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    Fearsome Fauna: A Field Guide to the Creatures That Live in You
    Fearsome Fauna: A Field Guide to the Creatures That Live in You
    Fearsome Fauna: A Field Guide to the Creatures That Live in You
    Ebook122 pages2 hours

    Fearsome Fauna: A Field Guide to the Creatures That Live in You

    By Roger M. Knutson

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    About this ebook

    Hypochondriacs beware-- would you believe the nastiest creatures in the known universe live inside our bodies? Not content to just find a home and produce offspring in our internal space, parasites will drink our blood, eat our cells, and infest our muscles. There is very little that can be said in their favor, with perhaps one exception-- they are truly fascinating!

    Fearsome Fauna is a wickedly amusing and startlingly informative look into the secret world of these fascinating creatures. Perhaps the greatest biological success story of all time (there are more kinds of parasites than insects), parasites have found homes in the vast majority of people on earth and have learned to live in their environment without destroying it (usually). For readers who would like to meet these hardworking beasts-- or learn how to avoid them-- Fearsome Fauna tells you everything you always wanted to know about parasites but were too disgusted or terrified to ask.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 1, 2011
    ISBN9781429933773
    Fearsome Fauna: A Field Guide to the Creatures That Live in You
    Author

    Roger M. Knutson

    Roger M. Knutson is professor emeritus of biology at Luther College in Iowa. He is author of the now-classic Flattened Fauna: A Field Guide to Common Animals of Roads, Streets, and Highways and Furtive Fauna: A Field Guide to the Creatures Who Live on You.

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      Book preview

      Fearsome Fauna - Roger M. Knutson

      Introduction

      Life is hard for a parasite. You may think it is hard for the host, especially if you are the host, but think again. A protracted and intimate association is the essence of a parasitic relationship, somewhat like marriage or parenthood. As a parasite, you do know where your next meal is coming from most of the time. In return for that security, you have probably given up most of your nervous system and sense organs. Considering that you probably live in the mire of someone’s intestine or their bile duct, not having sense organs is probably a plus. You often don’t know where your next home will be, yet you haven’t enough brains to look for an inexpensive, rent-controlled apartment where you can live and raise a family.

      Very few parasites live in one place or even in one host for their whole life, and almost all of them are required (by the difficulty of their life style) to send their offspring out into the world without the benefit of parental guidance or resources. Parasite children often are forced to leave home very early in life (often as eggs or early embryos) and seek whatever fortune they can find in a neighborhood very unlike the one where their parents live. It is necessary, if you are a young parasite, to periodically leave home and hearth and wander the Earth like an unhappy spirit, hoping against hope that you will stumble on a place where you can live for a few years. What parasites do have is a lot of fellow parasites. Successful as insects are, there are more kinds of parasites on Earth than there are kinds of insects. We will be looking at only a very few of the parasites that find a home in people.

      The parasites that live in humans are generally ugly (at least to us, though not to other parasites), not very smart, and excessively interested in sex or at least reproduction. This is neither a failing on the part of the parasites nor a product of their long-term association with people, but rather a necessary result of their life style. If you are a parasite living on the inside of a host organism, appearance doesn’t count for much in the struggle for survival; it’s dark in there. Better you should have a good set of hooks, suckers, or clamps or a mouth for hanging on or the capacity to swim with vigor. The potential to live unobserved for many years will serve you well. Not much intelligence is required to soak up predigested food from your nutritious surroundings, but you had better be able to avoid your host’s attempts to find you and kill you. And a dramatic emphasis on reproduction is absolutely essential if you expect any of your offspring to find a home as secure as yours. It is usually a long way, in time and/or space, to the next appropriate address, and the next generation has to get there with almost no help from parents or host organism, taking what help it can from an errant wind or the occasional wandering insect.

      Our internal parasites are genuinely creatures of the dark side, the inside where the light don’t shine. One or another of them can live in nearly all our internal spaces or cells, and sometimes during an adolescent walkabout they wander from our skin to our bloodstream to our lungs to our gut and during the wandering create their own small spaces where we had none before. They drink our blood, eat our cells, infest our muscles, and compete with us for the food we have already eaten and for the vitamins we need to keep us healthy. Not much can be said in their favor except that they are truly fascinating. How they manage their mostly secret lives would seem unbelievable if we had not studied them carefully enough to be certain of their oddities. Better yet, knowledge of how they conduct their lives can provide us with nearly the only mechanisms for maintaining our distance from them.

      1

      Is There Room for All Those Parasites?

      A proper Victorian lady is supposed to have thought of herself as being of solid wood from the neck down. Whatever problems that vision of the human body might have caused or prevented in a previous century, I suspect that it is closer to the way most of us think of the inside of ourselves than teachers of anatomy would like to believe. Sure, we know that some people have internal parts removed or even replaced, and we know the names of a number of things that are in there somewhere and maybe even approximately where they are located. What we are much less likely to know is that there is a remarkable amount of room in our bodies that is not occupied by anything remotely close to solid and that there are inner spaces of real significance.

      Why are these interior spaces of such importance? They provide most of the places where internal parasites, our fearsome fauna, live and work for most of their lives—also for most of ours. There are few genuinely vacant spaces in this body of ours, but there is a large amount of fluid-filled space in our arteries and veins and in the spaces between cells and organs. And there exists almost equally large amounts of potential space that we are continually filling with food or air. Occasionally a parasite will actually burrow through or dissolve away something we think of as solid: our cornea, our muscles, our kidney, or even our brain. A few parasites are capable of hollowing out spaces in some of our solid parts. But mostly they live contentedly in the spaces we provide for them. Like a fish in the ocean or a bird in the air, they find a suitable habitat inside us and thrive in it. If we have trouble thinking of ourselves as having internal spaces rather than being mostly solid, we will certainly not be able to mentally accommodate the multitude of things that swim and grow and reproduce in those spaces. We do literally accommodate them, though, so we might as well get used to the idea that, often without drastic cost to ourselves, we provide parasites with a good and comfortable home: food, shelter, and a quiet place to

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