Ok, this didn’t start out being about parasites.
It started out with my fixation on two art pieces that cbullitt got me interested in.
1) An angelic eco-tard freezing in the arctic wastes (believe me, it’d have some artistic value/merit, even as bad as it sounds)
2) Hungry Bear ™ TV Dinners – Eco-tard in a parka, iced seal-sushi, and hockey-stick pudding
But as I was searching for inspiration I ran across an article on parasites, which (and cbullitt will laugh at this) I thought of him. No, he’s not a parasite, but it is funny to say it sarcastically. He’s actually my muse. My twisted and psychotic muse.
I must continually fight the temptation to sidetrack. Running around on the internet will take one down many winding and otherwise hidden paths. One such path was the blog of a ocean-biology writer’s blog. And there I learned about a certain barnacle. Two words…
Damn. DAMN.
I mean, this is enough to make your testes shrivel up and fall off.
Parasites are nasty things. (Discover magazine)
D-d-d-d-d-DAMN.
Okay, that Discover link will have to be perused at length. Just glancing, I can tell it is full of “eewwww… not right.”
It’s disturbing and really cool at the same time.
Really seems too fantastical to be wholly by chance if’n you get my drift. I can’t imagine WHY you’d come up with a barnacle that injects itself into another critter just so’s it could make the other critter help you raise your young, but there should be a reason, in my mind.
Like mosquitoes. There should be a reason.
I love that neanderthal, reptilian, old part of the brain that first asks, can I eat that?
Isn’t that just the best?
Very few critters that, when they are first discovered, there isn’t some part of me that wonders how best to prepare one.
Glad to say I don’t think that of most animals, parasitic or not. The thought of food doesn’t make a blip in my radar when confronted with a new species of fill-in-the-blank
Though the thought of a parasite injecting itself into my psyche to the point that I take care of her young….oh, wait, aren’t those welfare queens???