microbes...!

for my biology class we are reading non fiction books and then book reporting on them. yes, i know, ugh. science-y non fiction? sounds like a bore fest to me. only it's not! i am reading Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease. it's fascinating, for the most part, and it's certainly not the bore fest that i thought it would be. here is an excerpt from my book report...

"Chapter five talks about microbes, more specifically host manipulating microbes! The nasty human affecting microbe, the Guinea worm is one crafty little guy. You’re only at risk if you spend a lot of time with contaminated water so we should all be good, but if you get one it lives inside you and grows to about, oh, three feet long. Then its actions make you think that it’s decided that you’re no longer a good enough host and wants to come out. It does this by giving you painful blisters that burn with a fiery sensation so you automatically think, okay let’s just submerge my arm in some nice cool water. DON’T DO IT!! By submerging you arm in water the little Guniea worm let’s all of its little babies out into you. So now instead of having just one wormy living inside you, you have many, many, many. The only good way, that’s been found, of getting them out is wrapping them around something like a toothpick and slowly pulling them out bit by bit. Unfortunately this usually takes more than one day. Just one more host manipulator microbe example is the Dicrocelium Dentriticum. Basically, it’s a parasite that lives in sheep, but the thing is that it uses ants as a Trojan horse to get into the sheep. These little guys mess with the brains of the ants making them suicidal; once affected the ants go hang out on the ends of the blades of grass just hoping to be eaten by a sheep."

there's also one more type of microbe mentioned in the book that i didn't put in my book report and it's the Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga. because no one in their right mind knows what that is, i will call it the parasitic wasp that messes with the mind of Plesiometa Argyra, a spider. this spider is just a minding it's own business weaving its orb shaped webs all over the places in hopes of catching the little bug that blindly walks into in and then becomes lunch. to rain on this nice little parade, out of nowhere comes the parasitic wasp and he/she stings the spider. okay it's a she, because when she stings the poor little spider she deposits her eggs in it. after a short stint of being paralyzed by the sting from the evil wasp, spider wakes back up and goes about his/her business not knowing that his/her days are numbered. all the little wasp eggs living in the spider soon hatch into little wasp larva, and they're hungry. so what do they do? they suck the blood of the spider but for some reason the spider can't feel it so it just keeps on spinning webs. once this gets boring for the larva and they decide it's time to cocoon they inject some chemicals into the head of the spider. so now the spider is all drugged up and can only remember how to do steps on and two of its web making. after repeating steps one and two about fourty times, and this usually happens at midnight, the spider just stops. no more movement from mr. spider. the larva then kill motionless mr. spider and use the product of repeating steps one and two fourty times to have a nice place to hang it cocoon from. give it a week or two and you now have some more wasps. nasty little guys aren't they.