Parasite Rex

The life of parasites is amazing. Listen to This American Life with Carl Zimmer to hear how a certain parasite will be eaten by a snail, which is then induced to puke it up. Snail vomit is especially attractive to ants, so now the parasite is in the ant... but where it really wants to be is in the stomach of a sheep. So how does it get there? That's easy, create an uncontrollable urge in the ant to climb a blade of grass where it will be eaten by the sheep.

A parasite that wants to be in a cat, is first eaten by a rat. The parasite then controls the rat's brain, causing it to loose all sense of danger when it smells a cat. I think you can figure out the rest.

Or hear about a parasite that eats the tongue of a fish, then turns around to act as the tongue. The fish can still function, because it has an artificial tongue, and the parasite benefits from the fishes hunting skills.

Amazing. I have put the book, Parasite Rex on my "to read if it is cheap or at the library" list.

And to think that some people believe it is possible to predict the environmental impact of our actions in such a complex system.

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Over the weekend I went out on a Kayak trip with the Karlskrona Kayak club to watch a seal colony living nearby in the Baltic Sea. At first they kept their distance, but after a while they were swimming along with our kayaks, popping their heads up every once in a while just a few feet from our boat. I think they were more curious than we were.

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In an attempt to make this as boring as possible for the reader, I have to tell you about how I searched for 15 minutes today at the supermarket for unsalted sunflower seeds. I could only find a huge (yet cheap) bag in the bird-seed section. They taste better than the seeds they make for humans. I'm a little afraid that there might be less stringent health regulations for bird food than there is for human food, but on the other hand, the human food we usually eat is full of so many dangerous chemicals and poisons that I guess there can not be much difference.

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I have been annoying my classmates for two months now with my constant photo-taking. I guess I might as well annoy them more by posting their photos online for the world to see. See also this collection of photos from my birthday party on Oct 1. (it also happened to be Nigeria's independence day)

To be fair of course, I posted a few photos of myself above as well.