Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. And
Speaker 1: in this episode, we're talking about the a little book series,
Speaker 1: a little TV show, a little franchise known as The Strain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is something that Giermo del Toro originally came
Speaker 1: out with as a series of novels with Chuck Hogan. Uh,
Speaker 1: and it is primarily you know, we're gonna try not
Speaker 1: to spoil this story for anybody during this episode. It's
Speaker 1: primarily about vampires, but they have a very particular kind
Speaker 1: of biology that's unique to this story. So what we
Speaker 1: were thinking was that we could take a look at
Speaker 1: that and how it relates to the biology of actual
Speaker 1: parasites and vampire like creatures in nature. Yeah, it's kind
Speaker 1: of in the same vein with some past episodes we've
Speaker 1: done with Monster of the Week blog series, Monster Science
Speaker 1: video series, that sort of thing. And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I know some of you out there I love The Strain.
Speaker 1: Some of you out there may hate The Strain, and
Speaker 1: a number of you have no idea what we're talking about.
Speaker 1: Perhaps you end up checking some of it out because
Speaker 1: of this episode. But but we're gonna use the show.
Speaker 1: We're gonna use the books, which you've read, but I
Speaker 1: have not. I have. Yeah, I've read the books, and
Speaker 1: I've read the comics, and I've watched the first season, okay,
Speaker 1: and I've watched the first and second season up until
Speaker 1: like this right where yeah, where it's that now? So
Speaker 1: we're not gonna we're not gonna get into spoilers related
Speaker 1: what happens to characters in the book or on the
Speaker 1: TV show. We are going to discuss the biology of
Speaker 1: the fictional creature so as to discuss real world comparisons.
Speaker 1: But but that's about it. So if you want, like
Speaker 1: if you want to enter into the show just on
Speaker 1: purist unspoiled, then I guess you should skip this episode
Speaker 1: and come back to it later. But but for the
Speaker 1: most part, you don't have to worry. Yeah, So for
Speaker 1: the most part, what we're gonna do is stick to
Speaker 1: the biology of these things. And I think I could
Speaker 1: place to start is with Del Toro himself. So if
Speaker 1: you're not familiar with his movies, Del Toro is I
Speaker 1: think it's fair to call him a horror mastermind. Or
Speaker 1: at least he's considered one. He's done movies about vampires before,
Speaker 1: He's done of fantasy kind of fairytale movies, movies about demons.
Speaker 1: He's very into the gothic horror supernatural genre. Uh, he's
Speaker 1: has he done. He's also done some stuff that isn't supernatural, though, right,
Speaker 1: I feel like has he I don't know that he has.
Speaker 1: I feel like like even his you know, he has
Speaker 1: these two types of films. He has the more personal,
Speaker 1: artsy films and then the bigger budget stuff. But they
Speaker 1: all seem to have monsters in them. Maybe he has
Speaker 1: a monster free um film out there. I am totally
Speaker 1: forgetting it. Yeah, I am too. Maybe maybe I'm I'm
Speaker 1: wrong on this, but yeah. So the first two vampire
Speaker 1: movies that he worked on, though, the first one was Chronos,
Speaker 1: which is what like twenty years old at this point,
Speaker 1: the first future film, yeah uh, and then he also
Speaker 1: directed the classic Blade, to which I love. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: a fan as well. And uh, there is a particular
Speaker 1: kind of vampire and both of these that sort of
Speaker 1: we can look back to as the you know, uh
Speaker 1: vampire for Del Toro's Vampires in the Strain before we
Speaker 1: get into that. I think it's really interesting. There's a
Speaker 1: quote by him where he talks about why he was
Speaker 1: interested in creating the show in the first place, and
Speaker 1: he said that since he was a little kid, he's
Speaker 1: always kept a notebook full of ideas about vampire mutations, biology, sociology,
Speaker 1: and mythology. So this is just something he's been thinking
Speaker 1: about since he was a child. He knows, you know,
Speaker 1: he put he put some of it in Chronos, he
Speaker 1: put some of it in Blade, But he really wanted
Speaker 1: the strain to be like his his opus on vampires. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he and you and you really get that from these properties,
Speaker 1: you know, like, well, whatever failings there might be regarding
Speaker 1: you know, the main characters in this or that, or
Speaker 1: or the you know, the plot or the narrative, you
Speaker 1: can't thought the monsters because the man, the man loves
Speaker 1: his monsters. And it's it's it's clear the amount of
Speaker 1: work he puts into it, the people that he brings
Speaker 1: into design, like he's always bringing in such a fantastic
Speaker 1: team of artists, And I understand he sets up when
Speaker 1: when he's developing any of these properties, he sets up
Speaker 1: in the middle of the art department, like it's not
Speaker 1: another room. He's there in the middle of its saying
Speaker 1: that's great. That's I believe. That's his background is that
Speaker 1: he worked in television, I want to say, in Spanish
Speaker 1: language television as like an art director before he started
Speaker 1: directing and writing himself. But yeah, have you ever looked
Speaker 1: at um there? They may even have published a version
Speaker 1: of this of his notebooks there fascinating, Like each each
Speaker 1: project he works on, he just fills a notebook with
Speaker 1: drawings and little writings and scribblings. And he's an amazing
Speaker 1: artist as well, so you get to see kind of
Speaker 1: his ideas for how these things flesh out, literally flesh out,
Speaker 1: because these really into them. Yes, but I mean it
Speaker 1: seems like there's always a monster autopsy scene and any
Speaker 1: film he does which is which is perfect, absolutely, and
Speaker 1: he is seriously got an obsession with jaws and mandibles
Speaker 1: and tongues like pretty much everything. I remember watching Pacific
Speaker 1: rim which is what that's the last major feature that
Speaker 1: he came out with. And yeah, and even the giant
Speaker 1: monsters in that that the Kaiju had these like mandibles
Speaker 1: that separated off of their face and these huge tongues
Speaker 1: that shot out. He's he's really into that. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: but I believe most of his recent films he's brought in.
Speaker 1: Wayne Barlow is one of the artists. Is of course
Speaker 1: his work designing alien physiologies and demonic physiologies all based
Speaker 1: on a background that he and his parents had in
Speaker 1: uh in in in Natural World Illustrations. This is Wayne Barlow. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But Wayne Barlow's work is just so I mean, you
Speaker 1: believe and he designed that he gives you it feels
Speaker 1: like a real, actually creature that you've just never witnessed before. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So his his team that he works with, that he's
Speaker 1: kind of he's assembled this like a team over the
Speaker 1: years of working on project. But Wayne Barlow is a mainstay. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then another guy who I'm a fan of his,
Speaker 1: Guy Davis, who is a comic book illustrator who's worked
Speaker 1: on stuff like the bpr D, his own book, The Marquee. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he did a really interesting one of his first
Speaker 1: comics was like a punk rock take on Sherlock Holmes
Speaker 1: if Sherlock Holmes was a woman in the seventies who
Speaker 1: was a punk rocker. It was fascinating. Uh. It's good stuff.
Speaker 1: But guy is also just an amazing concept artist, and
Speaker 1: so he's designed monsters as well along with that team
Speaker 1: with Wayne, and then looking at the research that we
Speaker 1: had for this episode, there were two guys in particular
Speaker 1: that seemed to work with them on the actual special
Speaker 1: effects and makeup. It was Steve Newberne and Sean Sansom,
Speaker 1: or the team on the at least the first season
Speaker 1: of The Strain, they were responsible for a lot of
Speaker 1: the practical special effects. Now just go back to Chronos
Speaker 1: and Blade Too for a second. Um. In Chronos, we
Speaker 1: saw Vamporism as this kind of hybrid of an you know,
Speaker 1: alchemical insect clockwork contraption that was pretty interesting, like it
Speaker 1: kind of pins to you, sinks its teeth in, and
Speaker 1: begins to transformation. Yeah. I had actually forgotten the main
Speaker 1: plot of that movie because it's been so long since
Speaker 1: I've seen it. So I reread the summary before we
Speaker 1: came into the studio, and it really immediately came back
Speaker 1: to me that what stuck with me was the aesthetic
Speaker 1: imagery of that clockwork bug thing, you know, piercing people
Speaker 1: more and and also the like sort of marble ish
Speaker 1: white translucent skin yeah of the vampire. Yeah, that that
Speaker 1: definitely stuck with me, and that's something he came back
Speaker 1: to Emblade too as well for the Elder Vampire, and
Speaker 1: that where you have this this ancient creature that is,
Speaker 1: you know, at once beautiful and ghastly that it's it's
Speaker 1: taken on this nos Ferato appearance, but it also has
Speaker 1: the look of like a marbled statue. So it's that
Speaker 1: kind of dichotomy that I feel like he captures really well.
Speaker 1: And yeah, there's he does a great job. You know,
Speaker 1: this is pop culture talking about science talk, but he
Speaker 1: does a great job of honoring the sort of lineage
Speaker 1: of vampire stories and incorporating aspects of notes ferra To
Speaker 1: or Dracula into these things, but also putting his own
Speaker 1: spin on it by adding weird science, I guess is
Speaker 1: the best way to put it. Yes. Yes, the reapers
Speaker 1: in Blade two, which is like bad new Strain of Vampires,
Speaker 1: they are even closer to what we see in the strain. Uh.
Speaker 1: They have these cool mandible jaws that opened like the jaw,
Speaker 1: though the lower jaw splits down the middle and becomes mandibles,
Speaker 1: and then there's a probiscus type tongue that comes out
Speaker 1: to pump out blood and My favorite bit, which I
Speaker 1: think I mentioned in the Stigmata episode is that they
Speaker 1: have hardened bone plating front and back, so the only
Speaker 1: way to stab him in the heart is to go
Speaker 1: into the side. Yeah, like under the armpit, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: where where you get into this into the course of
Speaker 1: the Catholic imagery that del Toro is really into as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, I think it's important to note to this
Speaker 1: is also part of the strain in a number of
Speaker 1: his uh designs, I suppose, but there's definitely a vagina
Speaker 1: dentata theme going on with his vampire monsters, and that
Speaker 1: like their monster mouth's kind of open up and have
Speaker 1: teeths in a way that like the vagina dentata mythology
Speaker 1: I think represents. Yeah. I remember listening to The Blade
Speaker 1: to director's commentary, Oh, I have not heard that while back,
Speaker 1: because like I said, I really loved that movie came
Speaker 1: out and it's one of those I could probably watch anytime.
Speaker 1: But I remember del Toro pointing to like different scenes
Speaker 1: and saying, yes, that that door kind of looks like
Speaker 1: a vagina. This is far away, it kind of looks
Speaker 1: like a vagina. So who's like that Catholicism and monsters.
Speaker 1: That's this thing. Did you ever see the third one? Yes,
Speaker 1: because in the third one, I think they took it,
Speaker 1: didn't they take his model? He did not direct it,
Speaker 1: but they took his model and like applied it to
Speaker 1: a Pomeranian dog. Yeah, it kind of has a cameo
Speaker 1: with a Pomeranian. Yeah, just just to mock you with
Speaker 1: how great that the second one was? So? All right
Speaker 1: before basically, this is how we're gonna play this out.
Speaker 1: We'll present to you how the vampires in the strain
Speaker 1: are biologically formed, how their fictional biology works. And then
Speaker 1: the second part of this episode, we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about string oi, which is what they call them in
Speaker 1: the series in the natural World. So everything from wasps
Speaker 1: to uh, creepy worm, syphilis, you name it, we're gonna
Speaker 1: try to cover it. Excellent, alright, so let's do it.
Speaker 1: Let's dissect the strog i hear um. Do you want
Speaker 1: to take us through this? Yeah? I will try so. Uh. There.
Speaker 1: He definitely has thought out from beginning to end a
Speaker 1: process through which these things go through. And it all
Speaker 1: starts with a worm, this kind of capillary worm that
Speaker 1: passes from one creature to another. Uh, and in the
Speaker 1: case of the vampires, they you know, they bleed the
Speaker 1: worms or you know, when they when they drink the
Speaker 1: blood of their victims, they passed the worms onto their victims.
Speaker 1: They might vomit it into your face. Yeah, is there
Speaker 1: one or two of those as well? Yeah, um, I
Speaker 1: mean it can really happen. Happen like any way that
Speaker 1: like even if you like touch I think, like spilled
Speaker 1: blood by one of these things, there's worms in it
Speaker 1: that will burrow unto your skin. Yeah. They're always like
Speaker 1: wiping off their swords because they with you know that
Speaker 1: I corps on them with little little worms. So this
Speaker 1: worm is essentially responsible for the whole fictional biology of
Speaker 1: these vampires. And the way that it works is you
Speaker 1: get infected by one of them, you lie in a
Speaker 1: suspended state of animation for about a day, and then
Speaker 1: the following night you rise as a vampire. And it's
Speaker 1: so it's not like the idea of the vampire from
Speaker 1: sort of past fiction where it kills the victim. They die,
Speaker 1: they're buried, and then they rise. These people are still alive.
Speaker 1: They're just undergoing like a metamorphosis. Yeah, yeah, like that definitely,
Speaker 1: it's a situation where the parasite transforms the host um
Speaker 1: into really a different kind of organism, and they the
Speaker 1: primary thing, Like I think the first thing in these
Speaker 1: vampires biology that changes is they grow a six ft
Speaker 1: long stinger out of their mouth that fills up their
Speaker 1: torso cavity. Uh. And I guess what's supposed to happen
Speaker 1: is the lungs and the throat tissue all kind of
Speaker 1: like melt down and recompose and modify into this stinger thing.
Speaker 1: And it's hideously long too. Yeah, yeah, and it and
Speaker 1: it uh is how they feed. They shoot it out
Speaker 1: of their mouths and latch onto people or they also
Speaker 1: that's how they pass on warms so other people to
Speaker 1: spread the infection. Uh. And like the like we mentioned
Speaker 1: with the mandibles of the blade to vampires, their jaws
Speaker 1: are on this weird lower hinge and they kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, drop so that the stinger has room to
Speaker 1: come out of. And that I think in the storylines,
Speaker 1: at least from my experience the books and the comics,
Speaker 1: I think it takes like that's the first thing, Like
Speaker 1: within eight hours you've got a stinger, and you might
Speaker 1: still have a little bit of your personality. But then
Speaker 1: it takes seven days for this other set of of
Speaker 1: traits to change within your body. So, uh, your skin
Speaker 1: becomes opaque, your digestive system gets fused together. Uh, the
Speaker 1: stinger forms. Of course, you lose your hair and your
Speaker 1: fingernails and your nose and also your genitals and ears.
Speaker 1: So the vampires are are sexless kind of Uh, they're
Speaker 1: they're very machine like you in a lot of ways. Right,
Speaker 1: They just kind of dump all of the non essentials
Speaker 1: of the human body. Uh, and then their fingers grow
Speaker 1: into talent like things, which I don't know if they
Speaker 1: use them as weapons as much as they do for
Speaker 1: like crawling around on walls and stuff. Right, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think in the show you you do see them use
Speaker 1: less as weapons, because I mean they got that stinger, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: why would you don't have to use your close So
Speaker 1: the idea then is that, you know, after seven nights,
Speaker 1: they're fully formed into these sort of hairless, white stinger
Speaker 1: beasts that troll around and you know, kill humans and
Speaker 1: turn them into more vampires. And most of them are
Speaker 1: kind of zombie like as apt to the very few
Speaker 1: who have like a rational mind. Yeah, within the fictional world,
Speaker 1: I'd say like there's only like two or three maybe
Speaker 1: vampires that have sort of control or or individuality. The
Speaker 1: rest of them sort of turned into this hive mind
Speaker 1: of of almost like insects. Actually. Um So there are
Speaker 1: a couple of ways that they used science, or they
Speaker 1: tried to use science. It's kind of hokey pseudoscience, you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes when when fiction meets science, you have to you
Speaker 1: have to build the bridge a little bit between it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and I certainly I think this is the
Speaker 1: best part about the strain too. There was a lot
Speaker 1: of attention put into this. But uh so the mythology
Speaker 1: of vampires being vulnerable to silver, that's because silver has
Speaker 1: an anti viral bacterial quality that disinfects these worms and
Speaker 1: is somehow able to sort of burn through the tissue
Speaker 1: that they've created. Uh And then they're also vulnerable to
Speaker 1: UV light, which is where the you know, they can't
Speaker 1: go into sunlight thing comes from, because the UV light
Speaker 1: also has germicidal properties. It's on a certain kind of
Speaker 1: wavelength that breaks down the tissue within the vampire bodies.
Speaker 1: Um this is an interesting sort of science e thing
Speaker 1: that del Toro thru into there. So his vampires can't vomit,
Speaker 1: and all of their waste is excreted from a cloaca.
Speaker 1: Uh that you know, they're they lose their genitals and
Speaker 1: everything fuses down there into a cloaca, and their waste
Speaker 1: is all just ammonious spray, which they usually emit while
Speaker 1: they're eating, so like, while they're drinking the blood of
Speaker 1: their victims, they're also spraying ammonia out behind them. And
Speaker 1: he based this on ticks because apparently ticks have no
Speaker 1: space inside of their bodies for the food that they eat.
Speaker 1: So when like a tick is on you and it's
Speaker 1: drinking your blood. This is all from Del Toro. I
Speaker 1: didn't do tick research for this episode, but uh, he
Speaker 1: says that they spray out their waist as they're drinking.
Speaker 1: You know. That reminds me. I was reading about scorpions recently,
Speaker 1: or actually it was a really cool article about the
Speaker 1: anus and the evolution of the anus, and they mentioned
Speaker 1: as a particular type of scorpion that can jettison its
Speaker 1: tail when threatened, much like a lizard. Really yeah, autotomy
Speaker 1: uh and uh And in this case though, when they
Speaker 1: jettison their tail, they also jettison their anus, so they
Speaker 1: can no longer defecate at that point, so they just
Speaker 1: continue to balloon up with feces for the rest of
Speaker 1: their life and then die from it eventually. Like there's
Speaker 1: a toxic only here on stuff to blow your mind?
Speaker 1: Will you go from anus to scorpion to vampire? Um?
Speaker 1: You know, I do want to throw in real quick
Speaker 1: that another interesting vampire myth uh tidbit that they employ
Speaker 1: in the Strain is the whole vampires cannot cross moving
Speaker 1: water of their own volitions, which which they never really
Speaker 1: flesh out because it's it's kind of more of a
Speaker 1: magical idea. But I think gets at least hinted that
Speaker 1: this might have to do with like the evolutionary history
Speaker 1: of the worm that like something in The Worm of
Speaker 1: Whores moving water. There is I don't want to spoil
Speaker 1: it for our listeners are for you, but there is
Speaker 1: a explanation to it that comes in the third book,
Speaker 1: I want to say, and maybe you know, I guess
Speaker 1: if the TV shows a season for every book, it
Speaker 1: would probably be in the third season. Well, I have
Speaker 1: that to look for. Yeah, there is a sort of explanation.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's science though, but I like you.
Speaker 1: I like your idea better. Yeah, because it will end
Speaker 1: up exploring um, you know, water moving water, parasites and
Speaker 1: parasitositic manipulation of the host. Hugely important, hugely important. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we do see that in the real world. So Del
Speaker 1: Toro himself has said in interviews that he based these
Speaker 1: worms in the strain on two real worms. The first
Speaker 1: one is the heartworm, which we're all familiar with if
Speaker 1: you have a pet, if you have a dog. I
Speaker 1: just gave my dog is heartworm pill this morning. Uh
Speaker 1: and it you know, it's a worm that lodges itself
Speaker 1: in the heart of dogs. It's not a thing that
Speaker 1: you want. And then the other is an old friend
Speaker 1: of stuff to blow your mind, the horsehair worm. We
Speaker 1: did a video about this while back, and yeah, I'll
Speaker 1: link to it on the landing page. It is. Um.
Speaker 1: I gotta say this episode was a little tough for
Speaker 1: me to research. Um I really, I really feel like
Speaker 1: I've gotten my uh my, my badge of of stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind courage this week, because there's some
Speaker 1: pretty disgusting stuff in the biology of these different parasites
Speaker 1: and insects. And just watching the video of the horsehair
Speaker 1: worms squirm its way out of a cricket's body is
Speaker 1: It just gives me goose bumps. Uh, it's it's chilling,
Speaker 1: but it's also fascinating. I definitely recommend that you go
Speaker 1: watch that video because I had not heard of it
Speaker 1: before you did that episode. Yeah, that was one. I
Speaker 1: think I mentioned it in the episode that I saw
Speaker 1: it in like a junior high band class for some girl.
Speaker 1: You saw a real one. Yeah, yeah, Like there was
Speaker 1: a cricket on the floor and this girl on the
Speaker 1: clarinet section. She was acting, she was acting like all
Speaker 1: you know, grossed out by she she stopped the cricket,
Speaker 1: which I thought was a little at the top, but
Speaker 1: then in perfect karma, she was then legitimately horrified by
Speaker 1: the side of the horsehair worm emerging, you know, impossibly
Speaker 1: long from the belly of the cricket and crawling across
Speaker 1: the band room floor. So yeah, they are. I mean
Speaker 1: a lot of these things that we're about to talk
Speaker 1: about are are pretty vile. And I'd like to quote
Speaker 1: there was an article that I research I read for
Speaker 1: this episode that was about the strain, and it was
Speaker 1: the only other thing I could find that was like
Speaker 1: this episode. It was about the strain and the science
Speaker 1: behind parasites. Uh. And the science writer at Vox, her
Speaker 1: name is Susannah Locke. She was the expert that they
Speaker 1: spoke to about these uh and she had this quote
Speaker 1: in this that I really liked. She said, for as
Speaker 1: creepy as you can make some monster, there are almost
Speaker 1: certainly ten or eleven things out there in nature that
Speaker 1: are even creepier, which is that's nice. I like that,
Speaker 1: and she's She's right, it's a there's just something about
Speaker 1: these things that just are revolting. Yeah. I mean that's
Speaker 1: the thing I find again in again with my Monster
Speaker 1: the Week and Monster Science series is that, like, sometimes
Speaker 1: I approach it by like, there's a cool article that
Speaker 1: comes out and that's some neat biology. I wonder what
Speaker 1: that matches up with and fictional monsters. But in other
Speaker 1: times it's just if you think of any elaborate monster,
Speaker 1: if you watch a film and you say, hey, that's
Speaker 1: a really cool monster design, and then you wonder, is
Speaker 1: there something in the real world that matches up or
Speaker 1: exceeds that. There Almost always is, Yeah, I mean, obviously
Speaker 1: it's where the imagination probably comes from in the first place. Uh.
Speaker 1: Del Toro himself. You know, we mentioned earlier about how
Speaker 1: he was obsessed with vampires as a little kid. Well,
Speaker 1: he also refers to himself as a biologically perverse guy.
Speaker 1: Uh And he said when he was a kid that
Speaker 1: he's always keeping jars of things, like jars of animals
Speaker 1: and blood, and he had little dissection tables. He would
Speaker 1: just do his own little autopsies on animals, which is
Speaker 1: terrifying and makes me think of that that old adage
Speaker 1: that you know, the kind of people who torture. I mean,
Speaker 1: he's not torturing animals, but you know, opening up animals.
Speaker 1: His little kids are probably going to grow up to
Speaker 1: be a psychopath. Instead, he grew up to be an
Speaker 1: artistic genius. That's why I keep financing his films. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're not. This episode is not financed by Crimson Peak
Speaker 1: coming to a theater soon near you. One last thing
Speaker 1: before we get into the examples, there was another great
Speaker 1: piece of research that we found that was actually Susanna
Speaker 1: Locke's article led to it. A guy named Ed Young
Speaker 1: did a ted talk about parasites uh and, and the
Speaker 1: kind of zombie ish effects that they can have on
Speaker 1: various animals, mostly insects, but cats are covered as well. Um,
Speaker 1: and he says, I think this is part of what
Speaker 1: makes parasites so sinister and compelling. We place a premium
Speaker 1: on our free will and our independence, we being humans,
Speaker 1: and that the prospect of losing those qualities to forces
Speaker 1: unseen informs many of our deepest societal fears. So this
Speaker 1: gets right to the heart of what scared me the
Speaker 1: most about vampires when I was a child. Uh, I
Speaker 1: very clearly remember my my first interaction with vampire fiction
Speaker 1: was an episode of Spider Man and his Amazing Friends,
Speaker 1: and Dracula was the villain that they fought in that episode.
Speaker 1: And something something happened where his Amazing friends Firestar, I
Speaker 1: believe is the his female superhero friend. She was turned
Speaker 1: into a vampire, and it I was I mean, I
Speaker 1: was probably like four or five, and I remember like
Speaker 1: doing that thing where you stand by the door and
Speaker 1: you're watching the TV with one eye around the corner
Speaker 1: of the door because I was so scared of this
Speaker 1: cartoon Dracula. That's weird to Dracula himself showed up because
Speaker 1: what's the name of the actual vampire that is in
Speaker 1: like kind of the Blade and marvel omrbeous the living vampire. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know if he ever showed up in the cartoon.
Speaker 1: But Marvel the old one, right, you're talking about that
Speaker 1: really old Spider Man cart Yeah, the one from the eighties.
Speaker 1: This one. There was an older Spider Man cartoon, I
Speaker 1: believe in the late sixties, early seventies. But um, Marvel
Speaker 1: had a string of horror comics that came out in
Speaker 1: the seventies, and Dracula was one of them. I think
Speaker 1: probably because I would assume the rights to that were
Speaker 1: open and they could just do whatever they wanted with it.
Speaker 1: Cool that I like that quote from from me young
Speaker 1: that because because the whole issue of parasites and free will, uh,
Speaker 1: the whole idea of vampires and free will, uh certainly
Speaker 1: certainly resonates because in vampires you often see themes of addiction.
Speaker 1: Um are are explorer, themes of disease, themes of parasites,
Speaker 1: all things that suddenly turned the table on us and say, well,
Speaker 1: maybe we are not in control of our bodies. Of
Speaker 1: our bodies are telling us to drink this and making
Speaker 1: these things happen to ourselves. You know, some stories have
Speaker 1: gone so far as to make it a metaphor for
Speaker 1: like HIV, for instance, like a blood borne disease, and
Speaker 1: it again it changes our bodies against our will. We
Speaker 1: don't have any control over it. Yeah, the I that
Speaker 1: idea is I think inherently revolting, especially to human beings
Speaker 1: and maybe maybe specifically to Americans. I don't know. There
Speaker 1: might be a cultural study on that, but we value
Speaker 1: our independence so highly in our culture that maybe there's
Speaker 1: something to that that affects us more well, you know,
Speaker 1: and that brings us to syphilis um and And I'm
Speaker 1: we're not gonna go too in depth on syphilis because
Speaker 1: we have two episodes in the path that we did
Speaker 1: on syphilis, looking at syphilis as a disease, looking at
Speaker 1: the Treponema palladium, the the organism that causes syphilis, as
Speaker 1: well as the history and cultural impact of it um.
Speaker 1: But just to to refresh Treponema palladium, it is a thin,
Speaker 1: tightly coiled spiral key, this little little worm creature that
Speaker 1: causes syphilis. Its sexually transmitted in the illness spread through
Speaker 1: Europe from the mid fifteenth century onward, and before the
Speaker 1: advent of antibiotics, it was one of the most common
Speaker 1: infections afflicting up to tim per cent of the adult
Speaker 1: population in Western in the Western world, and it was
Speaker 1: an incura. It was incurable for four point five centuries UM.
Speaker 1: And when you really start teasing apart the impact of
Speaker 1: syphilis in the Western world, it's difficult to overstate it. Um.
Speaker 1: It was widespread spread again, it was incurable. Uh, it
Speaker 1: was a thing to be feared. And and of course
Speaker 1: when we as we've been discussing when we we take
Speaker 1: our monsters, where when when we create monsters, we're giving
Speaker 1: our fears form and face and force all their own. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that it's important to recall, like how prevalent
Speaker 1: syphilis was at a time time before we were alive,
Speaker 1: and that I imagine from what I've read of of
Speaker 1: you know, the period that it was most active was
Speaker 1: that I say most active as if it's like a
Speaker 1: living you know, one single minded creature. But but but
Speaker 1: it was really had a huge impact on the cultural
Speaker 1: of zeitgeist. I guess, uh, you know, people were in
Speaker 1: fear of it and there was also a sort of
Speaker 1: uh disgust towards those who had contracted it. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: it was I mean, you know, in the past, pretty
Speaker 1: much any illness or physical ailment is tied to the soul,
Speaker 1: but certainly with syphilis because it of course is is
Speaker 1: tied to sexual contact, right, and so you know, and
Speaker 1: not exclusively sexual contact. You could also there's also congenital
Speaker 1: uh syphilis, in which you're just born with it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there is an assumption in a lot of cases.
Speaker 1: You know, if you found out that somebody had syphilis,
Speaker 1: you assumed that they got it from you know, loose
Speaker 1: sexual practices, right. Uh. And like I remember doing research
Speaker 1: for another project about the Franklin Expedition going through the
Speaker 1: Northwest Passage. This is in the mid eighteen hundred, and
Speaker 1: you know, there were there were members on board those
Speaker 1: ships who certainly had syphilis, you know, and the officers
Speaker 1: looked upon them as being, you know, less than because
Speaker 1: they had contracted such a thing. So it's this thing
Speaker 1: that's spread from one person to another, and and it
Speaker 1: has these various stages. And I'm not going to go
Speaker 1: into into to the first two stages, but the the
Speaker 1: later stage, tertiary syphilis, which occurs in ten to occurs
Speaker 1: ten to twenty years after the initial affection, so you know,
Speaker 1: quite a lot of time passes, and there are a
Speaker 1: number of symptoms that it involves and we're talking about
Speaker 1: tissue damage, muscle damage, organ damage, coordination problems, paralysis, numbness,
Speaker 1: gradual blindness, dementia, uh, death. But where it really ties
Speaker 1: in nicely with the strain Uh. Not only you know
Speaker 1: the worms of course causing everything, but you would often
Speaker 1: see with syphilis the loss of the nose or the
Speaker 1: sinking of the nose into what was called saddle nose um.
Speaker 1: And this is where we saw increased use of wigs,
Speaker 1: the increased use of cosmetics, and the increased use of
Speaker 1: fake noses to cover up your own essentially decaying nose. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is uh ironic because just yesterday I was reading
Speaker 1: a piece that you had previously written in the Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind site on Stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind dot com about the fake noses artificial noses as
Speaker 1: prosthetics because of syphilis. But also there were other people
Speaker 1: like the famous scientists or astronomer Tycho brah Hey, he
Speaker 1: had his nose cut off in a sword fight, and
Speaker 1: I believe they were a gold nose. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: he had. I think he had a couple, but but yeah,
Speaker 1: I think he had a hit a like a brass
Speaker 1: or gold nose at any rate, he was. He replaced
Speaker 1: his nose, but was not shy about it. He was
Speaker 1: just oh, he was very brash. He made it as
Speaker 1: obvious as possible, kind of like I think. But in
Speaker 1: the stream, you see these, you know, these characters that
Speaker 1: have been degraded into these um, these nonspat tousque characters
Speaker 1: by the parasite. They still have to interact with the world,
Speaker 1: some of them. And in those cases, what do they
Speaker 1: have to do. They have to put on wigs, they
Speaker 1: have to put on cosmetics, they have to put on
Speaker 1: a fake nose, um all in order to uh to
Speaker 1: appear normal again. Also, you would see syphilis sufferers who
Speaker 1: would use cod pieces. There's also where we saw a
Speaker 1: resurgence of cod pieces, or not maybe not a resurgence
Speaker 1: but a uh but you saw an increased use of
Speaker 1: them due to a potential damage to the genitalia. Well
Speaker 1: maybe that's why some rock stars wear cod pieces. There
Speaker 1: you go, I think that's a holdover from syphilis. It
Speaker 1: could be, it could be um and uh in according
Speaker 1: to um Slavic and comparative literature professor Thomas lav Langevic,
Speaker 1: commentators have often drawn a line of comparison between hereditary
Speaker 1: syphilis and vampirism um because one of the one of
Speaker 1: the things that you see with the congenital um syphilis
Speaker 1: is the formation of sharp, pointy teeth, which which are
Speaker 1: known as Hudgetson's teeth. So it's you know, the different
Speaker 1: deformations of the of the dums and teeth. You sometimes
Speaker 1: see long nails, you see elongated skulls, um and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, superficially, it's easy to look at extreme cases
Speaker 1: of late syphilis and congenital syphilis because when you have
Speaker 1: congenital syphilis, a lot of times the physical deformities are
Speaker 1: really I mean they're taking place in the womb and
Speaker 1: they're pretty severe early on in life. Um, but you
Speaker 1: could you could easily make a comparison between count orlock
Speaker 1: in Nosferatu and severe syphilis sufferer. Yeah. I remember the
Speaker 1: research that I had done on syphilis again about the
Speaker 1: sort of Arctic expedition time. Some of the photos that
Speaker 1: I saw of like skulls or or or they had
Speaker 1: done like molds of people's heads. I mean we're talking
Speaker 1: like elephant man style deformations here. It looked incredibly painful. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this is a side note about syphilis I don't
Speaker 1: know if you've heard this before, but here's a little
Speaker 1: tidbit fun fact. There's a theory that Leon Cholgas, who
Speaker 1: was the man who assassinated President McKinley, that he possibly
Speaker 1: had been in acted with syphilis and was in second
Speaker 1: stage heading into third stage syphilis, and that it was
Speaker 1: part of the disease acting upon his mind that made
Speaker 1: him go mad and try to kill the president. But well,
Speaker 1: you know, given the time period there, it seems very likely.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's possible his nose didn't fall off, he
Speaker 1: hadn't started turning into you know, a deformed third tertiary
Speaker 1: stage syphilis victim. But uh, there's there's some some evidence
Speaker 1: people think that points in that direction. Yeah, there are
Speaker 1: people that argue that Bram Stoker may may he himself
Speaker 1: have suffered from syphilis, and that the novel Dracula is
Speaker 1: or was his own way of exploring his own syphilitic condition.
Speaker 1: But there's not there's not any hard proof in that area. Uh.
Speaker 1: So I feel like we've we've gotten syphilis pretty well
Speaker 1: covered here. Uh And like you said, there's two previous
Speaker 1: episodes all about it. So if you want to learn
Speaker 1: more about syphilis, go back through the archives and certainly
Speaker 1: take the deep dive with Robert and Julie on that. Uh,
Speaker 1: let's get to another one. This is just one that
Speaker 1: that guy Young mentioned in his TED talk. He talked
Speaker 1: about the guinea worm. Is this one that you've encountered
Speaker 1: in your various travels with parasites and monsters? I feel
Speaker 1: like we've covered guinea worm in the past. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think we. I could be wrong on this, but I
Speaker 1: think we did a something with the Carter Center about
Speaker 1: guinea worm. Okay, well, yeah, that would make sense actually
Speaker 1: given the work that they do, because apparently the way
Speaker 1: that you are infected by these is from unclean drinking water. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the community that I live in a suburb just
Speaker 1: outside of Landing here are our water went off for
Speaker 1: three days last week. Uh. And I don't think guinea
Speaker 1: worms were what people were worried about, but unclean drinking
Speaker 1: water was certainly on everybody's mind. We realized sort of
Speaker 1: how privileged our first world society is. But yeah, so
Speaker 1: you are infected by this thing, and then what happens
Speaker 1: is it creates a burning blister on either your leg
Speaker 1: or your ankle. So well, I guess your ankle is
Speaker 1: your leg and that what happens is hurt so much
Speaker 1: in it and it burns that your inclination is to
Speaker 1: immediately go to the water. So here we go. This
Speaker 1: ties into this sort of vampire can't cross the water
Speaker 1: type thing and also vampire I'm not vampires, but parasites
Speaker 1: um twisting your behavior, manipulating you to do things exactly right,
Speaker 1: Like was it your idea to do this? Did the
Speaker 1: parasite consciously say I need to make this host of
Speaker 1: mine walk towards the river? But what happens is people
Speaker 1: go toward the water, they try to wash the blister,
Speaker 1: and what happens is the worm bursts out because they
Speaker 1: can only mate in water, so immediately bursts out of
Speaker 1: your skin and moves on. And then you know more,
Speaker 1: I assume they must be microscopic in size when you're
Speaker 1: drinking them from the unclean water. More produced. But then
Speaker 1: let's get on. This is the big daddy monster parasite
Speaker 1: that really connects to you know, uh, the del Toro
Speaker 1: string oy, the horse hair worm. We just mentioned it
Speaker 1: briefly earlier, but let's let's really investigate this thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we we mentioned if you look at any videos of this.
Speaker 1: It generally consists of some sort of an insect that's
Speaker 1: been squashed or it's near the water, and there's this
Speaker 1: enormous black worm. It looks like a like a thick
Speaker 1: horse hair, you know, just long black, doesn't have any
Speaker 1: others distinguishable features, extremely long, extremely wiggly, just writhing and
Speaker 1: emerging from this creature's abdomen. And it's it's grotesque, its beautiful,
Speaker 1: and yeah, you're right, it's both those things. If you
Speaker 1: haven't seen it, I think it's important to to note,
Speaker 1: like these things are like three or four times the
Speaker 1: size of their host body in terms of like length.
Speaker 1: So you see them start pouring out of like a
Speaker 1: dead cricket or whatever, it's just wool. So nauseating because
Speaker 1: you just they unfurl. Yeah, there there are a number
Speaker 1: of different ones. They're all from the phylum U Nematomorpha,
Speaker 1: And uh, the way it works is this, Uh, the
Speaker 1: adults are free living, but the larva are parasitic, can
Speaker 1: grow to adulthood in the body of an insect. Male
Speaker 1: and female horsehail hairworms mate and damp soil and fresh water.
Speaker 1: So you may if you were ever walking through the woods,
Speaker 1: which I was once and I actually looked in a
Speaker 1: puddle and I saw one squirming around. Yeah. Um, So
Speaker 1: that the males and the females they mate in damp
Speaker 1: soil or fresh water. The female lay is just millions
Speaker 1: of eggs in this little puddle, and then the eggs
Speaker 1: hatch and tiny larva um that they insist on vegetation
Speaker 1: near the water's edge, which is probably likely to be eaten. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what happens. Cricket or other host drops. By they
Speaker 1: eat the vegetation, they end up consumingly insisted larva. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in the case of say are carnivorous mantis, it
Speaker 1: acquires the parasite by devouring an intermediate hook. So something
Speaker 1: else eats the grass and then the antis eats it.
Speaker 1: And that's another common theme we're going to see with
Speaker 1: some of these creatures today. Yeah. Yeah, because the parasite
Speaker 1: is playing kind of the long game, right uh. And
Speaker 1: so once inside the final host, be it the thing
Speaker 1: that ate the plan or the thing that ain't, the
Speaker 1: thing that hint the plant um, theys covering dissolves an
Speaker 1: insects gut and it allows the juvenile warm to escape
Speaker 1: bore through the gut wall and start absorbing nutrients. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and that's you know, similar to what we were
Speaker 1: just talking about with the guinea worm. That's when it
Speaker 1: bursts free right after after it's sort of taken as
Speaker 1: many nutrients as it can. Yeah, once it's reached full size.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing, and this is something that researchers
Speaker 1: are still exploring. So if you if the host dies,
Speaker 1: if somebody squashes it on a band room floor, the
Speaker 1: worm emergence. But obviously this is a situation where spaceship
Speaker 1: cricket is going down, and so the parasite that is
Speaker 1: piloting the spaceship at this point it has to get off,
Speaker 1: has to has to just embark. But remember how we
Speaker 1: talked about the puddle, right, the puddle is where it
Speaker 1: needs to go, right, so it unlike the guinea worm,
Speaker 1: it doesn't encourage its host to go towards wet areas well,
Speaker 1: or is that they happen. Still trying to figure that out,
Speaker 1: because there are two possibilities one either the the Either
Speaker 1: the horsehair worm waits until its host inevitably returns to
Speaker 1: an area in your water and then punches out through
Speaker 1: the abdomen, or it manipulates the host into seeking out water. Okay,
Speaker 1: so this is again very much very vampire vamporistic. And
Speaker 1: there's all there's actually some some compelling evidence toward the
Speaker 1: brain hacking situation, like observations of of of Mandis is
Speaker 1: jumping into the water like you know, living style. You
Speaker 1: know now that you're saying this, I do remember from
Speaker 1: Young's talk that he said that there's evidence that they
Speaker 1: release a certain kind of protein into the crickets brains
Speaker 1: that addle their brains so that they head towards water. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I said, I feel like the the evidence for
Speaker 1: brain hacking is pretty compelling here and ultimately makes the
Speaker 1: creature all the more fascinating. Now, I know what you're wondering.
Speaker 1: Can it infect humans? Well, yes it can. They are.
Speaker 1: Human infections are possible, though not that likely. The human
Speaker 1: is not, of course, the intended host. But there were
Speaker 1: two Japanese cases reported in two thousand twelve, but these
Speaker 1: were due to, of course, just accidental ingestation of infected insects.
Speaker 1: So these two humans had eaten a cricket or something
Speaker 1: like that, and that cricket had yet to burst. It's uh,
Speaker 1: it's horse hair worm. Yeah, I actually have a quote
Speaker 1: from the study here said the woman vomited a worm
Speaker 1: after gargling with a sailine solution as she felt something
Speaker 1: was caught in her throat while she was lying in bed.
Speaker 1: She had eaten vegetables harvest from a private garden. The
Speaker 1: other worm, from the mouth of a boy, was removed
Speaker 1: by his mother. So, so, uh, you said that you've
Speaker 1: seen these, So I'm assuming that they're indigenous to southeast
Speaker 1: United States, where we live. It sounds like they're also
Speaker 1: in US to Japan. Are they just everywhere? I think
Speaker 1: they're just everywhere. Yeah, They're in They're in Asia, They're
Speaker 1: in Europe. There in the United States, they're um anywhere
Speaker 1: there is a warm, safe insect belly in which to grow.
Speaker 1: Here you will find the horse hair worm, and maybe
Speaker 1: inside us. Yeah, I think, right, how well you washed
Speaker 1: your grains well. It also makes me kind of went right, like,
Speaker 1: how many autopsy tables have you know, somebody dies and
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden a little worm just kind
Speaker 1: of pokes its way out and makes its way over
Speaker 1: to the sink or something, you know. I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't think that they're that insidious, obviously, but this is
Speaker 1: clearly where del Toro got the inspiration from. Uh. There's
Speaker 1: one last creepy fact about the horse are worm I
Speaker 1: want to throw in here. This is also from Young's talk.
Speaker 1: He said, there's a Japanese scientist named Takuya Sato who
Speaker 1: found one stream where there were so many of these things,
Speaker 1: and they'd infected so many crickets that it just had
Speaker 1: filled up the stream with crickets and over six of
Speaker 1: the local trout's diet where the crickets who had been
Speaker 1: infected by horsehair worms and then subsequently horsehair worms themselves. Uh.
Speaker 1: I also remember reading in one of these articles that
Speaker 1: generally the host has only one horse hair warm inside it,
Speaker 1: but it is possible to wind up with twins. So
Speaker 1: you have two of these things. Wow, okay, all right,
Speaker 1: well let's let's move on. What else do we have
Speaker 1: on the parasitic pop ladder. Well, we've got a zombie
Speaker 1: fungus here, and uh, you seem familiar with this when
Speaker 1: we were first talking about this, but I believe it's
Speaker 1: pronounced opheo corti SEPs. That correct, court sps. Okay, so
Speaker 1: this is also commonly known as the zombie fungus. And
Speaker 1: what I had heard was that, I say, I heard
Speaker 1: like down on the street. You know they talk about
Speaker 1: the zombie fun I read about it. It drives carpenter
Speaker 1: ants like so that they get infected with this fungus,
Speaker 1: and carpenter ants then go to find a more suitable
Speaker 1: home for the fungus and then it bursts out. So uh,
Speaker 1: young jokes about this and it's talk. As you can
Speaker 1: already tell. The common theme is something gets in you,
Speaker 1: it drives you to go somewhere, and then it bursts
Speaker 1: out of your body and kills you. Now you had
Speaker 1: some other research on the there's more than one court
Speaker 1: of steps. Oh yeah, there are thousands of different court
Speaker 1: of steps, and each one is aimed at a different
Speaker 1: insects species. Uh. For instance, though bullet ants are infected
Speaker 1: by one particular type of court of steps, and it
Speaker 1: manipulates the behavior of the ant. It causes it to
Speaker 1: climb up about five centimeters above the usual ant trail,
Speaker 1: usually facing northwest, clamp on with its jaws generally around
Speaker 1: noon and just not let go, and then within six
Speaker 1: hours it dies. A few days later, a tube sprouts
Speaker 1: out of its head, and this is the fruiting body
Speaker 1: of the fungus it you know, blast out the spores
Speaker 1: and then these end up infecting a new ants. So um,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's it's it's kind of essentially it makes
Speaker 1: the the ant go raise itself up like a flag
Speaker 1: on a flagpole, die and then spread. It's it's a sport.
Speaker 1: What's um? I mean, surely it seems very specific northwest
Speaker 1: at noon? What's the specific? Um? There must be some
Speaker 1: kind of reason for that, like as the sun as
Speaker 1: it's at its highest, and that subsequently makes it easier
Speaker 1: for the fungest to bloom or something. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I guess though, Or it's you know, tapping into existing
Speaker 1: you know, behavioral maybe that's the ant. But um, if
Speaker 1: the generally what happens to in these these social ant colonies,
Speaker 1: if they discover a worker that is exhibiting some of
Speaker 1: the characteristics of a court accepts infected AUNT, they'll remove
Speaker 1: them and take their body out and dump them somewhere
Speaker 1: else because they know the real yeah, that they are prized.
Speaker 1: So they're like the vampire hunter ants. Yeah, yeah, like
Speaker 1: they they are. They are aware of the vampire issue
Speaker 1: and they will remove them if there's something fishy. Huh.
Speaker 1: This reminds me of recent movie Aunt Man that's just
Speaker 1: come out to where apparently through some science, like they
Speaker 1: just wear like blue too. It's basically in their ear
Speaker 1: that allows them to control ants. And now I'm wondering
Speaker 1: if they could backtrack and do a pseudoscience explanation of
Speaker 1: it by saying that they've they've infected these ants with
Speaker 1: the zombie fungus. Well, you know, there there's a lot
Speaker 1: of interesting um species that live among ants. Um one
Speaker 1: in particular I was reading about the other day as
Speaker 1: a as a type of beetle. And if you want
Speaker 1: the details on this, I did a monster the week
Speaker 1: about the thing. Carpenter is the thing, and I'll link
Speaker 1: to it on the list pretty recently. Yeah, but but
Speaker 1: in that I tied in this this particular beetle that
Speaker 1: lives among the ants, and it uses scent and an
Speaker 1: audible cues to convince the other ants that it is
Speaker 1: either work or ant or sometimes even royalty within the colony,
Speaker 1: so that you can live amongst the ants undetected, eat
Speaker 1: their larva, and also benefit from the protection of the
Speaker 1: high because it's like it's like living in a bank vault,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like living in a medieval castle in
Speaker 1: the insect world. You're pretty safe in there. And if
Speaker 1: you're if you can get away with eating some of
Speaker 1: the babies in the castle, all the better. Yep. Resolutely
Speaker 1: wasn't that dark. But I believe that they just said
Speaker 1: something very quickly about pheromones. You know, that's usually just pheromones.
Speaker 1: That's how we do it. So what do we we
Speaker 1: have a parasitic castration next? Yes, because of course the
Speaker 1: Strain has some wonderful scenes where the characters who are
Speaker 1: changing suddenly realize that they're genitals are rotting and or
Speaker 1: falling off, and then whoops, they finally dropped their pants,
Speaker 1: look in the mirror and there is this kin doll
Speaker 1: like molding. Yeah. As I mentioned at the top, it's
Speaker 1: like they get rid of everything that that that that
Speaker 1: the the vampire biology no longer needs, and it falls off.
Speaker 1: They I do remember this from the television show that
Speaker 1: they made a rather big production about one character going
Speaker 1: through that process, and um, yeah, it was grizzly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but yeah, you're right, they've got the sort of action
Speaker 1: figure Barbie doll body, uh, and they're very smooth. So
Speaker 1: all that stuff falls off. So the pair citocratic castration
Speaker 1: is similar to this. Yeah, and it's you know, it's ghastly,
Speaker 1: but it's purely economical because in the case of the strain,
Speaker 1: the little stragary worm, it does it doesn't need these
Speaker 1: host creatures to breed, and it doesn't This is not
Speaker 1: a part of its functional biology anymore. And so in
Speaker 1: the natural world we see parasitic castration as a as
Speaker 1: a tactic where they shut off reproduction in the host,
Speaker 1: generally in order to hoard all the energy resources for themselves.
Speaker 1: Because this is your host. You're were you were gaming
Speaker 1: this organism, and so any energy expenditure, and and certainly
Speaker 1: in organisms mating, energy expenditures are kind of high. So
Speaker 1: if you can shut that off, then you've streamlined the
Speaker 1: the the the energy efficiency of the organism for yourself. Um.
Speaker 1: There are numerous accounts of this, but one one that
Speaker 1: came to mind here is a parasitic parasitic barnacle called
Speaker 1: Sacculina carcini, and this parasite stops rep production in the
Speaker 1: host crab and stand and end up ends up stimulating
Speaker 1: the female crab to disperse parasitic eggs. In this with
Speaker 1: the same behavior that you would normally use to lay
Speaker 1: her own eggs, So us want the same mouth well
Speaker 1: I don't know their mouthparts, but using the same the
Speaker 1: same physiological gifts to distribute the parasite young that she
Speaker 1: would normally use to distribute her own eggs. I you
Speaker 1: have a note here too about how trematode parasites also
Speaker 1: use this to destroy the gonads of their victims. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because again, what does it have gonads for? This is
Speaker 1: you know, the parasites essentially saying this is not a
Speaker 1: free roaming crab or insect. It's it's it's my car now,
Speaker 1: and I my card does not eat gonads. Okay, So, uh,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say this. There's a particular one that we're
Speaker 1: gonna get to that I had a nightmare about last night.
Speaker 1: So we're heading towards it, though, But the parasitic castration,
Speaker 1: and you think of about it. This is the first
Speaker 1: time working on an episode of stuff to blow your mind.
Speaker 1: I've had a nightmare. Well, welcome to the show, Christian.
Speaker 1: So another one is this is not the one I
Speaker 1: was thinking of, but the the the hookworm which many
Speaker 1: of us are familiar with her which also called a nematode. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, This is just your your average hookworm parasite
Speaker 1: that sucks the blood from within its host, very vampiric. Uh.
Speaker 1: It burrows into your skin and migrates to small intestines.
Speaker 1: And we're talking about humans here. And yeah, especially in
Speaker 1: the South here, we're big on the hookworm not too
Speaker 1: not too long ago. Sometimes they can suck so much
Speaker 1: blood from within your body that you can get anemia,
Speaker 1: so you will probably be aware of this. And here
Speaker 1: is a stunning fact. When I was looking this up,
Speaker 1: they currently infect six hundred million people in the world.
Speaker 1: So that's a lot. I mean when you think about it.
Speaker 1: You know, I was joking earlier about our sort of
Speaker 1: first world uh plumbing problems of having clean water that's
Speaker 1: readily available, but uh man, six hundred people and six
Speaker 1: hundred million people in the world are carrying around hookworms
Speaker 1: and can't do anything about it. Well, then you have
Speaker 1: the interesting situation where hookworm free individuals have sought them
Speaker 1: out there. There's been some interesting content to come out
Speaker 1: in previous years about this where there's the argument that
Speaker 1: humans have had hookworms for so long that we've kind
Speaker 1: of co evolved with them, and we've reached the point
Speaker 1: where we kind of don't work right if if we're
Speaker 1: missing the hookworms. Really so you have you've had cases
Speaker 1: where certain individuals have claimed that as hookworm free organisms
Speaker 1: there they don't work right, they're not properly. They have
Speaker 1: all these allergies, etcetera, or some kind of some some
Speaker 1: kind of modern maladay. Yeah, and I think a lot
Speaker 1: of times it is just excessive allergies. And then they
Speaker 1: seek out the hookworm infection and uh and and and
Speaker 1: the choir hookworms by saying going to treem filled field
Speaker 1: in Africa. There was this American life about this one
Speaker 1: individual britishdividual who did this. I think he was British
Speaker 1: where he ended up fleeing to Britain anyway, he um,
Speaker 1: he went acquired hookworms and he was actually selling them
Speaker 1: online for a little bit to like minded individuals. Um.
Speaker 1: The thing is he's kind of acting ahead of the research.
Speaker 1: There's actual research that's looking into this, say saying, you know,
Speaker 1: to what extent, how do we uh, do we benefit
Speaker 1: from a mild hookworm infestation in our bodies? You know,
Speaker 1: not enough to actually cause anema anemia, but enough to
Speaker 1: to sort of balance things out and give our body
Speaker 1: the in the the level of infection and occupancy that
Speaker 1: it has come to expect. So it's sort of like
Speaker 1: the symbiotic relationship many animals have with parasitic uh, parasites
Speaker 1: have with their hosts. Yeah, I mean across the board
Speaker 1: when you look at parasites and symbiotic relationships, there's often
Speaker 1: kind of that gray area like when does when does
Speaker 1: the parasite stop being a parasite and start being becoming
Speaker 1: a symbiotic organism? At which point does it stop becoming
Speaker 1: a paras side and become a part of who you are,
Speaker 1: such as you know, all the bacteria in our bodies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I'm thinking of Lamprey's where I grew up in
Speaker 1: New England. Lampreys are really common in the rivers around there,
Speaker 1: and they certainly work off of hosts and kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, to maintain one another's ecology. But there's also, um,
Speaker 1: what are the what the what are the I'm forgetting
Speaker 1: the name right now. With the fish that cleaned sharks
Speaker 1: believe so yeah, the little yeah little cleaning Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe that's maybe the hookworm is our remora. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean there, I've I've read some interesting speculative biology about
Speaker 1: about the origins of the vampire bat, and there are
Speaker 1: some there's some theories that vampire bats originated as as
Speaker 1: his creatures that would would feed clean up the wounds
Speaker 1: of giant you know, megafauna, and then over time that
Speaker 1: develops into just full blown parasitism. Yeah, well that is
Speaker 1: you know, if your stomach hasn't hearn from our hookworms
Speaker 1: and syphilis and zombie fungus, what have we got next
Speaker 1: for you? That's like a vampire from a from a
Speaker 1: science fiction TV show. Of course, we could keep going.
Speaker 1: We're actually gonna have to cut a couple of parasites
Speaker 1: from our notes just to so that we don't go
Speaker 1: too long here. But the next one we're gonna look
Speaker 1: at if simon Thoa exigua, which is this cool isopod
Speaker 1: creature that a number of you are probably familiar with.
Speaker 1: It kind of looks like a like a sand louse,
Speaker 1: a little bit like a kind of beetle or an
Speaker 1: enlarged tick or something like that. Yeah, I think it's
Speaker 1: actually kin to like the little roly poly creatures you see.
Speaker 1: If you've seen the horror movie The Bay, which came
Speaker 1: out about to maybe three years ago. The whole movie
Speaker 1: surrounded the idea of these sort of mutated isopods infecting
Speaker 1: human being. Did you see it? I did. Does it
Speaker 1: actually like replace their tongue? Yeah? Yeah, I mean the
Speaker 1: whole movie sort of builds up to, uh that that's
Speaker 1: the big scene, but they cut it's found footage, so
Speaker 1: they cut it with footage of actual isopods inside fish
Speaker 1: mouths replacing their tongues. Yeah. I mean, I think a
Speaker 1: lot of our listeners are familiar with this one because
Speaker 1: I think we've covered in on the podcast before, and
Speaker 1: it's it's also one of these things that just really
Speaker 1: became viral because it's horrifying. This the idea that you know,
Speaker 1: you look at the fish's mouth and there instead of
Speaker 1: the fish's tongue, you have this little crustacean that is
Speaker 1: just setting there, perched on the on its tongue stump,
Speaker 1: acting as its tongue, just like you know, you open
Speaker 1: this mouth and there's a little guy in there's hello. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think there's some some lovely cartoons out there they
Speaker 1: explore that. Um, this is so I mentioned earlier I
Speaker 1: had a nightmare doing the research of this episode, and
Speaker 1: this was I think it was sort of an amllegation
Speaker 1: of all the parasites that we're talking about here, but
Speaker 1: the isopod in particular is one that gets me. I
Speaker 1: before I went to bed last night, my my throat
Speaker 1: was a little inflamed, I think, like my allergies were
Speaker 1: bothering me. And in the night I had this you know,
Speaker 1: horrifying there about something crawling around in my throat. It
Speaker 1: was probably mixed in with the strain as well, with
Speaker 1: the you know, the whole idea that your voice box
Speaker 1: and lungs collapse and fuse into the stinger thing. But
Speaker 1: the isopod is really I mean, that's that's pretty close
Speaker 1: to the strain there where your tongue is replaced by
Speaker 1: a living thing. Yeah, and it's horrifying to think of
Speaker 1: of a fish experiencing this because the fish can't just
Speaker 1: reach in and do anything about it. It's just kind
Speaker 1: of it's just got to roll with it. At this point.
Speaker 1: This thing painfully like drains your tongue juice out and
Speaker 1: then you're just atrophies and then attaches to the stump
Speaker 1: and then it becomes your new tongue and then you know,
Speaker 1: feeding off of morsels of food and mucus it's it's horrifying. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And to be clear here, uh, my understanding is that
Speaker 1: they do not do this to humans. There hasn't been
Speaker 1: a case where humans tongue has been replaced by one
Speaker 1: of these things. And that movie exists, it's fictional. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the the the isopods in question here, they don't.
Speaker 1: Uh My understanding too that that we we still need
Speaker 1: a lot more research on and there isn't a lot
Speaker 1: of of of of there isn't a lot of study
Speaker 1: into their biology, uh and their their life cycle. But
Speaker 1: but hopefully in the years the years to come, well
Speaker 1: learn more about their their marvelous lifestyle. But yeah, if
Speaker 1: you certainly, if you want to see some twitchy imagery,
Speaker 1: do an image search for isopods because just in general,
Speaker 1: not even just the ones the Simothia, as you mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: uh that they're creepy, there's some there's something about them
Speaker 1: that just doesn't doesn't work for me. Uh So, okay, wasps,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of different parasitic wasps, so there
Speaker 1: this is sort of a broad category, but I think
Speaker 1: it's important for us to cover in this relation to
Speaker 1: the strain because there's so many of them. But they
Speaker 1: They commonly have this this trait where they lay eggs
Speaker 1: inside of a host. The generic one that I read
Speaker 1: about was that they lay eggs inside a caterpillar, right,
Speaker 1: and they these eggs hatch inside the caterpillar's body, devour
Speaker 1: it from the inside out, and then you know, burst
Speaker 1: out of its body again, like the stereotype of all
Speaker 1: these things. Right. Here's where it gets even weirder. Some
Speaker 1: of these wasps stay behind in the corpse of this
Speaker 1: caterpillar to defend other wasps that are still metamorphosizing inside
Speaker 1: of it, and they will, like like people wearing a
Speaker 1: horse costume sort of, they manipulate the the caterpillar's corpse
Speaker 1: so it seems like it's still alive, and they try
Speaker 1: to chase away predators. The move it and kind of
Speaker 1: twitch it around, and it's it's a horrifying Yeah, when
Speaker 1: you start looking at parasitic wasps, there's so many fables examples,
Speaker 1: Like there's a study that I was just reading, an
Speaker 1: embargo study that's coming out and we'll have come out
Speaker 1: by the time this episode airs, uh, in which a
Speaker 1: particular wasps actually makes the infected spiders build it build
Speaker 1: a protection for it. Yeah, And One of my favorites
Speaker 1: is a particular wasp dino campus Cocanella, and it does
Speaker 1: the you know, the traditional parasitic set up here, It
Speaker 1: ambushes a ladybug, implants it's it's egg inside it, and
Speaker 1: then and then runs off. Right, So, eventually the the
Speaker 1: the young wasp emerges from the host organism, and a
Speaker 1: lot of times, you know, you would expect the host
Speaker 1: organism to mercifully die off, but in this case, not
Speaker 1: only does the ladybug live, but a little behavior modification
Speaker 1: from the parasite forces it to hang around and guard
Speaker 1: the parasite baby as it grows into full adulthood beneath
Speaker 1: the protective bulk of the ladybug. And they think it's
Speaker 1: due to secretions that are left by the larva when
Speaker 1: it bursts out that you know, functionally reprogram it. And
Speaker 1: then on top of that, the ladybug doesn't even dive. Then, um,
Speaker 1: the researchers found that of the cases, the ladybugs recovered
Speaker 1: normal behavior following the ordeal. Really, so this is really
Speaker 1: gets to the heart of that theme of taking away
Speaker 1: independence these parasitic organisms doing so, but also that it
Speaker 1: it gains it back, it gets it gets its life
Speaker 1: back afterwards. If so, what I mean it has nice
Speaker 1: that I can't help but imagine like a human scenario,
Speaker 1: like we lived in a world where occasionally you're just
Speaker 1: impregnated by a parasite and you essentially give birth to
Speaker 1: this thing that emerges from you, you know, alien chess,
Speaker 1: but Verster style. But then you live on to you know,
Speaker 1: go to support groups for likewise parasite afflicted into well.
Speaker 1: I mean I suppose that that you could argue that
Speaker 1: that's what's going on with some people of hookworm or
Speaker 1: codeworm and and such, but they're not reprogrammed to guard
Speaker 1: the tape worms layer. You know. Uh. There's another just
Speaker 1: one more parasitic wasp that I wanted to touch on here,
Speaker 1: the Ampilex compre us so, which is the emerald cockroach wasp.
Speaker 1: This one does a similar thing that for the ladybug,
Speaker 1: but it's with cockroaches like that they all have their
Speaker 1: own like like specific breed of other insects that they
Speaker 1: you know, mind control and destroy. So this one lands
Speaker 1: on a cockroach, stabs it when it's fertilized with eggs.
Speaker 1: The wasp the stinger that it stabs it with is
Speaker 1: also a sense organ, so it kind of roots around
Speaker 1: inside the cockroach and touches its brain, and it injects
Speaker 1: a certain kind of venom into the cockroach's brain that
Speaker 1: basically takes away the cockroach is motivation to escape danger
Speaker 1: at all. So the cockroach becomes placid and just follows
Speaker 1: the wats. Well that's a gift, really, right, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean taking away you know, fear, so you know they give,
Speaker 1: they take. But this is where it gets really nasty.
Speaker 1: It leads the cockroach away from where it lives back
Speaker 1: to the wasp layer, lays the egs in it, and
Speaker 1: then what do you think happens? Um, everyone goes through
Speaker 1: separate ways. Unfortunately no, uh, the uh wasp bags hatch
Speaker 1: and burst out of the corporach and kill it. So
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of bursting, more bursting. It's
Speaker 1: a beautiful world, the beautiful para. I mean, I would say,
Speaker 1: you know, we're specifically trying to associate these with the
Speaker 1: vampires from the stream, but I would say that a
Speaker 1: lot of these resonate with the xenomore from Alien. Oh yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1: And it's very very parasitic in that regard. And the
Speaker 1: crazy thing is like is is elaborate as the crigory
Speaker 1: um life cycle is as elaborate as the zenobore f
Speaker 1: life cycle is. You look at some of the the
Speaker 1: the charts showing you various parasitic life cycles and all
Speaker 1: the different hosts they have to go through, and some
Speaker 1: of these are tremendously complex, Like you could never do
Speaker 1: a TV show about them, because everyone would have to
Speaker 1: keep referring to, uh, you know, flash cards to keep
Speaker 1: up with your life style, especially when you get these ones,
Speaker 1: which we didn't we didn't cover that much here, but
Speaker 1: the ones that go from one host to another host
Speaker 1: to another host, so they they they're ultimate end goal.
Speaker 1: For instance, is like a flamingo that they get eaten
Speaker 1: by a cricket or something first, and then they they
Speaker 1: they're inside the cricket, and then the crickets eaten by
Speaker 1: a flamingo or something like that. You know, uh, it
Speaker 1: move on and on and on to get to the
Speaker 1: eventual thing that they can reproduce in yeah, and then
Speaker 1: and then I'm very often they're hacking the mind of
Speaker 1: the host. They're manipulating behavior in order to gain it
Speaker 1: back towards that that that start point or that endpoint. Right, exactly.
Speaker 1: All right, So there you haven't the strain the world
Speaker 1: of parasites, and I'll make sure that the landing page
Speaker 1: for this episode includes links to a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: stuff to blow your mind content about parasites in their
Speaker 1: wonderful ways. Yeah, I was gonna say this research really,
Speaker 1: I think is in the uh golden zone for stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind. There's a lot of previous episodes
Speaker 1: and videos and posts that you've done over the years
Speaker 1: on this, and uh, you know, I would love to
Speaker 1: hear from our listeners as well about their experience with
Speaker 1: these things, whether you know, maybe there's somebody out there
Speaker 1: who's had hookworm, or maybe there's somebody who's had experience
Speaker 1: researching these things and could tell us more about them.
Speaker 1: It really is stuff we're gonna just keep on covering
Speaker 1: because it's fascinating and there's always more research. They were
Speaker 1: continually finding cool, new cool new parasites and new understandings
Speaker 1: without existence sites work. So if you want to tell
Speaker 1: us your stories about these you can contact us on Facebook, Twitter,
Speaker 1: or Tumbler where we are blow the Mind, or you
Speaker 1: can write to us at blow the Mind at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics. Is it how stuff Works? Dot com