Guest Science Blogger: The Parasitic Nematode

We are the parasitic nematode. We are small worms, but also so much more. Four out of five of us here on earth are nematodes. We are EVERYWHERE: in pastures, dunes, beneath the ocean floor, on cutlery, iPods, in Emma Bunting’s eyes. Where there's organic material, we are present in an abundance you can scarcely imagine, even with your complicated brains and “female’s intuition”. A handful of dirt contains at least 50 different species of nematodes, yet we never feel crowded.

“If all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable,” your nematologist Nathan Augustus Cobb wrote in 1914, “and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes and oceans represented by a film of nematodes. The location of towns would be decipherable, since for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes." To which his wife replied, “I am leaving you, Nathan, and I shan’t be back.” We know. We were there. We have always been there. We see what you do … in the night.

Anyway. The way you have chosen to spread your genetic material is strange, but it is nothing compared to what we have come up with. Behold.

Our mermithid nematode has a particular problem. Mayfly nymphs eat their eggs and then carry them until their deaths. When the nematode infects a female fly it waits until the fly returns to the water, then bursts out of her guts, a la John Hurt in Alien. But what if they’re eaten by a male? How do they get out? Well, the mermithid simply turns the males into females, a la Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society.

When the ant cephalotes atratus is infected with a parasitic nematode, its normally black abdomen becomes red and swollen, resembling the many red berries in the tropical forest canopy, thereby attracting the birds that normally feed on the berries, thereby distributing our eggs high and wide across the land, thereby blowing your freakin’ mind.

Now, most human people fall into two groups: those who believe that our curious behaviour came about through countless billions of micro-adaptations to our DNA over the ages, and others who believe that we could not possibly have come about through natural changes, that we could only have been intentionally designed. These people will describe at length how a magical sky-wizard created the earth in a ballistic seven day freakout, and then said, “You know what this place really needs? An organism that distributes its eggs by making ants’ arses glow red,” before taking another long draw on his skull-shaped, Jupiter-sized, cosmic love-bong.

Myself, I have no idea.

Now bow to us!

Find out more about the wonderful world of parasites here.