A Halloween Story

So they say that humans make such good mothers. I think we're terribly selfish when it comes to raising our young. We hardly ever die for our children.

Sure, we carry them for nine months. Which is a long time, both in terms of average gestation periods and just in terms of time itself. There are animals that are pregnant longer, of course, but there are a lot more that aren't. We can only have one at a time--usually--which just seems...inefficient. Oh, sure, there's the trade-offs between lots of offspring and a few better-cared for ones, but on a level that's more purely illogical, I think that more matters. Matters most, even, maybe.

But there are animals that do so much more. Salmon die to breed, after all. Like all semelparous animals, they give up their lives for their offspring. Their bodies start to decay as they move upstream. They'll beat themselves to death against dams, trying to get to where they can spawn. They fight to die, because before they die they lay their eggs. That next generation is the primary imperative. They know that they'll die either way, no matter if they've passed on their genes or not.

I like frogs. Some of them. Most of them just abandon their eggs, like so many animals. But others--they take very careful care of their young. Like the Surinam toad. After the eggs are laid--extruded--and fertilized by the male, they're pushed onto the female's back. Her flesh bloats to cover up the eggs, protecting them. Inside her, they can live and grow, taking their nutrients from her. You can see them moving underneath her skin--it ripples, her back filled with her young. After a lunar month, they break through her skin, tear through it, perfectly formed miniatures. Would you do that? Even if you could?

The gastric brooding frog eats its eggs. To protect them, she doesn't digest anything for the six weeks it takes her young to mature. She starves herself as the young grow big off of her own body, so big until eventually there's no more room for her lungs to expand. She's forced to rely on the barely-sufficient oxygen she can absorb through her skin, as she slowly starves. So much love. She suffers for them.

The giant pacific octopus, too, starves for her young. She lays her eggs in a carefully constructed cave, like precious little grains of rice--hundreds of them. Then she walls herself inside the cave, so that predators can't get to them; so that the currents won't wash them away until after they've hatched. She blows water over the priceless clutch, keeping them clean and oxygenated; she chases away or kills anything that might eat them. She doesn't eat. She's dead by the time they hatch, or shortly afterwards, but they wouldn't have lived without her.

Would you die for your children? Really? Would you have had them at all, if you'd known that it would, inevitably, cause you to die?

The caecilian's young eat their mother. They eat the skin off of her, in one species. In another, it's the lining of the oviduct. Like if your fetal child ate--for as long as eleven months--the lining of your uterus. Or if your clutch of precious babies swarmed over you every three days, consuming every inch of skin on you, and waiting only long enough for you to regrow it before they did it again. And again. Every three days, for months. You don't love your children so much.

It's what makes us weak. We don't want the pain, the blood and violence of birth. We want to be drugged until it doesn't hurt. We want everything clean and sterilized. Everything as much like surgery as possible--c-sections even for the women who don't need them. Sickening. You should bleed for your child, it's the only thing you can do. Give them your own flesh, it's all you really have to give. Milk is a sick, weak replacement for your own blood. For your life. That's how you give love.

Best of all are the parasitoids. The wasps and flies that give up their duties of mothering to someone else, someone who can give more. They lay their precious young, very carefully, onto the back of a host. A surrogate mother, an adoptive parent--the ones who really will give up anything, everything, for the child that's come into their care, even though it's not really their flesh and blood. That sort of altruism is--touching. Something worth emulating, replicating. Wouldn't the world be a better place if we were all so selfless? It would be. A better place.

The infant wasp hatches and burrows into its host. It eats it, piece by piece. Eventually the surrogate dies, but not before it's raised the wasp to adulthood. It hatches out of the husk left behind. The ultimate sacrifice. "I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you." And when you are eaten of, you're enacting the most sacred rite and sacrament--giving life to another. Even all your selfish whims are taken away, at the very end. You only want to do your part.

I feel it. I'm heavy with child; caring for them. Giving them everything I have to give--all of myself. Not in the transparent, weak way that people mean when they say it, but in a way that means more. Everything: flesh, blood and life. And at first I resisted, but it was only because I didn't understand. Now, I welcome the prick of each ovipositor--the laying of each new egg, ready to hatch open and begin its new life within me. It's been a while since one has come, though, which makes me a little sad. I'm getting close to the end, they can sense my imminent death; with almost preternatural intuition, the wasps know that I'm coming close to death, that my parasite load grew too high. I took on too much. Welcomed it in, once I realized what it all meant.

I am a city. A palace. A testament to divinity, to becoming something more. You won't understand until you've felt it. All the glory of motherhood, only more so. Because what I'm doing--it's truly laudable. There's no way to describe it. As my organs fall apart, as my flesh begins to rot away, I'm creating. Even second-hand--it's the closest I'll ever come to being the perfect mother. The one who will die for her children.

Inevitable.

Animals That Horrify Me II: Cannibalism Edition

The odds are somewhat decent that you have never heard of caecilians. I hadn't, except in a very vague and dim sense.

They are related to some of the most adorable animals on the planet: newts and salamanders! And even adorable little frogs! A little more distantly, they're related to lizards, turtles and crocodilians (AWWWW, ADORABLE BABY ALLIGATORS, SO CUTE WITH THEIR LITTLE YELLOW MOUTHS GAPING), which are reptiles--fairly close relatives of the amphibians, which include the salamanders, frogs and caecilians.

Caecilians have developed as burrowing animals, losing all internal and external evidence of legs. Many have only vestigial eyes covered over with skin, and have replaced sight with tentacles that serve as some sort of sensory organ. Many are pretty small, but one species gets 1.5 meters long, or an inch under five feet. They have very small scales, making them unique among amphibians.

They are not adorable.

Now, there are a lot of disgusting-looking creatures out there, and really, caecilians aren't that bad. For example, hagfish are essentially boneless tubes of organs with small tentacles and an extremely unpleasant fleshy character, and they exude mucous in quantities up to a gallon. In essence, they're much like a caecilian, only without bones (except for a little cartilage, including a partial skull but no jaws), and far slimier.

So what makes them disgusting and caecilians horrifying? Well.

Not much is known about caecilian behavior, but they do know something about how they breed. Or, rather, how the young are raised. Caecilian mothers are devoted parents, especially by amphibian standards: they guard and even feed their young.

This is where things start getting terrifying.

One species of caecilian, Siphonops annulatus, feeds her young with her own skin. She lays her eggs and then curls around them. When the young hatch, they consume her skin as she lays there, tearing it off of her until she's been completely stripped bare--skinned, you could say. She regrows her skin over the next three days as her family rests, and then the pattern's repeated.

This is not the most horrific way that they feed their young. There is another species that is even more disgusting and frightening. And painful to think about.

The female holds the eggs within her until they hatch--they're an ovoviviparous species, or a species that produces eggs (which are unattached to the mother, differentiating them from live-birth (viviparous) animals, but the eggs are retained within the mother until they hatch, giving the appearance of live birth--at which time the young start eating the lining of her oviduct. THIS IS THE EQUIVALENT OF HAVING YOUR BABY EAT YOUR UTERINE LINING. And it still gets worse because this? Can go on for eleven months. They live inside her, eating her reproductive organs, for almost a year.

More posts later about amphibians that terrify me! Surinam toads! COMING SOON.

(Sources: Life in Cold Blood by David Attenborough, which provided the inspiration for this post and the next. Online, the pictures linked are all from outside sources--obviously. Also, this article about hagfish.)

Animals That Horrify Me

Animals can be pretty damn scary things. To illustrate this, here is my personal list of seven animals that could destroy and/or control the world, if they so desired, in order from least to most horrifying. (This entry brought to you by a classroom discussion on appropriate uses of obscenities in writing. Things are--gosh!--a little foul-mouthed.)

1. Aphids. Now, even in terms of garden pests, aphids aren't as bad as you get. I mean, squirrels are more of a problem and they're, well, squirrels. So why single them out as having the potential to be destructive beyond all means?

Aphids control the ants. And ants are, bar no other living creature, the scariest fucking creatures on the face of the planet. They can get into almost any building, exist all over the world, are sometimes poisonous, are slavishly devoted to the good of their queen and hive to the point where they have no self-interest whatsoever, and they're incredibly numerous. Most horrifying? The mega-colony of ants located in Europe, which is like a whole bunch of different anthills, only instead of fighting each other, they cooperate. This is the most horrific thing I have ever heard.

To return to aphids, they have a pretty nice set-up going with the ants. Ants will protect, feed and even place aphids in opportune places, "farming" them, in return for the honeydew (or sweet, sugary piss) of aphids--the aphids lose nothing, since it's a natural waste product anyway, and in return, they control the most frightening insect on the planet.

Not so harmless now, are they?

2. Octopodes. (Before anyone gets me started on the name... Yes, I know, octopi. That's lovely and all, but that's a Latin plural ending on a Greek word. Either call them octopusses (my usual choice) or use the right plural form--just don't mix and match, especially if you then proceed to correct people smugly. "It's octopi," you may say, raising one brow with a superior sneer on your face. Yeah, shut up, bitch--it isn't.)

So what's so horrifying about the octopus? Well, for one, they're incredibly intelligent. They break locks. Sometimes they choose not to break locks, because it's easier for them to just break the locked box into pieces and get their fishy reward that way. They solve simple puzzles, they observe humans--there was an octopus that was being trained to do simple tasks for treats, which were stored in a cupboard. After a while, the scientists noticed that the treats were disappearing very quickly--reviewing the cameras in the lab showed that the octopus was escaping its cage (something they didn't even know it could do), climbing over to the cabinet where the treats were stored, opening it, and then eating its fill every night. Oh my fucking God. There are registered voters who couldn't do that shit.

The one thing holding the octopus back is its slightly less effective copper-based blood. Soon, they will find a way around this. And then--well, then the world will fall. With other cephalopodian shock troops, like the demonic Humboldt Squid, which hunts in voracious packs of up to 1200 individuals, devouring whatever crosses its path, working cooperatively and dragging humans down to be consumed in the darkest depths of the ocean, nothing will stand in their way--as soon as they find a way to subsist for long periods of time on the surface of the water, we're all doomed.

3. Canadian geese. They are some nasty motherfuckers, let me tell you. And adult geese are strong--they can knock you around pretty bad. Mostly, though, these are the most ruthless and aggressive birds on the planet: looking like a Canadian goose is the avian equivalent of being 6'5", made of muscle, wearing black leather, being heavily tattooed, twitching sporadically and generally giving the impression that you're about to snap and go for their throat, and probably wearing the caked-on blood of the multitudes of dead men, women, children, kittens and other innocents that they've killed. And, unlike many other types of birds, they're hideous rapists with an insatiable sexual appetite, to the point where birds sometimes drown because they have been fucked into the water, after a particularly enthusiastic drake landed on them while they were floating.

You probably think this is hyperbole. It's not. The invasion has already begun--notice how the geese no longer fly south for winter everywhere? They're planning their attack. They already have us feeding them bread--soon, our every goal will be to serve our feathered overlords.

Canadian geese will take a break from raping, murdering and eating your lawn, and then laugh and laugh, honking wildly as they chew on the severed fingers of your children. Not even the adorable goslings will make up for that. The cuteness is a lie.

4. Chinese giant salamanders. They get six feet long. They are a six-foot-long amphibian. One that can live for hundreds of years. Six-foot-long incredibly long-lived predatory amphibians. The only reason that they don't have human deaths attributed to them is because they're very obscure and unstudied, living high in the Chinese mountains. Nobody knows how intelligent they are. Nobody knows much of anything, in fact--and they like it that way.

5. Infectious dog cancer. "Infectious cancer?" you may say. "Don't be ridiculous!" But it is, in fact, the truth--another infectious cancer is behind Devil Facial Tumor Disease, which causes cancerous growths on the faces of Tasmanian devils, swelling until they're so large that the animal is unable to feed and starves to death.

The cancer dogs get is a little more benign: it's usually not fatal. Canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT) is passed from dog-to-dog by sexual contact or by fighting--and unlike the cervical cancer caused by HPV, it's truly an infectious cancer. That means that every cell in every tumor in every dog who has this disease--and it's found across all five continents, commonly--is genetically identical, and that it all comes from one animal, a dog or wolf, who lived approximately 150-1000 years ago.

Which means that that dog, in essence, has never died. Instead it lives on, a few of its cells--mutated until they no longer follow the rules of genetics and the body as we know them--buried inside hundreds of thousands of dogs, all across the planet. Waiting.

6. Cordyceps fungi. Now, fungus usually aren't all that scary--maybe if you're immunologically depressed you might get certain species growing in you (like Schizophyllum commune, a known cause of "human mycosis," settling in the lungs and sinuses, among other organs, and causing things like brain abscesses) but mostly they stick to dead stuff, right? Or plants at the very least--although there is that fungus that grows on hibernating bats, causing erratic behavior, physical problems and eventually death--really, not a threat to humans or the greater part of the animal world.

Well, the Cordyceps fungus infects living insects. It moves slowly through the insect, consuming the most vital systems last and entwining with the insects nervous system. Now, let's say that the infected species was an ant: as it grows sicker and sicker, dying as more and more essential systems are confused by the parasite growing inside its body, it starts to exhibit erratic, abnormal behaviors. (This still isn't very scary, is it? Just wait.) It starts washing compulsively, for example--more to the point, it starts climbing up towards the canopy of the tropical rain forests it's found in. Why up? Because there's more air flow up there. Why? Because the Cordyceps fungus makes it. How can you tell? It's totally abnormal behavior for the ants.

As the ant moves upwards, it eventually dies. As it passes away, it grips its jaws into the wood beneath it, clinging to the tree even as death sets in, followed by rigor mortis. And, finally, the fungus shows itself: it begins to fruit, a long spike emerging from the body to spread its spores. The increased breeze at the tops of the trees helps the plant spread, to infect another ant.

No scientist really knows how it causes behavioral changes like that. It already effects hundreds, possibly thousands, of insect species...

7. Hairworms. This is another mind-control parasite, like the Cordyceps in some ways: it changes the behavior of the host, to its detriment and eventual death. It even infects insects--although the hairworm in question infects grasshoppers exclusively. (For the moment, at least. And as far as we know.) It was discovered when scientists noticed grasshoppers jumping directly into ponds--not normal behavior for them. It appeared that they were committing suicide, which they were, in many ways.

It was eventually discovered to be caused by a parasite. Somehow, it alters grasshopper behavior; for a while it lives relatively quietly within its host, consuming the flesh and vitality of the grasshopper like any normal parasite. Then things change. In the end, the grasshopper ends up plunging helplessly into the pond, where it drowns, leaving the worm free to leave its host and find a mate, finishing its complex life-cycle.

Essentially--somehow--this parasite makes the grasshopper kill itself so that it can continue to finish its disgusting life cycle. (To illustrate just how disgusting: the worms writhe themselves into hideous balls and clumps, earning their other name--Gordian worms, after Gordian knots.) How? Again, nobody knows--but I'd look really carefully at the number of human suicides-by-water in regions where this thing is found.

(Sources: Chinese Giant Salamanders, and the same again, hairworms, Humboldt squid, Tasmanian devils, Cordyceps fungus, and infectious dog cancer.)