rude awakening
Incubus
if you ever judge a colony of ants or a den of cockroaches or a hive of
bees as inferior to you. If you think you would survive with the wild as the
wild after all our domestication. then read this Essay
http://www.apodion.com/vad/tani/worms.shtml it says it all. A well written
essay on the superiority of nature.
Enjoy.. I did
MsCirce
is really deep. I'm still getting thru all of her articles,it will take
awhile but they are damn well worth it.I also liked "All Things" did you
happen to read that one yet? If not it is a must read too.
"Incubus" <tes...@testing.net> wrote in message
news:vK3L5.28397$h%4.20...@news2-win.server.ntlworld.com...
Incubus
not tired. I did glance at it. which was why i saved the url. Sorry i left
you suddenly. my ISP is a petty wanker
"MsCirce" <MsC...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:fQ3L5.1828$NY2....@cletus.bright.net...
MsCirce
Incubus
visulaisation then we may not be so screwed.. but sadly we do not
Ezekiel J. Krahlin
wrote:
>if you ever judge a colony of ants or a den of cockroaches or a hive of
>bees as inferior to you. If you think you would survive with the wild as the
>wild after all our domestication. then read this Essay
I just read it, about "worm intelligence"; what a wonderful essay, so
astute and concise. I do believe that all animals are equally
intelligent to us, if not more so. I don't believe the "brain" is the
seat of intelligence; it's the "soul" or "mind" that is...which cannot
be encased in any material container, such as the brain...thus *size
of one's brain can be no measure of intelligence.
I believe that, since we humans are the newest creatures on earth,
that we are also the dumbest. The animal kingdom (or for that matter,
the plant kingdom as well) is lovingly and patiently bearing all our
foibles until the day comes when we evolve to the level where we can
be welcome into the rest of Mother Earth's Great Family.
In a nutshell: all of life (as well as non-life) is created from Pure
Intelligence. We must learn to revere everything in that light.
The word "animal" comes from the Latin "anima" and "animus", meaning
"soul". So Satan tells me. :o)
---
LAVENDER VELVET REVOLUTION!
Disgusted with our choices for next President?
Write me in: Ezekiel J. Krahlin, gay activist,
homeless and civil rights advocate. To make
an informed decision about me, peruse my website:
http://surf.to/gaybible
Faust
SVsite
I'm glad you like the article on Worms. But THIS, this following, blew
my mind.
DISCOVER Vol. 21 No. 8 (August 2000)
Do Parasites Rule the World?
New evidence indicates our idea of how nature really works could be
wrong By Carl Zimmer
On a clear summer day on the California coast, the carpinteria salt
marsh vibrates with life. Along the banks of the 120-acre preserve, 80
miles northwest of Los Angeles, thousands of horn snails, their conical
shells looking like miniature party hats, graze the algae. Arrow gobies
slip through the water, while killifish dart around, every now and then
turning to expose the brilliant glint of their bellies. Fiddler crabs
slowly crawl out of fist-size holes and salute the new day with their
giant claws, while their bigger cousins—lined-shore crabs— crack open
snails as if they were walnuts. Meanwhile, a carnival of birds— Caspian
terns, willet, plover, yellowleg sandpipers, curlews, and dowitchers—
feast on littleneck clams and other prey burrowed in the marsh bottom.
Standing on a promontory, Kevin Lafferty, a marine biologist at the
University of California at Santa Barbara, watches the teeming scene
and sees another, more compelling drama. For him, the real drama of the
marsh lies beneath the surface in the life of its invisible
inhabitants: the parasites. A curlew grabs a clam from its hole. "Just
got infected," Lafferty says. He looks at the bank of snails. "More
than 40 percent of these snails are infected," he pronounces. "They're
really just parasites in disguise." (I.e., they LOOK like snails, but
they behave in accordance with, and for the benefit of the PARASITE.)
He points to the snowy constellation of bird droppings along the
bank. "There are boxcars of parasite biomass here; those are just
packages of fluke eggs."
Every living thing has at least one parasite that lives inside or on
it, and many, including humans, have far more. Leopard frogs may harbor
a dozen species of parasites, including nematodes in their ears,
filarial worms in their veins, and flukes in their kidneys, bladders,
and intestines. One species of Mexican parrot carries 30 different
species of mites on its feathers alone. Often the parasites themselves
have parasites, and some of those parasites have parasites of their
own. Scientists have no idea of the exact number of species of
parasites, but they do know one fact: Parasites make up the majority of
species on Earth. Parasites can take the form of animals, including
insects, flatworms, and crustaceans, as well as protozoa, fungi,
plants, and viruses and bacteria. By one estimate, parasites may
outnumber free-living species four to one. Indeed, the study of life
is, for the most part, parasitology.
Most of the past century's research on parasites has gone into trying
to fight the ones that cause devastating illness in humans, such as
malaria, AIDS, and tuberculosis. But otherwise, parasites have largely
been neglected. Scientists have treated them with indifference, even
contempt, viewing them as essentially hitchhikers on life's road. But
recent research reveals that parasites are remarkably sophisticated and
tenacious and may be as important to ecosystems as the predators at the
top of the food chain. Some castrate their hosts and take over their
minds. (!!!!!) (Read that LITERALLY, not as a metaphor.) Others
completely shut down the immune systems of their hosts. Some scientists
now think parasites have been a dominant force, perhaps the dominant
force, in the evolution of life. (How about connecting this to the Tree
of Destruction!!)
Note: consider also, the parasite would make the hosts DO things in
relation to others of the host's species! The implications are HUGE.
Sacculina carcini, a barnacle that morphs into plantlike roots, is not
the kind of organism that commands immediate respect. Indeed, at first
glance Sacculina appears to slide down the ladder of evolution during
its brief lifetime. Biologists are just beginning to realize that this
backward-looking creature is a powerhouse in disguise.
Sacculina starts life as a free-swimming larva. Through a microscope,
the tiny crustacean looks like a teardrop equipped with fluttering legs
and a pair of dark eyespots. Nineteenth-century biologists thought
Sacculina was a hermaphrodite, but in fact it comes in two sexes. The
female larva is the first to colonize its host, the crab. Sense organs
on the female Sacculina's legs catch the scent of a crab, and she
dances through the water until she lands on its armor. She crawls along
an arm as the crab twitches in irritation— or perhaps the crustacean
equivalent of panic— until she comes to a joint on the arm where the
hard exoskeleton bends at a soft chink. There she looks for the small
hairs that sprout out of the crab's arm, each anchored in its own hole.
She jabs a long hollow dagger through one of the holes, and through it
squirts a blob made up of a few cells. The injection, which takes only
a few seconds, is a variation on the molting that crustaceans and
insects go through in order to grow. For example, a cicada sitting in a
tree separates a thin outer husk from the rest of its body and then
pushes its way out of the shell, emerging with a new, soft exoskeleton
that stretches throughout the insect's growth spurt. In the case of the
female Sacculina, however, most of her body becomes the husk that is
left behind. The part that lives on looks less like a barnacle than
like a microscopic slug.
The slug plunges into the depth of the crab. In time it settles in the
crab's underside and grows, forming a bulge in its shell and sprouting
a set of rootlike tendrils, which spread throughout the crab's body,
even wrapping around its eyestalks. Covered with fine, fleshy fingers
much like the ones lining the human intestine, these roots draw in
nutrients dissolved in the crab's blood. Remarkably, this gross
invasion fails to trigger any immune response in the crab, which
continues to wander through the surf, eating clams and mussels.
Meanwhile, the female Sacculina continues to grow, and the bulge in the
crab's underside turns into a knob. As the crab scuttles around, the
knob's outer layer slowly chips away, revealing a portal. Sacculina
will remain at this stage for the rest of her life, unless a male larva
lands on the crab and finds the knob's pin-size opening. It's too small
for him to fit into, and so, like the female before him, he molts off
most of himself, injecting the vestige into the hole. This male cargo—
a spiny, reddish-brown torpedo 1/100,000 inch long— slips into a
pulsing, throbbing canal, which carries him deep into the female's
body. He casts off his spiny coat as he goes and in 10 hours ends up at
the bottom of the canal. There he fuses to the female's visceral sac
and begins making sperm. There are two of these wells in each female
Sacculina, and she typically carries two males with her for her entire
life. They endlessly fertilize her eggs, and every few weeks she
produces thousands of new Sacculina larvae.
Eventually, the crab begins to change into a new sort of creature, one
that exists to serve the parasite. (!!! yet consider, it still LOOKS
like a crab.) It can no longer do the things that would get in the way
of Sacculina's growth. It stops molting and growing, which would funnel
away energy from the parasite. Crabs can typically escape from
predators by severing a claw and regrowing it later on. Crabs carrying
Sacculina can lose a claw, but they can't grow a new one in its place.
And while other crabs mate and produce new generations, parasitized
crabs simply go on eating and eating. They have been spayed by the
parasite.
Despite having been castrated, the crab doesn't lose its urge to
nurture. It simply directs its affection toward the parasite. (Consider
this in HUMAN terms.) A healthy female crab carries her fertilized
eggs in a brood pouch on her underside, and as her eggs mature she
carefully grooms the pouch, scraping away algae and fungi. When the
crab larvae hatch and need to escape, their mother finds a high rock on
which to stand, then bobs up and down to release them from the pouch
into the ocean current, waving her claws to stir up more flow. The knob
that Sacculina forms sits exactly where the crab's brood pouch would
be, and the crab treats the parasite knob as such. She strokes it clean
as the larvae grow, and when they are ready to emerge she forces them
out in pulses, shooting out heavy clouds of parasites. As they spray
out from her body, she waves her claws to help them on their way. Male
crabs succumb to Sacculina's powers as well. Males normally develop a
narrow abdomen, but infected males grow abdomens as wide as those of
females, wide enough to accommodate a brood pouch or a Sacculina knob.
A male crab even acts as if he had a female's brood pouch, grooming it
as the parasite larvae grow and bobbing in the waves to release them.
(Males behave like females.)
Sacculina's adaptations reflect a relatively simple life cycle for a
parasite— it makes its way from one crab to another. But for many other
parasites, the game is more complicated—they must journey through a
series of animal species in order to survive and procreate. Such
parasites exert extraordinary control over their hosts, transforming
them into seemingly different creatures. They can change a host's looks
or scent to appeal to a predator. They can even alter its behavior to
force it into the next host's path. (Could it also change the
creature's behavior in a way where it would induce OTHERS of its own
species to succumb to the parasite? Yes.)
The mature lancet fluke, Dicrocoelium dendriticum, nestles in cows and
other grazers, which spread the fluke's eggs in their manure. Hungry
snails swallow the eggs, which hatch in their intestines. The immature
parasites drill through the wall of a snail's gut and settle in the
digestive gland. There the flukes produce offspring, which make their
way to the surface of the snail's body. The snail tries to defend
itself by walling the parasites off in balls of slime, which it then
coughs up and leaves behind in the grass.
Along comes an ant, which swallows a slime ball loaded with hundreds of
lancet flukes. The parasites slide down into the ant's gut and then
wander for a while through its body, eventually moving to the cluster
of nerves that control the ant's mandibles. Most of the lancet flukes
head back to the abdomen, where they form cysts, but one or two stay
behind in the ant's head.
There the flukes do some parasitic voodoo on their hosts. As the
evening approaches and the air cools, the ants find themselves drawn
away from their fellows on the ground and upward to the top of a blade
of grass. Clamped to the tip of the blade, the infected ant waits to be
devoured by a cow or some other grazer passing by. (It elicits what
we'd call thanatos behavior, self-destructive behavior!)
If the ant sits the whole night without being eaten and the sun rises,
the flukes let the ant loosen its grip on the grass. The ant scurries
back down to the ground and spends the day acting like a regular insect
again. If the host were to bake in the heat of the direct sun, the
parasites would die with it. When evening comes again, they send the
ant back up a blade of grass for another try. After the ant finally
tumbles into a cow's stomach, the flukes burst out and make their way
to the cow's liver, where they will live out their lives as adults.
As scientists discover more and more parasites and uncover the extent
and complexity of their machinations, they are fast coming to an
unsettling conclusion: Far from simply being along for the ride,
parasites may be one of nature's most powerful driving forces. At the
Carpinteria salt marsh, Kevin Lafferty has been exploring how parasites
may shape an entire region's ecology. In a series of exacting
experiments, he has found that a single species of fluke— Euhaplorchis
californiensis— journeys through three hosts and plays a critical role
in orchestrating the marsh's balance of nature.
Birds release the fluke's eggs in their droppings, which are eaten by
horn snails. The eggs hatch, and the resulting flukes castrate the
snail and produce offspring, which come swimming out of their host and
begin exploring the marsh for their next host, the California
killifish. Latching onto the fish's gills, the flukes work their way
through fine blood vessels to a nerve, which they crawl along to the
brain. They don't actually penetrate the killifish's brain but form a
thin carpet on top of it, looking like a layer of caviar. There the
parasites wait for the fish to be eaten by a shorebird. When the fish
reaches the bird's stomach, the flukes break out of the fish's head and
move into the bird's gut, stealing its food from within and sowing eggs
in its droppings to be spread into marshes and ponds.
In his research, Lafferty set out to answer one main question: Would
Carpinteria look the same if there were no flukes? He began by
examining the snail stage of the cycle. The relationship between fluke
and snail is not like the one between predator and prey. In a genetic
sense, infected snails are dead, because they can no longer reproduce.
(i.e., an animal that does not reproduce is genetically dead.) But
they live on, grazing on algae to feed the flukes inside them. That
puts them in direct competition with the marsh's uninfected snails.
To see how the contest plays out, Lafferty put healthy and fluke-
infested snails in separate mesh cages at sites around the marsh. "The
tops were open so the sun could shine through and algae could grow on
the bottom," says Lafferty. What he found was that the uninfected
snails grew faster, released far more eggs, and could thrive in far
more crowded conditions. The implication: In nature, the parasites were
competing so intensely that the healthy snails couldn't reproduce fast
enough to take full advantage of the salt marsh. In fact, if flukes
were absent from the marsh, the snail population would nearly double.
That explosion would ripple out through much of the salt marsh
ecosystem, thinning out the carpet of algae and making it easier for
the snails' predators, such as crabs, to thrive.
Lafferty then studied the killifish. Initially, he found little
evidence that flukes harmed or changed the fish they colonized; the
fish didn't even mount an immune response. But Lafferty was suspicious.
He figured that flukes sitting on the brain were in a good position to
be doing something. So he plucked 42 fish from the marsh, dumped them
into a 75-gallon aquarium in the lab, and gave his student Kimo Morris
the laborious task of watching them. Morris would pick out one fish and
stare at it for half an hour, recording every move it made. When he was
done, he'd scoop the fish out and dissect it to see whether its brain
was caked with parasites. Then he'd focus on another killifish.
What was hidden to the naked eye came leaping out of the data. As
killifish search for prey, they alternate between hovering and darting
around. But every now and then, Morris would spot a fish shimmying,
jerking, flashing its belly as it swam on one side, or darting close to
the surface— all risky things for a fish to do if a bird is scanning
the water. It turns out that fish with parasites were four times more
likely to shimmy, jerk, flash, and surface than their healthy
counterparts.
Lafferty and Morris followed up with a marsh experiment in which they
set up two pens, each filled with 53 uninfected killifish and 95
infected fish. To distinguish between the two groups, the researchers
clipped the left pectoral fin of the healthy fish and the right fin of
the parasitized ones. One pen was covered with netting to protect it
from birds; the other was left open so birds could easily wade or land
inside. After two days, a great egret waded into the open pen. It
stepped slowly into the muddy water and struck it a few times, the last
time bringing up a killifish. After birds had visited the pen for three
weeks, Lafferty and Morris added up how many fish were alive. (The
covered pen acted as a control for the researchers to see how many fish
died of natural causes.) The results were startling: The birds were 30
times more likely to feast on one of the flailing, parasitized fish
than on a healthy fish.
Predators are often very careful about the prey they eat, avoiding
poisonous insects and frogs, for example. So why would birds pick so
many fish that are guaranteed to pass on an energy-sucking intestinal
parasite? The flukes do drain a bit of energy from the birds. But that
is more than offset by the benefit they provide: They make finding food
very easy for the birds.
Scientists have been stunned by the implications of these findings.
Note: YEAH, ME TOO! HUMANS with parasites? HUMANS that use the
digestive canal (mouth OR anus) for sexual pleasure and obsess over
that? They desire far MORE sex of that nature than do "normals" or
mating male/female types. Maybe it has nothing to do with kundalini
or mental aberrational fetishes. That's only what HUMANS conclude by
seeing other HUMANS doing strange shit. But: What's in the digestive
tract? LOTS of parasites, bacteria, etc. This is a non-mating act
that is DESIRED over and above the mating act: but WHO is doing the
desireing? The human? Or something else? What OTHER behaviors?
Religiousity - Borna virus? Self-destructive stuff?
The birds that frequent coastal wetlands depend on fish for much of
their diet. Without parasites throwing prey their way, the birds of
Carpinteria might have to put far more time and effort into eating and
might reproduce at a lower rate. "Could we have so many birds out there
if it were 30 times harder for them to get their food?" asks marine
biologist Armand Kuris, also of the University of California at Santa
Barbara. "Parasites don't just modify individual behavior, they're
really powerful— they may be running a large part of the waterbird
ecology."
The fluke that Lafferty studied is but one parasite, living in one salt
marsh. There are a dozen other species of fluke that live in the snails
of Carpinteria and other parasites that dwell in other animals of the
marsh. Every ecosystem on Earth is just as rife with parasites that can
exert extraordinary control over their hosts, riddling them with
disease, castrating them, or transforming their natural behavior.
Note: repeat this: They can exert extraordinary control over their
hosts, riddling them with disease, castrating them, or transforming
their NATURAL behavior.
Scientists like Lafferty are only just beginning to discover exactly
how powerful these hidden inhabitants can be, but their research is
pointing to a remarkable possibility: Parasites may rule the world.
Note: read my story online: "PRIMOGEN." Sci Fi story that scared
everyone who read it.
The notion that tiny creatures we've largely taken for granted are such
a dominant force is immensely disturbing. Even after Copernicus took
Earth out of the center of the universe and Darwin took humans out of
the center of the living world, we still go through life pretending
that we are exalted above other animals. Yet we know that we, too, are
collections of cells that work together, kept harmonized by chemical
signals. If an organism can control those signals— an organism like a
parasite— then it can control us. And therein lies the peculiar and
precise horror of parasites.
End article
That's a WOW!
In article <vK3L5.28397$h%4.20...@news2-win.server.ntlworld.com>,
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SLAVA NAM! SLAVA SATANYE! SLAVA CHYERNOMU PLAMYENI!
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Before you buy.
GUlLLOTlNA
>Satan appeared to you too? Man your house is a happening place!>>
ROFL! It's elbow-room-only for the dieties over at Zeke's place. Who hasn't put
in an appearance over there?! Odin has visited him, as well as Christ, Satan,
the entire Greek pantheon, Loki, the Virgin Mary, the Elves from Elfquest,
Hitler, (so these last arn't deities, I know, I know...), some Hobbits,
Gandalf, Matrona the Moon, Lug the Sun, the Great Spirit, Vishnu, Kali, and who
knows *who* else.
There must be a time-limit on the sofa, so everyone gets a chance to sit down.
I hope Zeke doesn't sic the cops on me for my homophobic post. An awesome
threat!
Still laughing:
L.
Incubus
certain instinctive intelligence in us all. note the worms in the essay or a
colony of ants, they have a very well organised order or the new born chick
that instinctively knows that food goes into its mouth
"Ezekiel J. Krahlin" <ezek...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:39fceb3c...@news.cis.dfn.de...