book review; Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures.

[Guest guest]

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GER/is_2001_Winter/ai_81790194

 

Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous

Creatures. - book review

Whole Earth, Winter, 2001 by Joe Eaton

 

Parasite Rex

Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures.

Carl Zimmer

2000; 298 pp.

$14

Touchstone Books

 

Tapeworms, liver flukes, and trypanosomes don't get a lot of respect.

Biologists traditionally saw these organisms, simplified for life in

other creatures' innards, as degenerate exceptions to the progressive

trend of evolution. But as Carl Zimmer shows, parasites are among the

planet's most successful life-forms. Their numbers and diversity are

staggering: the majority of animal species are parasites, and many

plants, fungi, protozoa, and bacteria have followed this evolutionary

path. They've colonized a multitude of microhabitats (a dozen

different kinds may live in the guts of a duck, a hundred on the gills

of a fish) and perfected ways of living off their hosts without

killing them.

 

From the Costa Rican rainforest to a Southern California salt marsh to

the cassava fields of Nigeria, Zimmer follows scientists as they

inventory parasite species, work out their ecological relationships,

and enlist their services in pest management. The picture that emerges

is complex. Although parasites still exact an enormous toll on human

health, they're also important indicators of the well-being of

ecosystems; it's not the big predators who are really at the top of

the food chain.

 

Parasite Rex is one of those books that change the way you see the

world. On one scale, each of us is an ecosystem with an unsuspected

complement of passengers. On another, if you view the Earth as an

organism, there's a real sense in which we are its parasites--and we

could learn a lot from the lowly tapeworm about sustainable exploitation.

 

" The inside of a body is a tough place to survive. With our

air-breathing lungs, our ears finely tuned to the vibrations of the

air, we are adapted to life on land. A shark is made for the sea,

ramming water through its gills and smelling for prey miles away.

Parasites live in a different habitat altogether, one for which they

are precisely adapted in ways that scientists can barely understand.

Parasites can navigate through their murky labyrinth; they can glide

through skin and gristle; they can pass unscathed through the cauldron

of the stomach. They can turn just about every organ in the body--the

eustachian tube, the gill, the brain, the bladder, the Achilles

tendon--into their home. They can rebuild parts of the host's body to

suit their own comfort. They can feed on almost anything: blood, gut

lining, liver, snot. They can make their host's body bring them food.

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