitic diversity on earth?
The Global Parasite Project
is a call to action to document the parasites in the world.
If we could create a moonshot for parasites,
the leaps and bounds of knowledge that we could cross in a time frame,
even 5 to 10 years would be revolutionary to knowledge in the field.
It's important to document it now because these changes are happening
faster than ever.
This needs to be a truly global effort.
We wanted the data to live somewhere.
We built something called the
Parasite Extinction Assessment and Red List, or PEARL.
There's about 450 species of parasite in there
and what it really is is just a set of maps.
Here's where the parasites are today.
Here's where we think they could be in the future.
And here's some information on their hosts.
It's a monument to we could do this if we cared about it.
Obviously, the world knows that there's
a lot of research that still needs to be done with viruses,
and we feel the same way about parasites.
There's no way to stand at the computer like Nick Fury
and be like, okay, show me a world map and show me every gopher
and then only show me the gophers that have ticks.
But what if we could?
There's so much data from nature.
And so that's kind of where we're headed.
These parasites are species just like any other on the planet
that have been evolving for millions of years.
And so in many ways,
they have just as much right to exist as the tigers and the pandas.
As a scientific community,
we're asking all these really big questions about the future.
And barely ever
are we thinking about what parasites are doing in that system.
We're so many steps back from actually having these answers
that we're guessing about what the important questions are.
That's never a situation you want to find yourself in
when you're talking about a changing planet.