Parasites are bad, and I'll bet you didn't know snails could cough
Those who are terrified of climate change, artificial intelligence or unassembled Ikea furniture have never heard of Dicrocoelium dendriticum, an insidious, miniscule flatworm more commonly known as the lancet liver fluke.
New research on the LLF has revealed a life cycle so complex that it makes Photoshop look like a box of crayons.
It was known that the parasite affected grazing animals, but according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Due to the highly specific nature of this parasite's life cycle, human infections are generally rare.”
I always like words like “generally” and “relatively” and “comparatively” and other “don’t hold us to it” words that gives science some wiggle room should all hell break loose. So like if 10% of the world population is killed by the lancet liver fluke they can say that relative to nuclear holocaust it was a pretty positive outcome.
But no one who has read a detailed account of the fluke’s life cycle may ever sleep again. Most parasites — like ticks, lice and Wall Street hedge fund managers — have a linear, Point A to Point B modus operandi. A tick sees a source of hemoglobin and he just goes for it. No complex instruction manual needed.
But according to The Washington Post, an ant will eat a batch of Lancet Liver Flukes and just one of these flukes (I guess they draw straws) will go on a suicide mission to the ant’s brain, where it gains control of the insect’s motor controls.
Meanwhile, the rest of the flukes, hundreds of them, go stampeding off to the ant’s abdomen where they weave a hardened shell that protects them from the ant’s stomach acids. That’s when things start to get weird.
“The fluke in the brain heads to the ant’s suboesophageal ganglion, part of its central nervous system, and causes the infected insect to climb to the top of a blade of grass in the cool of dawn or dusk, clamp its jaws around the blade and stay there,” the Post writes. “When cattle, sheep or deer come to graze, they eat the ants along with the grass, and the worms settle into the larger animal’s liver.”
And you’re thinking that has to be the end of the story, no? You are a fool.
Once in the liver, the Post says, “The worms lay eggs, which are later excreted in the host animal’s feces. The feces, in turn, are eaten by snails, the fluke’s final destination. Larval flukes reproduce inside the snails, multiplying by the thousands. Eventually the snails cough them out in a ball of mucus, drawing ants. The bugs feast upon the fluke-infested slime, and the cycle starts all over again.”
No way. No way in the world the flukes thought this up on their own. You think for one minute a gang of flukes were sitting around one night playing cards and one of them said, “Hey I know, what we’ll do, see, is hide in the stomach of an ant while one of us takes control of its brain and drives it up a blade of grass and park it there. Then after a cow eats us we’ll come out the back and be eaten by a worm — no no, not a worm, a snail, and he’ll cough us up, kind of like a pet cat does with a hairball.”
The rest of the flukes are going to be drumming their fingers saying, “Really Sid, you ought to get some help.”
No, this horrific, cockamamie scheme was not the work of a fluke. They had to have had help from a higher life form like Marjorie Taylor Green.
And to me, the bigger question is: Who knew snails could cough? And is there some sort of snail version of Robitussin they can take for it?
All I know is that if someone can get a video of a snail cough it will immediately be the most interesting thing ever to appear on Tik Tok.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
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This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: The life cycle of a liver fluke is a creepy thing.
