Oddities in the animal kingdom

[Fishteacher73]

Here's another one, not so much as the organism, but the whole process of this parasite, Dracunculus medinensis. The condition of having this parasite is called dracunculiasis. This is a parasitic worm in sub-Saharan Africa infects people through the water system.

Adult female Dracunculus worms emerge from the skin of Infected persons annually. Persons with worms protruding through the skin may enter sources of drinking water and unwittingly allow the worm to release larvae into the water. These larvae are ingested by fresh water copepods ("water fleas") where these develop into the infective stage in 10-14 days. Persons become infected by drinking water containing the water fleas harboring the infective stage larvae of Dracunculus medinensis.

Once inside the body, the stomach acid digests the water flea, but not the Guinea worm. These larvae find their way to the small intestine, where they penetrate the wall of the intestine and pass into the body cavity. During the next 10-14 months, the female Guinea worm grows to a full size adult 60-100 centimeters (2-3 feet) long and as wide as a cooked spaghetti noodle, and migrates to the site where she will emerge, usually the lower limbs.

A blister develops on the skin at the site where the worm will emerge. This blister causes a very painful burning sensation and it will eventually (within 24-72 hours) rupture. For relief, persons will immerse the affected limb into water, or may just walk in to fetch water. When someone with a Guinea worm ulcer enters the water, the adult female releases a milky white liquid containing millions of immature larvae into the water, thus contaminating the water supply. For several days after it has emerged from the ulcer, the female Guinea worm is capable of releasing more larvae whenever it comes in contact with water.

Here's a link with some more info: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dpd/parasi...unculiasis.htm

[Tormod]

Gee, I love this thread!

[alxian]

yummy. . .

*barf

so.. when on vacation remember to boil your water.. how about your [queazy] pork taco?

http://www.rense.com/general9/brain.htm

[Fishteacher73]

There's always the botfly, Dermatobia hominis. It likes to inject an egg into the victim (humans among them) it bites. The egg then develops through the pupa, larva, etc. stages until it is an adult botfly, at which point it burrows its way out (at about 1" long) from the skin!
Fun...Now take good care of your pet Timmy...We want your botfly to grow up big and strong, don't we?

[bumab]

I like the tube worm Osedax. With the aid of symbiotic bacteria, it eats whale bones on the bottom of the deep ocean. All the worms are females, the males are microscopic and live inside the females their entire lives, many males per female. It's a pretty cool looking worm.

http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/art...7/29/worms.php

[Fishteacher73]

Those wacky critters....

[TeleMad]

These are the kind of things I was fascinated by when I took zoology in college. Before that, I had a picture of animals as the normal lion, elephant, dolphin, cat, mouse, snake, etc. Then I started learning about all these oddball creatures - seastars with a water vascular system, nematodes that reproduce by splitting themselves in half and the having each half regenerate its missing parts, flukes and trichina worms, and so on - and was fascinated.

[Fishteacher73]

Pehaps not an odd organism, but truely odd none the less is the teratoma (from Latin: monster tumor). A specific type of tumor in humans that often stem from either the ovaries or testicles. What makes these tumors odd is twhat they develop. Some grow hair and teeth others secrete the human hormones such as the "pregnancy hormone", HCG, or thyroxine, a hormone produced by the thyroid.

Creepy....

[TeleMad]

Saw something interesting last night in a National Geographic show called Spider Power. They showed a spider called Porsche (pronounced por-sha, not sure of the spelling or if it is the technical name or just a nickname) that, despite having a typical-for-a-spider puny, tiny brain, showed signs of thought in its prey-stalking behavior. "Porsche" hunts other spiders. They showed it attempt to climb onto another spider's web for a direct attack but the web was too weak. So "Porsche" changed tactics and instead strummed the web to mimic a distressed insect entangled in it. Though this tactic worked earlier in the show for "Porsche", it didn't here. So "Porsche" changed tactics yet again. She appeared to walk away but actually was taking a circuitous route to get behind and above the spider web. Once there, "Porsche" spun out a single strand of silk and slowly lowered herself down to just above the other spider, then pounced.

I've heard of the many uses of webs but had never seen them video taped. A few of the more interesting ones:

1) One spider spins a catch net and holds it with it's forward limbs; when an insect walks beneath it, it takes the web and throws it on the prey, sort of like a person holding a blanket with two hands over a cat and then trapping the cat in the blanket and wrapping it up.

2) Another spider shoots its web at its prey: spiderman style. But there's more...the silk itself is toxic.

3) The Bollus (<-spelling? Bolas?) spider spins a single strand of silk down below it then secretes a sticky "glue" that runs down and forms a droplet at the end. The Bollus spider then emits a pheromone that mimics that of a moth. When another moth is attracted, the spider starts swirling it's single-stranded glue trap around in the air until it hits its target. The stuck moth is then reeled in, and as with most spiders' prey, injected the paralyzing venom and then wrapped up in silk, alive, for later consumption.

[Turtle]

___There is no more dynamically odd creature for me than the Spider. No human attempt to reproduce web has suceded to date.
___Spiders use web to fly, capture, build housing, & protect eggs as well as many other uses, some of which Telemad mentioned. In addition, they make a special kind of web that 'glows' with ultraviolet light to lure insects; it is an imitastion of certain flowers which also glow in UV.
___The patterns on some spiders' backs mimic other creatures as well as plants.
___Spiders web is many times the tensile strength of any 'fiber' synthetically produced.