Creepy Wikipedia

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A fediverse community for curating Wikipedia articles that are oddly fascinating, eerily unsettling, or make you shiver with fear and disgust

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Leucochloridium paradoxum - Parasitic worm that infects snails, manipulating their eye stalks to resemble caterpillars which attracts birds to eat them (en.wikipedia.org)

submitted 2 months ago by decadentrebel to c/creepywikipedia

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

After the bird eat them, they live in the bird's ass, propagating by laying eggs in the bird's poop, and the cycle begin anew.

This is probably the most sophisticated parasite I've ever known.

[–] frankenswine 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

so you never heard of toxoplasma?

[–] decadentrebel 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think you're just focusing on the pooping cycle. The part where the parasite possesses the snail and creates this elaborate display with the eyes to draw its real intended host/target is what's fascinating.

[–] frankenswine 1 points 2 months ago

i don't think so (: toxoplasma IIRC alters a host's behavior in favor of cats, so that it can infect those - since cats are the only ones it can reproduce in. not as colorful and funky as the exapmle here, but similarly clever/complex