Author: Kevin Dickinson / Source: Big Think
- Animals utilize shocking capacities in an effort to survive and pass on their genes.
- We look at five such gruesome scenarios to see how nature is red in more than tooth and claw.
- Halloween monsters don’t have anything on Mother Nature.
It’s October, and with Halloween just a few days away, ’tis the season to enjoy a good scare.
Pop culture overruns with monsters and miscreants looking to maim, maul, and otherwise gut hapless bystanders, and one reason we indulge in these terrors is that they can thrill us entirely within the realm of the imagined.Imagined, that is, for us.
Many of our favorite frights existed in the natural world long before storytellers repackaged them for our entertainment. Stories we associate with creep shows play out every day, as animals utilize shocking capacities in an effort to survive and pass on their genes.
Nature is indeed red in tooth and claw, but turns out, teeth and claws are some of the more docile adaptations in the evolutionary arsenal.
Chest-bursting parasites
(Photo from Wikimedia)
An ichneumon wasp lays its eggs inside a caterpillar.
In the movie Alien, the titular alien begins its lifecycle as a parasite embedded in a man’s chest before bursting forth in bloody fashion. If an ichneumon wasp could comprehend this scene, it would be flabbergasted — not by the violence but by the alien’s lack of efficiency.
The ichneumon wasp’s life cycle is strikingly similar to the alien’s. A female ichneumon seeks out a host for her young, usually a , and uses her syringe-like ovipositor to inject the creature with eggs. When the eggs hatch in their unwilling nursery, they begin devouring it from the inside out.
Unlike the alien, the ichneumon larvae’s approach is surgical. They leave essential organs like the heart for last in order to keep their host alive, and therefore fresher, longer.
In his essay Nonmoral Nature, Stephen Jay Gould notes that the ichneumon wasp was a major challenge for 19th-century naturalists trying to reconcile the notion of a benevolent God with the brutal realities of nature. No less than Charles Darwin, Gould cites, found the ichneumon as rendering the two ideas incompatible:
I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.
Mind-controlling protozoans
(Photo from Wikimedia)
The slug-looking Toxoplasma gondii are basically extraterrestrial brainwashers living in our backyards.
Mind control is a darling fear for storytellers. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, arguably the first true horror movie, tells the story of a hypnotist who controls a somnambulist for murder. Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters is about parasitic slugs from outer space that control their victims through their nervous systems. And let’s not forget how the Ludovico Technique made use of poor old Ludwig Van.
Interestingly, of pop culture’s many mind control methods, Heinlein may have come the closest to reality — that is, if you’re a rat.
Rats typically avoid smells of cat urine (for obvious reasons). But when afflicted with Toxoplasma gondii, slug-looking protozoans, the rat’s limbic system becomes rewired. T. gondii not only represses the rat’s natural fear of cat urine but replaces it with urges of sexual attraction. The rat is driven to seek out the odor in the hope to procreate, but comes face-to-face with a…
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