God's Mistakes: The Eye Worm

To be fair, there's a handful of other parasitic worms that do things just as horrible as the topic of this entry: the loa loa. And I'll probably pick them up in the future. But the loa loa gets special recognition since the Wikipedia article on David Attenborough, host of the Planet Earth series, includes this quote in his views on creationism: "My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind. And [I ask them], 'Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy'."

Hopefully it wasn't made in His image

So the wonderful life cycle of this little bastard starts when microfilariae produced by adult worms get ingested by a fly, where they manage to stay alive and develop through its larval phases and station themselves in the fly's proboscis. Then the parasite is transferred to a human once the fly bites someone. The flies that commonly carry the nematode, the mango fly and deer fly, are also not really upstanding citizens, given that they transfer the parasite by slicing a painful cut in the skin and licking the blood. So thanks for that, mango fly and deer fly. You assholes.

Maybe leave a tip or something for your "blood meal," guys. At least don't leave a goddamn parasitic worm.

Once in a human, the larva parties around in the subcutaneous tissue for awhile until it grows up into a big, evil adult. They then decide to feed on the vitals in various parts of the human body, including the spinal fluid, lungs, and blood. The cycle keeps going when another fly slices you open to drink your infected blood and transfer the microfilariae to someone else.

The loa loa is also commonly known as the "eye worm." You know, because it likes to infect your eye.

AHHHHHHHH

These worms range in length from 2 centimeters to a whopping 7 centimeters, which doesn't seem all that bad when compared with, I don't know, the Woolworth Building, but it seems awfully big when it's in your friggin' eye. Infection generally results in pain and cysts and swelling when the worm is elsewhere, and the unpleasant sensation of a worm crawling over your eyeball when it's up in that region. Assuming it wants to hang out somewhere else, it's likely going to be in your joints and cause them to be rather painful. And if it happens to die inside you, the body becomes a waste product and promptly causes abscesses and pus to sprout around its grave. It's kind of like how I imagine Jerry Falwell's cemetery plot looks.


Overall, some 12 million people are affected by loa loa infestation at any time, usually in about 11 nations of Africa. Often the treatment is taken through diethylcarbamazine, and if that sounds like a scary thing it's because it's one of those "side effects include death" compounds. Another option is cocaine. No, really. Apparently the idea is to paralyze them with a solution of coke and then remove them. So now you know for sure, though I'm sure many of you suspected it: Charlie Sheen was swarming with disgusting worms.

Not so winning now, are you Wall Street?

Then again, I'm pretty sure there's no real unpleasant way of getting a worm out of your eyeball, since the options seem relegated to a) the worm slithers out over your face or b) the worm makes its way back down into your body and exits some other way. There is of course, another possibility: having a doctor evict the unwanted guest. It's possible to pop a few 10-syllable drug drops onto your peeper and make a little incision and use some forceps to get it out. There's at least one video of the surgical procedure to remove the worm here, though it's kind of telling that it comes with a sidebar of a ton of gross-out stuff. Maybe just a picture from the procedure will be a little more tolerable, since-

FUCK.

Seriously, loa loa, go to hell.

God's Mistakes: the Nazi Hornet

When it comes to religion, I subscribe to a savage mixture of agnostic/deist/Universalist/United Church of Christ ideas. That is, I believe spirituality can play an important role in one's life, and the questions of a grand Creator are quite compelling when it comes to how the Universe exploded out of nothingness and where we go when we die and such, and some of the lessons of Jesus Christ and other figures in the Bible can be quite relevant to the way someone leads their own life. It also means that I don't believe that an Almighty God would be terribly concerned with the sex lives of six billion inhabitants on one tiny planet in the vast cosmos, or that He wants you to burn any Harry Potter book you can get ahold of, or that he shot down the space shuttle Columbia for daring to brush up against his outer veranda.

Whether the creation of life on earth was by a deity or a chance meeting of elements and electricity, the idea of infallibility in such works seems unlikely. I think I remember a Bible chapter in which God was on the verge of destroying humanity out of annoyance, and then there was that whole story with the ark where he nearly did wipe the slate clean. Doesn't sound like the work of someone who made perfect decisions the first time around.

Per Gary Larson, "God as a kid tries to make a chicken in his room"

Humans have been something of a mixed bag. There have been great men and women who advance knowledge and art and are generally major boons to the species, and then there are the sociopaths who spend most of their lives hooked up to the penal system after gunning down innocent victims. Some species out there...well, they may be a part of the planet's delicate ecosystem somehow, but we've already lost the dodo and passenger pigeon and several other creatures, and the rest of us are all still cranking along. So here are some I'm theorizing may have been a mistake, and if you're a mad scientist who can make some sort of ray to get rid of them, be my guest.

This entry looks at the Vespa mandarinia, or Asian giant hornet.

HOLY SHIT

Hornets are a subgroup of wasps, and though I've never been a fan of the lot of them I think I can safely say that the Asian giant hornet is the worst of the bunch. It's painful enough when a European hornet decides to jab a stinger into you, but these beasts apparently have the muscle and stinger length to put some real hurt on. The common description of the feeling, given by a Japanese entomologist, is that it's like a hot nail being driven into your body. As if that isn't enough, the hornet has a higher-than-normal concentration of the pain-stimulating neurotransmitter acetylcholine, other chemical weapons powerful enough to dissolve human flesh, and of course the lack of a barb for limitless stinging capability. This little jerk is concentrated in the western regions of Asia, where it apparently accounts for more human deaths by animal in Japan than any of the other fauna there. Unfortunately, it has also found Europe to its liking as well in recent years.

If it looks like you should be fighting it in a video game, that's generally not a good sign.

So far, it's a terrifying thing of hurt, but that can apply to a lot of creatures. If we leave it alone it will at least use those giant-looking mandibles to cut down on voracious farm pests or the mosquitoes that spread disease, right?



Oh.

Yes it turns out that the Asian giant hornet has a liking for honeybees and like to swoop in and eradicate hives like they're the helicopter gunships in Avatar or something. It's pretty much a full-on genocide, an unfair fight where they brutally slaughter thousands of bees in minutes. All those nice bees that pollinate flowers and produce honey and the like, gone. The hornets then proceed to rob the hive of all of its valuable resources, including the larvae. They can't digest solid protein, so what happens next, according to Wikipedia, is that they "chew them into a paste and feed them to their larvae. The larvae produce a clear liquid, vespa amino acid mixture, which the adults consume." Which means the hornets gnash infant bees to death with mandibles still bearing the decapitated remains of the larva's parents. And then feed it to their own children only to steal from them as well.

There's that saying, "Karma is a bitch." And there may or may not be the saying, "Burning to death is not the way you want to go." Let's watch the next video.



Assuming there's a whole good vs. evil balance going on in the cosmos, this means that the proportional response for the hornets' crimes is that if they enter the beehive when it's not their day, they're going to get slowly and inexorably burned to death, and/or suffocated. How the bees figured out that this could work, hurting the hornet but not them, is another fascinating aspect of nature.

The Asian giant hornet, ladies and gentlemen. It commits mass murder against a more productive insect, painfully destroys infant versions of that insect, might kill you or me (or at least give one bastard of a sting), looks creepy as hell, and seems to contribute absolutely nothing to the planet. I think this one definitely slipped past the quality control department.