[HN Gopher] Parasites are everywhere. Why do so few researchers ...
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Parasites are everywhere. Why do so few researchers study them?
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 136 points
Date : 2024-08-01 12:07 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| rwmj wrote:
| If you're ever in Tokyo, the Meguro Parasitological Museum is
| genuinely worth a visit although maybe don't go straight out for
| sushi afterwards as we did.
|
| Pictures of parasites:
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/meguro-parasitological-m...
| throwup238 wrote:
| Now you've got me curious... are parasites part of any
| culture's diet? I'm assuming human parasites are a hard no
| since it'd be like mainlining the eggs, but are there any
| parasitic species that we eat? There's probably more plant ones
| like huitlacoche but I can't think of any edible animal
| parasite.
|
| I know there's _Ophiocordyceps sinensis_ which attacks
| caterpillars but that's more traditional medicine than food.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| I think you mean parasites that we purposefully eat, but
| there are parasites everywhere. If you eat raw, or cooked
| fish, there's a reasonable chance you've eaten (hopefully
| dead) parasites. But not all parasites are harmful to humans,
| so you tend to hear less about those.
| philshem wrote:
| Here are some examples of parasites that are purposely eaten
| by humans:
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/five-parasitic-
| spe...
| Pompidou wrote:
| Becasse pate with tapeworms in France ??? I m french and
| never Heard of this. And I can't find anything in french
| about this on internet. I'm sceptical...
| WillyF wrote:
| I asked a French friend who comes from a long line of
| hunters. He'd never heard of it either. There are quite a
| few French woodcock preparations that include eating the
| guts, but I've never heard anything about tapeworms. I've
| also cleaned quite a few American woodcock, and I have
| never seen a tapeworm in the innards.
| rwmj wrote:
| There's an excellent answer already, but I would like to add
| mushrooms, since some of them are parasitic (eg ones that
| grow on trees). So I think: shiitake mushrooms.
| nick__m wrote:
| The mushroom that grows in ants are parasitic and scary.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis
| daedrdev wrote:
| Which itself gets parasitized by other fungi
| lqet wrote:
| > Parasitism is far from easy living; hundreds of millions of
| years of evolution have prodded parasites to find and manipulate
| other animals, just as those animals have evolved their own
| unique methods of survival.
|
| Parasites manipulating their hosts is something that really
| fascinates me from an evolutionary point of view. An example
| given in the article is T. gondii [0]:
|
| > [...] a parasitic protozoan that boasts "Mind Control," because
| it attracts its rodent host to the smell of cat urine, where the
| rat spreads the parasite to felines.
|
| Infected mice also have a reduced fear from predators, likely for
| the same reason.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii
| shagie wrote:
| > Infected mice also have a reduced fear from predators, likely
| for the same reason.
|
| In primates, there's some non-fear of cats too. For humans and
| domestic felines, this isn't much of an issue. For chimpanzees
| who share territory with leopards, this is more of an issue.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/16/science/a-parasite-leopar...
| (and the paper - Morbid attraction to leopard urine in
| Toxoplasma-infected chimpanzees
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...
| )
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Ancestral humans shared territory with leopards, and children
| were vulnerable (1). Big cats are still dangerous.
|
| Having a leopard stare at you, even through a fence, does
| raise the heart rate. But I don't know why we regard big cats
| so relatively favourably, when an evolved innate repulsion,
| such as to spiders or snakes, would make as much sense.
|
| 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopard_attack#Leopard_preda
| ti...
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Cats are just aesthetically well put together animals. We
| probably also like the smaller ones due to 5000 years of
| them predating upon vermin that like to hang around our
| encampments.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| 5000 years isn't that long in evolutionary biology
| timescales. But culturally we do kinda like the
| usefulness of the smaller cats.
|
| I would say that the cute cats are domesticated species,
| like many animals. So they wouldn't exist without humans,
| and it's in their benefit to behave to survive.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Interestingly enough, the genomes of wild forest cats and
| domestic cats have diverged FAR less than other
| domesticated animals such as dogs/sheep/etc. We
| domesticated other animals, but up until the 18th century
| or so I'd say it's more accurate to describe what we've
| done with cats as "co-evolution"
| shagie wrote:
| Cats are more "companion" rather than "domesticated" and
| (until recently) cats weren't bred for specific traits
| (and those now tend to be aesthetic choices rather than
| "practical" choices).
|
| Compare this with dogs that are more of a "working
| animal." We've bread dogs to fill specific roles because
| they were larger to work with. If humanity had tried to
| find companionship in the mountain lion instead of Felis
| lybica (the wild cat).
|
| Also for the how almost-domestic the African wild cats
| are: https://youtu.be/ZRqlSr1Yp1M
|
| The other part of it (as I understand it) is that cats
| body form is not as easily selected for when compared to
| animals that humans have domesticated.
|
| Dogs have a number of body sizes that can be "easily"
| selected for - https://embarkvet.com/products/dog-
| traits/traits-list/#body-... and
| https://embarkvet.com/products/dog-traits/traits-
| list/#other... (there's even a mutation of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPAS1 in wolves that was
| selectively bred into dogs
| https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/34/3/734/2843179 )
|
| I suspect part of the lack of range comes also from that
| the cats of size that don't eat us are not ones that can
| be crossbred with cats in the wild to introduce new
| useful genes. Trying to cross a domestic cat a wild cat
| doesn't produce a new cat that is useful in a new role (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felid_hybrids#Confirmed_dom
| est... ). Compare this with domestic dogs and the various
| wild dog species.
| nradov wrote:
| Dogs have twice as many chromosomes as cats. This makes
| it easier to selectively breed them for desired
| characteristics.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Dogs also have some features of their DNA that makes it
| more mutable than some other species.
| zargon wrote:
| House cats are nearly genetically identical to wildcats.
| Which is to say, the species has always and still does
| exist without humans.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| > Cats are just aesthetically well put together animals
|
| "They have a mat of messy protein extrusions in place of
| an exoskeleton, their eyes have no facets, and their
| thorax is completely indistinct from their abdomen!"
|
| - Insect Aesthetician
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| "And a ghastly shortage of legs!"
|
| While I subjectively agree about cats, "aesthetically
| well put together" is downstream of the "evolved innate"
| factors.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Faceted eyes wear your brain out faster from all the
| input. Maybe a bug would think they're a feature.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| I don't agree with that kind of aesthetic relativism. It
| undermines both the nature of the mind as something that
| can objectively know reality (which undermines the
| relativistic claim at the same time), and the richness of
| reality itself. Materialism is bunk, and something that
| corrupts and replaced reality with some crude reductive
| imaginary thing.
|
| Beauty is objective. Taste is subjective. Hence why we
| can say that someone has poor taste, i.e., the subjective
| fails to align with the objective.
|
| I can admire the beauty of an insect _as an insect_
| without me being an insect. Similarly, if an insect were
| intelligent, possessed with an intellect, it could judge
| the feline as a beautiful creature _as a feline_.
|
| "As _X_ " is important, because it is a matter of how
| well the specimen realizes the telos of its species.
| Hence, why defect is ugly. You wouldn't say pi is an ugly
| integer. You wouldn't say a hammer is a crappy saw. You
| wouldn't say a fish is a bad mountain hiker, except as a
| shorthand for "fish do not mountain hike, are not
| anatomically + physiologically ordered toward hiking".
|
| And of course there degrees of good, and therefore,
| beauty, based on how much more you resemble the Highest
| Good and therefore the Most Beautiful, Goodness and
| Beauty as such.
| nine_k wrote:
| Cats have large, forward-facing eyes, and a relatively
| short snout and jaws (especially smaller cats like the
| domestic cats, caracals, etc). This makes them look less
| like a typical predator (long jaws, like wolf's) and less
| like a typical grazing animal (side-looking eyes, long
| jaws, like a horse or camel). They look close enough to
| humans to look cute, possibly triggering some if the low-
| level reactions which human babies trigger.
|
| Arthropods and even snakes are morphologically too
| distant for that. Nevertheless, people usually find
| large-eyed geckos more cute than armor-eyed chameleons or
| tiny-eyed crocodiles.
| Nevermark wrote:
| The crazy jumping around people do when they are
| unexpectedly exposed to a proximate spider or snake might
| not be so adaptive for escaping large cats.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Probably not the only one who finds spiders
| interesting/curious/useful but most insects kinda
| disgusting/ugly/dirty.
| seanw444 wrote:
| I've grown quite fond of spiders. I don't have the same
| aversion I used to when I was younger. There are so many
| hobo spiders on the exterior of my house, but I leave
| them be unless they're in my way, because they've
| noticeably reduced the populations of every other
| nuisance bug. As long as they keep to themselves and
| don't invade my space, I'll let them chill. And I just
| relocate them if they wander in. Killing them is just
| sad.
|
| Wolf spiders are welcome in my basement though. They are
| smart enough and have good enough eyesight that the
| likelihood of getting bit by one is super low. They hunt
| down all the pests in your home.
|
| What makes them extremely cool is that they're kinda like
| nature's hydraulic robots.
| nine_k wrote:
| Humans have even less aversion towards marine arthropods.
| A lot of people would find eating beetles gross, but eat
| gladly shrimp, and find a lobster a delicacy.
| hapidjus wrote:
| I don't think this is universal for all cultures.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Big cats look adorable on a screen.
|
| In person they can produce a different reaction.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > In person they can produce a different reaction.
|
| A couple of years ago, a jaguar climbed from its habitat
| on the local zoo here, and put its paw over the fence to
| "play" with the humans.
|
| A really unexplainable amount of people did not have a
| different reaction.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Ancestral humans shared territory with leopards, and
| children were vulnerable
|
| For a long time I've been interested in the fact that
| children are afraid that, if they are left alone, they will
| be eaten by monsters.
|
| In the ancestral environment, this is absolutely true. But
| the belief is obviously innate and not learned. What's
| interesting is that the innate belief is correct in the
| details, as opposed to being something that is not
| necessarily true but nevertheless produces the correct
| behavior.
| digging wrote:
| I've read, and like, a theory that their unpredictable
| movement is a big driver in the fear of spiders and snakes.
| I just found this with a quick search, for some evidence
| (it's not what I read originally, years ago): https://journ
| als.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20438087231151...
|
| Of course, I'm not an expert in anything so this could be
| bunk.
| trte9343r4 wrote:
| Some people lost fear from other predators: aggressive dogs.
| They even force family members to live in dangerous
| situation, where they get attacked and injured regularly.
|
| Mental illness or brain parasite is the only possible
| explanation for dog owners behavior.
| workincircles wrote:
| A fascinating video of a leopard attacking baboons[1]. The
| big cat achieves a scratch on one baboon and then runs away
| from the troop. Enough to infect and then later pick off an
| errant victim? To my eye, the baboons are sad at the
| expectation that they will soon lose a friend.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5wnKEXs6YM
| calepayson wrote:
| Check out "The Extended Phenotype" (if you haven't already). I
| think you'll love it!
| mc_maurer wrote:
| I did my PhD studying manipulative parasites and in general,
| impacts of parasites/parasitoids on host behavior.
|
| This is my absolute favorite example:
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
|
| A parasitoid lays multiple eggs in a caterpillar host. The
| larvae eventually hatch out of the host's body, but do NOT kill
| it. They then need to pupate outside the host, which leaves
| them vulnerable to predation. Their former host, the
| caterpillar whose body they just violently erupted from, will
| then act as a BODYGUARD. It will body slam any insects that
| approach, knocking them away from the pupae. Truly the stuff of
| science fiction.
| mc_maurer wrote:
| Another one of my favorite papers of all time:
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/29779588
|
| There's a nematomorph parasite that infects crickets, and
| part of its life cycle is aquatic. It will induce crickets to
| jump into water and drown themselves (there are some crazy
| videos of this on YouTube). This study found that the
| allochthonous input (land to water) coming from the crickets
| jumping into a Japenese stream was a large part of an
| endangered trout species' diet. In short, his trout was kept
| alive because of a parasite driving crickets to drown
| themselves.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > This study found that the allochthonous input (land to
| water) coming from the crickets jumping into a Japenese
| stream was a large part of an endangered trout species'
| diet. In short, his trout was kept alive because of a
| parasite driving crickets to drown themselves.
|
| The summary doesn't seem to follow from the finding. The
| fact that you mostly just eat crickets that walk up and ask
| to be eaten doesn't immediately imply that, if the crickets
| stopped doing that, you'd starve to death. It should be
| easy to understand the choice to go with a low-effort
| option even if there's also a higher-effort option
| available.
| mc_maurer wrote:
| There's an inherent cost to foraging, so a high-quality
| food item that requires little effort is a much greater
| net energy benefit. When we're talking about an
| endangered species whose margins are quite slim to begin
| with, this can be a big difference maker. A couple dead
| trout reduces the population size, increases inbreeding
| depression, things aren't looking so good. I certainly
| oversimplified the mechanisms here, but a change in 60%
| of an organism's diet is not easily dismissed.
| mc_maurer wrote:
| Ok one more, I can't help myself.
|
| This one isn't really a manipulative parasite, but there is
| an isopod that will eat a fish's tongue:
| https://oceanconservancy.org/blog/2022/04/28/tongue-
| eating-l...
|
| What's weird is that it then... basically acts like a tongue?
| It doesn't seem to be massively detrimental to its host, but
| it's absolutely insane to see a fish's mouth open and then
| there's just like, a little guy hanging out in there.
| kome wrote:
| crazy, and terrible!!!
| burnished wrote:
| Jesus fuck. I knew about these guys but did not know they
| perform this by hanging out in fish gills until they get a
| breeding pair, them one crawls from the gills to the tongue
| to clamp on and replace the damned thing, and later they
| reproduce and spread young from the gills!
| throwanem wrote:
| Don't you think you're underplaying your hand here a little?
| The mechanism of this behavioral modification is in itself
| both beautiful and extremely spooky:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracovirus
| digging wrote:
| I'm loving your contributions to these comments.
|
| Tangentially: assuming I had the drive + health to make the
| change, do you feel it would be a particularly challenging
| move for a software engineer to abandon their career to go
| back to school and study insects or other arthropods? I'm not
| a competitive person at all, and I saw your other comment
| above about the field, but I still imagine the money
| available for studying bugs is a tiny fraction of that for
| writing them.
| thrownblown wrote:
| Toxo comes into the picture by way of an old wives' tale
| forbidding mothers from having cats around during pregnancy.
| Basically the only spot that toxo can reproduce itself is
| within a cat's stomach. The toxo then goes out with the feces
| (which is where the caution comes from) and rodents eat the
| feces. Toxo's mission is to get that rodent back into the
| stomach of a cat.
|
| Rodents themselves are genetically wired to fear cats. A rat
| that smells cat urine will go the other way. However, get that
| same rodent infected with toxo and it will suddenly be
| attracted to the scent. Thus it checks out cat urine and
| becomes more likely to find itself in the stomach of a cat.
|
| So you'd think toxo is wreaking havoc with all sorts of
| elements within the rat, turning it into a deranged rat. Nope.
| Everything else remains and functions normally - olfaction,
| social behavior, learning and memory, and even fear behaviors
| all stay the same.
|
| It takes about 6 weeks for toxo to migrate from the gut to the
| brain. In the brain it forms cysts in multiple locations, but
| mainly in the amygdala region. The amygdala is the brain's
| center for fear and anxiety. It is also the brain center for
| forming predator aversion pathways. Once in the amygdala toxo
| is able to take dendritic nerve cell endings and cause them to
| shrivel up.
|
| Shrivel up the dendritic spine, shrivel up the fear pathway.
|
| Taking the creepiness up several notches, recall that other
| fear/anxiety based behaviors remain constant. The parasite is
| actually locating and unwiring the very pathway it needs to
| destroy.
|
| Amazingly, it does not stop there. Toxo wants to make cat urine
| attractive and it is able to do so by hijacking another well
| known pathway; sexual attraction. Part of the neural connection
| for sexual activity passes through the amygdala. This gets
| rewired and a rodent infected with toxo will no longer have a
| fear response to the urine but it will have activation of this
| sexual response pathway, resulting in attraction to the scent.
|
| Eau de merde. C'est fantastique! They are mapping out the toxo
| genome. One curious element discovered is that this protozoan
| parasite has two genes for tyrosine hydroxylase. This is
| responsible in part for the production of dopamine, which is
| all about rewards and the anticipation of rewards (really it's
| the thing that gets you to do the thing needed for the reward).
| It acts as a catalyst in the conversion of L-tyrosine into
| L-DOPA, which is in turn a precursor for dopamine.
|
| So at the right moment, the parasite secretes the enzyme, thus
| driving the neurons to create dopamine at the time the toxo
| wants them to, thus associating dopamine with the neural
| pathway that toxo wants used!
|
| Do other parasites that are closely related to toxo share this
| gene? No. Strangely it does not have genes for other common
| hormones - just this one that allows it to plug into the key
| for mammalian reward systems. And it starts generating it after
| it has penetrated into the brain and formed cysts, especially
| cysts in the amygdala.
|
| For humans the current clinical dogma is that it's a disaster
| for a fetus but otherwise runs its course and goes latent.
| However, a small literature exists suggesting that males in
| particular become more impulsive after a toxo infection and
| that people who are toxo infected are 3-4 times more likely to
| be killed in car accidents that involve reckless speeding.
|
| He quips that this is a protozoan parasite that knows more
| about the neurobiology of fear and motivation than 25,000
| neuroscientists standing on each others' shoulders.
|
| And it's not alone. The rabies virus knows how to control the
| neurobiology of aggression. It makes the animal more likely to
| bite and pass on the rabies infection.
|
| from: http://www.robertsapolskyrocks.com/toxoplasmosis.html
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29906469/
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC117239/
| https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/13/2/593
|
| Martin Shkreli is still getting raked of the coals over his
| deraprim pricing shenanigans
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/01/...
| unaindz wrote:
| I have been fascinated by Toxo since I discovered it and this
| is the most well put and complete explanation I have seen.
| scns wrote:
| One crazy thing about Toxoplasmosis: Humans infected get less
| inhibited.
|
| More often busted for breaking the speed limit.
|
| More often founding a company.
| pcdoodle wrote:
| This should be some interesting discussion since parasites are
| kind of the hackers of the biological world.
| randcraw wrote:
| I thought that honor belonged to viruses.
| pydry wrote:
| I've often thought that the economics profession could do with
| more cross pollination with biology. Modeling the economy as a
| living ecosystem with, for example, a network of parasites and
| symbiotes would be more illuminating than the default
| neoclassical mode that almost treats it like a sanitized gaseous
| system where you turn a dial labeled "interest rates".
|
| I'm pretty sure there's a lot of conceptual overlap between
| parasitic/symbiotic organisms and economic relationships, too.
| E.g. I'm pretty sure this kind of thing happens all the time in
| scamming ecosystems:
|
| >Often, in an effort to travel between host animals, parasites
| will expose their hosts to new predators, like the tapeworm
| Ligula intestinalis, which grows so large it changes the buoyancy
| of the fish it inhabits, causing the fish to swim closer to the
| surface and get eaten by birds.
| bflesch wrote:
| great idea, why don't you follow it?
| 015UUZn8aEvW wrote:
| It is in fact a good idea, and it would probably generate a
| lot of insight. But it would be very politically dicey.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Sounds cool, if you can define economic "symbionts" and
| "parasites" in a rigorous way I'm sure it would make an
| interesting blog post.
| bedobi wrote:
| I don't disagree with you but economists are well aware of
| economical parasitism. (rent seeking, negative exernalities,
| game theory etc etc)
|
| The whole point of the field of economics is not as popularly
| believed to shill neoliberal, neoclassical free markets, it's
| kind of the opposite - to study all the ways in which economics
| models (and markets in general) fail (both in the abstract and
| in the real world) and how to fix that. (and the solutions have
| been known for decades at this point, but policymakers don't
| implement them)
| graphe wrote:
| It has been, it's a field called sociology.
| https://youtu.be/exPOPm8qQsY luhmann has something in it called
| systems theory.
| fipar wrote:
| This is an excellent book for anyone that finds this subject
| interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_Rex
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Second this recommendation! Great book, lots to learn in it.
| gtmitchell wrote:
| I immediately Ctrl-F'd for 'funding'. There's your problem right
| there. If there's no money to support graduate students, you're
| never going to get enough researchers to replace the ones you
| have.
|
| Additionally, graduate students tend to avoid selecting research
| areas they dislike or find disgusting. The most disturbing
| presentation I've ever watched was a slideshow given by a
| parasitologist in which I saw worms in parts of the human body I
| never imagined it possible for worms to be in. No wonder students
| aren't lining up to spend years of their life working with them.
| nemo44x wrote:
| The best way to get funding is for your idea to either have
| economic potential or to be politically useful. Both of those
| outcomes generate power. Ideas that don't generate power go to
| the back of the line when it comes to funding.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The most disturbing presentation I've ever watched was a
| slideshow given by a parasitologist in which I saw worms in
| parts of the human body I never imagined it possible for worms
| to be in.
|
| I read an essay once by someone who intentionally incubated
| some kind of fly in himself, and wrote that, after all the
| effort of being infected and incubating the fly, it chose to
| emerge while he was at a baseball game, where, he lamented, it
| was immediately killed by horrified fans over his protests.
|
| The fans were clearly in the right.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| During the most disturbing* presentation I ever watched, the
| simultaneous translation went dead for a good 15-20 seconds; I
| assumed the translators had muted their mikes to cover the dry
| heaves?
|
| * one could always spot the reconstructive surgeons at these
| conferences; they were the ones who could wander around the
| poster session, all while calmly nibbling away at their hors
| d'oeuvres.
| rng-concern wrote:
| I remember listening to the radio (I believe on cbc canada), and
| one issue of studying any living thing is, whether your
| animal/creature of choice is in vogue currently or not. People
| below have mentioned funding which ties into that, but, if you're
| studying birds it's a lot easier to publish, there's more of an
| ecosystem and conferences, etc... than if you were to study some
| insect that nobody has heard of. Even within existing conferences
| you might not get "top-billing", even if you're presenting.
|
| Pity as the things nobody has ever heard of are probably the most
| interesting.
|
| I wish I remembered more details so could link something.
| mc_maurer wrote:
| It's a pretty widely known thing that studying charismatic
| megafauna gets you lots of money. However, they're also
| generally WAY more of a pain to study. Fewer individuals,
| larger home ranges, expensive permits, etc. A good friend
| studies basking sharks and the shark research world is insanely
| competitive, full of crazy type A folks. Compared to the insect
| ecology world (where I come from), which is full of pretty
| chill stoners and weirdos.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| My takeaway is that to be an ecological researcher one must
| be crazy, weird, or stoned :)
| mc_maurer wrote:
| Plenty of variability within that subset though! Lots of
| stereotypes based on your study system lol
| solardev wrote:
| "Or"? ;)
| humanfromearth9 wrote:
| Logical or is the default or, which allows for either
| one, either other, or one _and_ other
| fuzztester wrote:
| 3 bi-di logical implications (between those 3 adjectives)
| is the right thing here ;)
| Biganon wrote:
| I wonder if the group studying an animal slowly evolves to
| resemble this animal
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Generally research follows funding, not intellectual curiousity.
| So the single-celled eukaryotic malaria parasite is pretty well-
| studied. This also highlights the often arbitrary nature of
| division of labor in academics - all viruses and many eubacteria
| could reasonably be classified as parasites, but are instead
| handed off to virology and infectious microbiology (which tends
| to exclude parasitic eukaryota, even single-celled protists, from
| its domain).
|
| Out in nature, things get more complicated - there are many
| reports of viruses infecting parasites which in turn infect
| animals, for example.
|
| https://schaechter.asmblog.org/schaechter/2011/07/viruses-th...
| hammock wrote:
| Isn't there a lot of parasitic research at DARPA facilities, for
| example Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever?
| harry_ord wrote:
| I think Lyme disease is caused by a bacteria rather than
| parasite (I always assumed the two are different)
| hammock wrote:
| Yeah, maybe ticks are the parasite in that scenario
| pvaldes wrote:
| I understand that the question here is why nobody studies
| parasite biodiversity.
|
| Well, this is a false claim. Sort of. Nobody notices or nobody
| cares about this researchers, is not the same as nobody
| studies.
| ekidd wrote:
| The book _Parasite Rex_ (2001) by Carl Zimmer is fantastic, and
| it inspired quite a few researchers to go into the study of
| parasites: https://www.amazon.com/Parasite-Rex-Bizarre-Dangerous-
| Creatu...
|
| The book manages to be gross and fascinating and occasionally
| beautiful.
|
| Given the age, I'm sure some of the science is outdated, perhaps
| even by people who grew up reading the book. But it remains one
| of my favorites, and it's an accessible read. If not always a
| comfortable one!
| scientator wrote:
| The tradition in parasitology of self-experimentation --
| swallowing unknown larvae to see what they do to your body --
| perhaps might deter new recruits from entering the field.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Perhaps because we have probably already discovered pretty much
| every parasite that infects humans, at least those with
| widespread impact in the western world?
|
| Parasites tend to be multicellular and relatively large (you can
| see them all with an optical microscope), and therefore hard to
| miss.
|
| On the other hand, there are plenty of bacteria and viruses that
| are out there still to be discovered, many of which directly
| impact humans.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Perhaps because we have probably already discovered pretty
| much every parasite that infects humans, at least those with
| widespread impact in the western world?
|
| The thing is, discovering them is not enough, not by far. We
| know how to avoid a few of them - say, by washing hands,
| regulatory agencies requiring meat be controlled for parasites
| (in Germany and possibly EU, against trichinella [1]), or by
| heavily suggesting pregnant people not handle cat litter (to
| prevent toxoplasmosis). We know how to treat a few of them
| (mostly worms).
|
| But we don't know how to treat a lot of them, for some of them
| (particularly in the veterinarian world) we're dealing with
| resistency developing. And a few of them remain utterly and
| completely deadly (Naegleria fowleri).
|
| The problem is, as always, a lack of funding. No one wants to
| spend much money on parasitology (as you said: we know about
| most of them), and since most parasitic infections are rare in
| Western countries that have the money, there is not much money
| for treatment R&D - no matter how many people die each year
| worldwide (400k for worms, 600k for malaria alone).
|
| [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinenuntersuchung
| nine_k wrote:
| Malaria in particular is a target of constant attention.
| Latest breeds of generically modified mosquitoes are unable
| to carry the disease [1] or that turn the carried mosquito
| populations infertile [2]. I'd say that malaria will be
| eradicated in 30-50 years. Hopefully, Guinea worm will be
| eradicated, too [3].
|
| Neither malaria nor Guinea worm affect "Western" (rich,
| industrial) countries directly, but people from these
| countries most actively work on the eradication, chiefly
| financed by charitable funds.
|
| [1]: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/239931/mosquitoes-that-
| cant-...
|
| [2]: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18974
|
| [3]:
| https://www.cartercenter.org/health/guinea_worm/index.html
| markovs_gun wrote:
| Is that true that most parasites are multicellular? My
| intuition would suggest that single celled parasites would be
| more numerous, even if they are less clinically significant.
| Malaria is one of the most significant diseases in the world
| and it's caused by a single celled parasite, for example.
| hello_computer wrote:
| We can acknowledge the effects on rat sexual arousal, but to
| extend this research into human behavior is just asking to get
| your funding cut and be excommunicated.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro1687
| fsckboy wrote:
| FTA:
|
| > _Why do so few researchers study them?_
|
| > _In the fall of 1985, Scott L. Gardner found himself standing
| over his toilet bowl, fishing around in the squishy output of his
| empty bowels with a chopstick._
|
| fsckboy's law of headlines: If the headline asks a question,
| check if the first sentence has your answer
|
| > _...Gardner was prescribed an antiparasitic pill, and the next
| morning, he pooped out his intestines' inhabitant--all 12 inches
| of it._
|
| irl, my brother got a parasite once, a tapeworm. This was all
| without leaving an upscale suburb of Boston. Only "noticed" it
| when he, a well-built vigorous athlete, lost a lot of weight out
| of the blue. It was eating his lunch, so to speak.
| kardos wrote:
| > It was eating his lunch, so to speak
|
| How does that work. A tapeworm is pretty small relative to your
| brother (eg by mass), one would think it's caloric needs are
| similarly small and it would just use a small fraction of his
| food. Can a tapeworm really consume a significant fraction of
| an adult's food?
| fsckboy wrote:
| there are different types of tapeworms that infect different
| hosts. cattle tapeworms can grow to 12 feet and much more. It
| doesn't take much googling to find claims of 100 feet.
|
| google "tapeworm symptom loss of weight" and you will get the
| recommendation "time to see a doctor"
| gwern wrote:
| So the explanation would be that growing is just very
| metabolically expensive and _that_ is where the deficit
| goes to?
| fsckboy wrote:
| I'm no expert on invertebrate metabolism, but it does not
| need to be more expensive than host metabolism, it's
| simply a redivision of the pizza-pie with more slices
| going to the growing worm, and fewer slices for the host.
| fsckboy wrote:
| I thought of a refinement to my previous: tapeworms
| attach themselves to the host intestinal wall only to
| secure themselves; however, they feed directly from the
| food in the digestive tract; they do not "suck nutrients"
| from the host's bloodstream.
| Aurornis wrote:
| That's part of it, but intestinal parasites also
| interfere with normal digestive processes. Their presence
| and secretions (waste products and the compounds they use
| to prevent being digested) can cause a lot of problems.
| It's common for people with intestinal parasites to have
| reduced appetite, intestinal inflammation, and digestion
| issues.
|
| The weight loss isn't just a result of the parasite
| competing for nutrients, though that doesn't help.
| derf_ wrote:
| At the Meguro Parasitological Museum [1], they have an 8
| meter long tapeworm [2] extracted from a human. Yes, that is
| an extreme example and still less mass than a person, but
| they _can_ get large.
|
| [1] https://www.kiseichu.org/e-top
|
| [2] Visible in the tall blue case here: https://static.wixsta
| tic.com/media/079dcd_843c7597ef244423aa...
| pvaldes wrote:
| Apart of eating your food directly, anything that can make
| you bleed internally can cause anemia.
| randcraw wrote:
| There's not much profit in treating parasites, and profit funds
| research. Like bacterial infection (before the rise of resistant
| bugs), you treat a parasite with a few doses and you're done. No
| more disease means no more revenue. So unless a really large
| fraction of the high income world gets a parasite, or the
| parasitism is chronically incurable, there's too little financial
| reward to justify studying or treating it.
| bordercases wrote:
| If parasites were widespread amongst human beings, would those
| infected humans have incentive to study them?
|
| We are likely biased and can't imagine how we are biased because
| of the infection! Yet the over-under for an individual is clear:
| try the medication and find out!
| dsign wrote:
| >> would those infected humans have incentive to study them?
|
| Plenty of diseases get us and most of us don't have an
| incentive to study what we know is statistically likely to kill
| us :<< . Which I think is a shame.
| pvaldes wrote:
| The amount of grants that you receive in modern zoology is
| directly proportional to the sweetness in your discourse, the
| size of the eyes and the density of the fur in your subject
|
| > Housed in a few modest rooms adjacent to a botanical collection
| and the floor's only bathroom, the laboratory is the world's
| largest university collection of parasites.
|
| > the Manter Lab only receives enough funding to employ the two
| men
|
| This explains why perfectly. Researchers that choose this live
| basically in poverty, so why would you to encourage your son to
| follow that career?.
|
| This and the two billions of videos of cats on internet that
| everybody consumes actively all the time. Try to earn sympathy
| and views with a samba dancing flatworm compilation instead. It
| only works one or none times.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| Maybe we could try a hybrid pitch? "We need to protect these
| cute, furry little dudes...from parasites. Giv money pls."
| morninglight wrote:
| TWiP: This Week in Parasitism A podcast about the tiny creatures
| that live on and inside us. New episodes the 1st and 3rd Friday
| of each month.
|
| https://www.microbe.tv/twip
| hinkley wrote:
| Someone did a book like the Secret Life of Trees but just for
| Oaks. There are a thousand critters and microbes adapted to oak
| habitation and/or parasitizing.
|
| The tannins in oak are an arms race to slow many of them down. As
| is the thick epidermis on mature leaves. And then there are the
| adaptations to prioritize roots over leaves when young, which
| both helps them tap into the wood wide web but also I suspect
| helps them deal with deer. Stay small until you can get tall and
| then jump out of reach as fast as you can.
| gumby wrote:
| I recommend the funny and gross book, "New Guinea Tapeworms and
| Jewish Grandmothers: Tales of Parasites and People" by Robert S.
| Desowitz. Basically a bunch of horrible parasite diseases, some
| with a bit of detective story to figure out.
| blueprint wrote:
| because they're oh so disturbing
|
| the same reason why so many other disturbing things go unstudied
|
| like certain risks to our survival, for example
|
| i think it's a vuln humans have
| eigenrick wrote:
| >Why do so few researchers study them?
|
| Because they're the ones funding medical research! nyuk nyuk!
|
| Seriously though, as a health nut who tries to stay on the
| science side of things, I still see a lot of "It's Parasites!"
| stuff from the pseudo-science health community. As well as
| bizarre cures. Walnuts, Cloves and electric shock seem to come up
| the most.
|
| I have tried to find any practical advice regarding detection,
| symptoms and such, and beyond tapeworms, heartworms and
| hookworms, there isn't much information.
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