#parasites

[6-2-aestheticsofhate]

LET ME EXPLAIN, A SECONDS PAIN

GIVES WAY TO PLEASURES ONLY DREAMED OF

#the magnus archives #tma #jane prentiss #trypophobia #insects #insects tw #parasites #parasites tw #my art #heard this song for the first time a little while ago and have been obsessed w replaying it and thinking abt jane #augh this is pretty messy but i also ended up putting a lot more effort into it than intended #whateverrrr

[hellsitegenetics]

alright, if I was an animal, what animal d’you think I would be. SERIOUS ANSWERS ONLY.

A rooster. A rat. A... a rat. A rat, a rat. You’d be a rat. Jerma, you’re a rat. you’d be a rat... I think you’d be a rat.

(Gayly) I think I’d be a wolf. I think so too... I would be a wolf-lion-hybrid-mix. King of the junjle- junjle but still social, and with it and ferocious

String identified:

agt, a a aa, at aa ’ t . A .

A t. A at. A… a at. A at, a at. ’ a at. a, ’ a at. ’ a at… t ’ a at.

(Ga) t ’ a . t t… a ---. g t - t t ca, a t t a c

Closest match: Schistosoma margrebowiei genome assembly, chromosome: 3 Common name: Blood-fluke

#tumblr genetics #genetics #jerma #asks #requests #sent to me #parasites #blood-fluke #peep the horrors!

[apsciencebydan]

Not A Cat

(Cuterebra buccata, a gorgeous botfly which apparently parasitizes bunnies? So large I thought she was a cicada when I first sighted her!)

One can see how I initially took her for a cicada:

As always, if you're thinking about dropping a comment here which is hating on bugs, move along or get blocked.

#nature #animals #photography #bugblr #science #invertebrates #entomology #diptera #Botflies #Parasites #Tunneling Teddy Bear

[deadthingposting]

As someone who lives in a tourist town I can say truthfully that having "but think about tourism " as a reason for the fucking monarchy is hilarious

My town has one castle we use as a museum, a ferris wheel, some good mountain views, an old train station, couple of expensive restaurants and hotels and lemme tell you every June/July we have thousands of fucks coming here to spend money and we don't have to pay for a family of racists inbred pedophiles to dress in their dead relatives clothes and do bullshit traditional little theaters for no reason

#uk politics #monarchy #royal family #bunch of leeches #parasites #end the monarchy

[strawb3rry-shark]

save me parasites as a metaphor for love,,, save me mold as a metaphor for love,,, save me rot as a metaphor for love,,,

#writing again #personal post !!! #canabalism too but we all know that #parasites #rot #mold

[bogleech]

Many parasites takeover the minds and bodies of insects, spiders or other creatures, making them like zombies. You’ve listed some in spider-ween and other places. Do you know any parasites that take over bees? I know wasps lay their eggs in their larva, but haven’t really found anything about those that pilot a bee’s body.

Strepsipterans! Also frequently just called "Stylops"

These are the weirdest most alien insect group in existence. What you're seeing are the head ends of the mature females; their bodies are just bags of tissue that absorb nutrients from the host, so they no longer have any trace of limbs or wings and their flat little heads no longer have mouths or eyes.

The only reason the female's heads stick out of the host at all is because the head evolved into the end they mate with. The short-lived mature male is a very tiny flying thing (whose anatomy is unlike any other insect alive today - a totally unique type of wing, unique eye arrangement, we have NO idea what these evolved from, except for some loose connections to beetles!) who mates by breaking through the female's featureless armored face with his bladed genitalia and then he dies. And Strepsiptera can be found infecting all sorts of arthropods, even apparently some arachnids, but none of those arthropods really tend to sit still when a little tiny flying man tries to land on them, so the females usually do something to their hosts (we aren't sure what exactly) to make them slower and more complacent. Social Hymenoptera like bees are especially common hosts though, and when a worker bee or wasp is infected by stylops, she actually abandons her colony and her duties for extended periods of time to just perch in one place while the parasite broadcasts its mating pheromones. This is especially eerie from the bee's perspective; a worker bee is a female bee that wasn't allowed to become a queen and isn't "supposed" to be going around mating, but now she's sitting around waiting for a male just like any other bug that wants to be a mom. It's just not a male of her species and she's not the one who gets to reproduce. Is the parasite tapping into buried queen behavior? Does the bee's little brain think it's calling for a drone to help it start a new hive? Or does the parasite just make the bee a lazy slob who stops caring about her hive and just feels like chilling out on a flower all day? We might never know.

Here are those unique eyes of the male for anyone wondering. Not set in a fine multifaceted grid like in other insects, but clustered, still set in their own individual "sockets" like we see in much more ancient arthropods like trilobites! This suggests that Strepsipteran eyes date back to when insects were first beginning to evolve towards true compound eyes, but there still aren't many insects in the fossil record that have anything else in common with these animals. EDIT: oh yeah I forgot to include that these are in the children's book made by @revretch and I!

I did the rough pencil sketch of this page while Rev did the beautiful inks! I felt kids should know about these animals but I tried to explain it in the most kid-friendly way possible.

#biology #parasites #insects

[teloles-and-friends]

Over here we are pro-animals

Allllll animals

Yes even those ones

Every parasite and every bloodsucker

Every disease vector and every pest

No organism is useless and none deserve to be driven to extinction

#just tired of hatred for the less lovable animals #animals #bugs #insects #parasites #zoology #parasitology #biology #ecology

[bonefall]

Warrior Bites: Dietary Needs

[ID: A fish carcass, bird carcass, and mouse carcass on a stone slab.]

Are you wondering how much prey a Clan needs a day? What they should eat to stay healthy? Why food processing is useful at all? All the answers to these questions and more, contained within a general guide to dietary needs for your Warrior Cats!

As an obligate carnivore, a cat's entire diet revolves around processing meat. More specifically, the ideal diet should be 55% protein, 45% fats, about 1% to 3% carbs, with the remainder being various micro-nutrients. You can expect the average 10-pound warrior to need 350 calories per day, about 3.5 mice on average.

I've also included a section talking about obesity, which dives into how canon's depiction of it is both harmful fatphobia and wouldn't make sense from a cat perspective. It also discusses obesity in realistic cats; and how you're free to choose the realism on that aspect.

Below the cut;

Caloric Intake

Nutrition

Food Processing

On Obesity

Caloric Intake

The general rule for how much a cat needs to eat is that an active, non-neutered tom will need about 35 calories per pound of their own body weight, per day, just to remain the weight they are.

That means that the average warrior, assuming they are 10 pounds, will need 350 calories a day.

Kittens, pregnant and nursing cats, and large warriors will need to eat more than average. Neutered cats, elders, and clerics/medcats will eat less. There are calculators online for determining how much an individual will need, but you can estimate how much an entire Clan will need just by taking 350 and multiplying it by population!

Assuming the average population is about 30 cats, that's 10,500 calories to feed a Clan for a day! To put that in perspective, that many calories would feed 7 large humans. If you felt like fighting a group of angry cats to steal their day's worth of mice, I mean.

Generally speaking, land prey will have a caloric value around 5 calories per gram. Aquatic prey is significantly lower, around 4 calories per gram. Birds will be just below 6 calories per gram. To find out how many cats a piece of prey will feed, or how many pieces a cat will need that day, take the category and multiply by the prey's weight in grams.

So for example, the average house mouse is 20 grams and it is land prey, meaning its caloric value is around 100 calories! A warrior will need 3 and a half mice a day to stay healthy, and a Clan will need 105 mice daily to support 30 cats.

105 mice may seem like a lot, but remember that a wild rabbit is 1,800 grams on average which means 9,000 calories. 2 big pieces of prey will feed the whole Clan, with leftovers.

Those estimates include every part of the animal. Cats eat organs, small bones, and even skin. Skeletal muscle, or "fillets" in reference to fish, is so low in calories that it's typically somewhere between 1 kcal to 1.5 kcal per gram. That's what you're buying in the supermarket; but wild animals don't usually cut their food into choice strips.

(unless you're writing a clan that does food processing of course!)

QUICK FACTS

Average warrior will need 35 calories per pound of weight

10 pound warrior needs 350 calories a day

350 x 30 cats = 10,500 calories to feed a Clan for a single day

Birds provide the most calories per gram, land prey the middlemost, and aquatic prey the least.

Calculate calories in prey by taking the weight, converting to grams, and multiply by 4, 5, or 6 depending on broad category.

If you're having trouble feeding a Clan on small animals, look at bigger prey like rabbits and trout.

Muscle fillets are inferior to organ meats and have a much lower caloric value.

Nutrition

Not all food is the same. The more important thing to consider about any particular meal is NOT its calorie count, but its nutritional value. This is especially important to cats because protein is not stored as fat. If the body has no immediate use for it, it's flushed out.

Since cats should not eat more than 3% carbs, ALL of their fat stores will need to come from fat.

The ideal piece of meat would be at least 55% protein and 45% fat. Every individual species will have a different ratio, and more importantly, individual cuts will have a different ratio.

Skeletal muscle has a higher ratio of protein to fat. Organ meat, also sometimes called "offal," will have a more balanced ratio. That said, nearly all meat skews towards protein. PURE fat is very hard to find on the sorts of animals Clan cats hunt, and must be carefully divided, collected, or processed to make sure all warriors are getting proper nutrition.

I'll be going more in-depth with dietary fat at some other time, as this guide is meant to just be an overview! Just know that some Clans will need to eat MORE food to stay healthy because of this.

Cats need more than the "macronutrients" to stay healthy. They can't JUST rely on the juiciest cuts of meat to keep their health intact, they also need several vitamins and minerals to support their body functions, and avoid getting a deficiency.

Here's some of the important micronutrients, where to get them, and what happens they don't get enough;

Vitamin A: Livers, mealworms, eggs This is one of the most important micronutrients in a cat's body, used for practically everything. Without this, their coats will grow dull, and their joints stiff, and they'll start to go night-blind. In a severe state, they'll start to lose the ability to heal skin lacerations and die. Pregnant cats and kittens need more of this than usual, but it IS also possible to get vitamin A poisoning from getting too concentrated of a dose.

Calcium: Bones, eggs With a calcium deficiency, the warrior will feel stiff and sore, and experience painful muscle spasms. Most cats will simply crunch the bones of small prey and never have to worry about this, but if your cats cook or scavenge, they have to be told to NEVER eat the bones of a roasted bird. Because bird bones are hollow and cooking makes them brittle, they can splinter and cause fatal internal bleeding.

Thiamine: Trout, boar meat, mealworms, eggs Called a Fish Seizure because raw carp and raw bream contains thiaminase, which will destroy thiamine in the body. Lack of thiamine will cause neurological issues, such as the aforementioned seizures, general confusion, memory loss, and muscle weakness. This can be counterracted by eating trout, which is so high in thiamine that there's a theory that carp evolved it specifically to eat salmonids better.

Potassium: Trout, boar meat, mealworms, eggs As cats get older, they begin needing a lot more potassium for their bodies. It's a very common micronutrient found in most meat, but elders should get the first bite of special snacks "out of respect" which helps keep their potassium level up. Without it, they become very weak.

i feel like that evil struthiomimus from land before time with how many times i typed eggs

QUICK FACTS

The ideal ratio of a cut of meat is 55% protein 45% fat

Organ meat > Muscle meat

Micronutrients are important

But micronutrients can also cause poisoning if, somehow, they're too concentrated (very hard to come across concentrated micronutrients without the science of chemistry tho. Like if a cat swallowed a vitamin gummy.)

Food Processing

"Food Processing" is when you do something to your food before you eat it. Just a little bit of care is going to go a LONG WAY when it comes to health of the warrior.

Cats that eat raw meat the way canon warriors do are almost guaranteed to get worms. Roundworms, hookworms, and tapeworms are all passed through the infected tissue of rodent prey, and in fish, roundworms, tapeworms, and flukes can pass through raw meat.

All parasites do something a little different, but most digestive worms aren't fatal unless the cat is sick or a kitten. However, nearly ALL of them screw around with digestion, making the cat need to eat more just to stay healthy, or causing stomach irritation. Some of them can even pass in milk, infecting a suckler's nursing kits.

The easiest way to reduce this kind of infection is simply to slice the prey open from mouth-to-butt, Tigerstar-style, and hook and lift out the GI tract before eating. There's nothing in that worth eating raw anyway. It can just be discarded, or cleaned out and used to case tiny sausages! But it's only a reduction; there's still a risk of catching worms from raw meat.

There's also always the possibility of getting salmonella poisoning.

Many believe that cats are immune to this, but that's not true! Carnivores just have a shorter GI tract than omnivores and herbivores, so salmonella spends less time in their gut and ergo has less chance of causing an infection. It still happens, ESPECIALLY when cats hunt songbirds.

Nothing can be done about salmonella in raw meat, besides eating it as quickly as possible. It's innate to the bodies of birds and reptiles, and usually found on raw eggs too.

Some animals are small enough to be dried and carried around as rations, such as minnows or grasshoppers. Others could be sliced up into strips, and marinated in spices like valerian or catmint for an extra boost of energy. It could also be worthwhile to cut the pelt off a particularly soft animal, like a mole, to dry and keep as bedding material.

All of the above examples of food processing are possible without fire, but if your cats DO have fire, they will have a DRASTIC increase to the quality of their health.

Such as;

Cooking will almost completely eliminate those foodborne parasites. Their eggs don't survive extreme heat.

No more salmonella poisoning! GONE! Cooking is the only way to eliminate this!

It can increase caloric absorption from anywhere between 20% to 50%. Our example warrior who needed 3.5 mice a day could suddenly need one less mouse; and even a meager 20% drop in how much the entire Clan needs saves 2,400 calories a day. 24 whole mice!

I HAVE TO STRESS HOW BIG THAT IS. You save anywhere from 2/10 to 5/10 successful kills.

Thiaminase is destroyed by cooking, making bream and carp healthier and reducing "fish seizures."

It allows for fats to be processed and stored as tallow, lard, and oil, so it can be added to other dishes to make them both healthier and tastier.

Most food preservation requires fire in some way; by heating, jellying, boiling, etc. The only other two ways to reliably store food is by having access to a ton of salt, which is hard for most non-coastal clans to acquire, or vinegar, which is so acidic it's a notorious cat-repellent.

While cooking can also destroy some micronutrients, its benefits FAR outweigh any potential "strengths" of raw food. Destroying micronutrients is also not always a bad thing; as TOO MANY micronutrients can cause poisoning. Fire-using Clans will be more likely to "seek" micronutrients than non-fire Clans as a result, though they probably won't recognize the science behind a hankering!

QUICK FACTS

Worms. Basically unavoidable if your cat's eating like a canon warrior.

Some parasites can spread through milk.

Slicing and lifting out the GI tract can significantly reduce the chance of catching worms.

Salmonella can only be eliminated with cooking

Cooking will drastically increase the quality of a Clan's health, if your cats are advanced enough to figure out fire.

Warriors need to hunt a LOT less prey, and can store that prey, if they have fire.

Fire-using Clans will intentionally try to put more types of food in their diets and get 'cravings.'

On Obesity

Warrior Cats is not a realistic series. The boundary that any particular writer draws between humans and warrior cats is completely arbitrary. The series itself follows no sense of realistic genetics, regularly shows the cats using herbs that would poison them, and gives the characters human-centric morals like monogamy and paternal involvement.

So when it comes to being fatness in your project, please keep that in mind. You do not need too follow realistic cat weight distribution, if that's not what your project about. That said, let me tell you about humans vs cats in this department!

Humans have a massive diversity of weight distribution, with varied genetic predispositions to gaining and losing weight. The shame, bullying, and medical discrimination that comes with fatphobia is a LOT more harmful than being fat itself, and the causes of the "obesity crisis" are ridiculously more complicated than "ppl r snorking 2 much food".

Realistic cats aren't the same way.

When REAL cats are fat, that's VERY bad. It's a sign they are being fed the wrong things by humans, or live somewhere that they are able to eat what they shouldn't. They just don't have that same diversity in fat distribution that humans do. Because of how adipose tissue secretes certain hormones, feline obesity is like a chronic inflammatory disease which can cause arthritis, bladder stones, hepatic lipidosis, and more.

But with that in mind, fatness should be perceived very differently even in the most realistic settings. In comparison to humans;

It is harder for a wild cat to put on weight. Most of what they're eating is raw protein, actively trying to fill the 45% of daily fat intake they need to stay healthy. Protein isn't stored as fat, it's immediately discarded by the body if there is no use for it. A cat would need to be taking an INSANE amount of prey to start becoming dangerously overweight. Housecats are often fed human food, which has carbohydrates. Low-quality cat food will also use carbs as filler. High carb food is VERY bad for them, since they're only supposed to have 3% carbs at most. This is one of the reasons why it's easy for pet cats to become overweight.

Realistic cats don't look start looking overweight until they are significantly obese. Most of their fat is stored around their ribs and internally, unlike humans with our thick hips and round bellies, and they are covered in a naturally sagging pelt of fur. It's not as obvious with them. Visually, weight will be noticed best from a bird's eye perspective, unlike humans where it's apparent at every angle.

Putting on the fat that CAN be acquired is ridiculously important 3.5 raw, whole mice a day, per cat, are needed to fill their basic dietary requirements. There are going to be days or months especially during winter where they might be below that number, and that stored fat is going to be lifesaving. Bulking up is actually a big deal!

So not only is how canon treats overweight characters full of malice, it's full of lazy malice. It makes no sense from a realistic standpoint for wild cats to develop an association between fatness and greed or laziness. It's important, hard work for them to acquire it!

Though the Clans are notoriously xenophobic and kittypets are more likely to be overweight, it still doesn't make sense from a realistic cat perspective to be fatphobic in the same way as canon. It's more likely they'd see fat housecats as having "unearned" weight given to them by humans, like they're cheating, or they might be disdainful of how much junk food they eat, or pitiable because it's a sign of a bad twoleg... or just "sour grapes" variety jealousy ☕.

Bottom line is that there's a LOT you can do here which is better than canon's vicious bullying. The writers just lifted British cultural disdain for fat people and put it into the books. They simply did not think it through.

So please do what they didn't, and just put a little extra thought into how your project is going to view fatness! Consider if fatphobia is even a theme you need in your text.

As stated, you do not even have to write weight in your cats as being realistic in this way! I encourage you to pick and choose what's most fun and fitting for your own work. I personally give my characters a more human weight distribution, simply because I want to spite canon and be more body-positive. I am a fat people and you can take Bumble's big chunky bod from my cold, dead hands.

You can choose to make your work however you'd like, and now with this guide, you can have an easy reference for what your cats should eat! Thank you, StarClan, for this prey <3

#Clan culture #warrior cats #Fatphobia #Cw fatphobia #tw fatphobia #Nutrition #Prey #Food #Bonefall's Clan Culture #Food guide #Nutrition guide #Gamer-the-kittypet art #Also if there are any devs or modders out there who wanted to add food values to any games that involve cats #Please feel free to use this guide as all my work is open-source #I can explain how I came to those values and work out some more accurate numbers if you end up needing them #animal death #cw animal death #tw animal death #cw parasites #tw parasites #parasites #Warrior bites

[great-and-small]

Please enjoy some valentine greetings from the animal world- if you decide to pass them out to coworkers/classmates make sure you have enough for everyone ❤️

1. Satin bowerbird

2. American alligator

3. Prairie vole

4. Marine flatworm (genus Pseudobiceros)

5. Bedbug

6. Galapagos hawk

#Valentine’s Day #bedbugs #funny #biology #parasites #animals

[snailspng]

Random PNGs, part 152.

(1. Caterpillar brooch with pearls/parasites (?), 2. Art Deco glass paste necklace, 3. Artichoke doll, 4. "A Basket of Strawberries" by William Hammer, 5. Raspberry illustration by Tom Curry, 6. Sawfly larvae eating a leaf, 7. Sunflower, 8. Heinz Pickle Bookmark from 1900-1910, 9. "Longbird in an apple tree" by Carol Long)

#png #pngs #transparent #moodboard #artboard #imageboard #sticker #stickers #collage #polyvore #shoplook #152 #parasites

[cipheramnesia]

It is possible I'm leaning too hard into the concept of a parasite POV protagonist which explores what it means to make yourself into the shape of another body (re the starfish comic and a bunch of bits in it), when the body in question is a trans woman who has undergone a severe amount of involuntary biomechanical body modifications, in an experimental attempt to utilize her poorly understood mutated nervous system as a kind of living weapon against a parallel universe which is inadvertantly unraveling our own world in isolated but escalating highly destructive incidents involving sudden explosive release of energy where they intersect.

But when the events proved fruitless, leaving her wracked with trauma and metastasized cancer, they threw her into a care home / prison where she died of the aforementioned cancer, and this is all in service of answering the question of where The Body which becomes the host originates. However, being as the parasitoid mutant blind millipede colony does not enter a corpse with a template, and merely threads into whatever pre-existing physical and neurological systems are part of the host corpse as-is, not only is the colony collectively entrapping itself within the boundaries of a host body, but it is operating on the assumptions that all the surgical and hormonal alterations, as well as the cancer, are a part of the body which they should also include in the neural network they extend themselves into.

Meaning the actual outcome is the world as seen through a parasite colony which, as it consumes and partially replicates both nervous system and brain of the host, believes itself to inhabit the world as a human, while in actuality it is oblivious to the fact that it now exists as an expression of the traumatic abuse which an authoritarian state under threat will inflict on a human body, as well as the cancerous expression of consequences of this abuse, all stemming from a body which, in a world facing an existential crisis, has an unconventional non-human nervous system which allows it to engage directly with an alternate universe.

Which all plays out because the apathetic management of the care home sold her corpse to a religious order / conservative activism group dedicated to the preservation of the mutant parasitic millipede colonies out of the fervent religious belief the colonies represent the unending cycle of life from life and life from death, and also because the millipede colonies act as natural predators to the Dalton County Dump Roundworm Infestation, which has been taking over large portions of the country via its exponential growth and lack of any competition. So now I have a completely sensible background derived for the parasite colony protagonist who is also fifty percent of the dead trans woman they consumed in the process of infesting her corpse, who is now a kind of holy relic to the temple which infected her, but who also wants retribution for the horrific abuse she suffered, while simultaneously experiencing her twisted and broken body as the correct form as derived by the parasite infestation, which is also her.

Simple.

#long post #parasites #girl bites god #body horror #millipede

[one-in-boots]

Me and the bad bitch I pulled by failing to properly defend myself against parasitic organisms.

#do enough people know how mycoheterotrophic plants work? #let me know if this is doesn't make sense #cortinarius #ghost pipe #196 #shitposting #murdering babies #funny #mycology #mycoposting #mushrooms #fungi #parasites

[hellsitegenetics]

this valentine’s day i would like to profess my undying, ardent love for the callistephus chinensis (china aster)! the flower that contributed to me giving myself my name!!

not only are they a part of the (superior in my opinion) family of asteraceae, but also the genus’ (callistephus) etymology is derived from the greek words “kalli-” meaning “beautiful” and “stephos” meaning crown. they have beautiful chrysanthemum-esque blooms and come in all sorts of colours (my favourites being purple and white).

straying away from taxonomy a bit, asters in general are one of the birth flowers for september (my birth month!). they symbolise hope, faith and wisdom. and according to greek mythology, astraea (“star maiden”: goddess of purity, justice and innocence) cried because there weren't enough stars in the sky and when her tears hit the earth, they caused asters to bloom! continuing to follow the greek myth, she was the last goddess to live amongst the humans after the golden age, symbolising the decline of hope for humanity along with the decline of the ages. she left and became the constellation virgo i believe!

some more fun fun facts, asters have a most frequently observed number of n = 9 haploid chromosomes (2n = 18 for diploid). the numerology of the word “aster” also happens to be nine and guess what! september is the 9th month of the year! is it obvious i really like the number 9? almost as much as i love asters <3

String identified:

t at’ a t g, at t cat c (ca at)! t tat ctt t gg a!!

t a t a at t ( ) a ataca, t a t g’ (cat) tg t g “a-” ag “at” a “t” ag c. t a at cat- a c a t c ( at g a t).

tag aa ta a t, at ga a t t t ( t t!). t , at a . a accg t g tg, ataa (“ta a”: g t, tc a cc) c ca t 't g ta t a ta t t at, t ca at t ! ctg t t g t, a t at g t agt t a at t g ag, g t c at ag t t c t ag. t a ca t ctat g !act, at a a t t = 9 a c (2 = 18 ). t g t “at” a a t a g at! t t 9t t t a! t a t 9? at a c a at <3

Closest match: Caligus rogercresseyi isolate FCH chromosome 9 Common name: Sea louse

#tumblr genetics #genetics #valentines day #asks #requests #sent to me #thisisasteresque #flowers #plants #china aster #parasites #ocean #sea louse

[antiqueanimals]

The developmental cycle of the Lancet liver fluke (Dicrocoelium dendriticum)

Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia: vol. 1 - Lower Animals. Written by Dr. Bernhard Grzimek. 1974.

Internet Archive

#parasites #flatworms #flukes #lancet liver fluke #mammals #ungulates #caprids #sheep #cervids #deer #bugs #gastropods #snails #insects #ants

[typhlonectes]

Wolves Keep Brain Worm–Spreading Deer Away From Moose Populations in Minnesota

Wildlife managers now face the challenge of creating conservation plans for all three species while maintaining balance between predator and prey animals

In Minnesota, moose used to roam the boreal forests by the thousands. The population had 8,800 individuals in 2006, and since then, numbers in the northeastern part of the state alone have fallen by 64 percent, reports Liz Scheltens for Vox.  Warmer, shorter winters, tick infestations, liver issues, wolves, and parasites all contribute to declines in remnant Minnesota moose populations, reports Dennis Anderson for the Star Tribune. However, the biggest threat may be migrating white-tailed deer. As deer entered moose habitats, they brought brainworm, a fatal parasite to moose. While harmless to white-tailed deer, the parasite (Parelaphostrongylus tenuis) causes disorientation, extreme weakness, and the inability to stand in moose. It may be a critical factor as to why Minnesota's northern moose populations have declined significantly...

Read more:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/plummeting-minnesota-moose-populations-may-recover-with-help-from-wolves-180979484

#moose #ecology #climate #climate science #parasites #ungulate #mammal #animals #nature #north america #wildlife science #science

[deepwaterwritingprompts]

Text: There’s a second house, hiding in this one. I see the unfamiliar rooms through the cracks by the hinges, and keyholes. I don’t trust its dark red walls, its emptiness, suggesting parasitic hunger.

#creative writing #writing prompts #haunted houses #parasites #settings #horror