If you click this here link, you’ll go to a page on the hilariously awesome site The Oatmeal which tells you way, way more than you have every wanted to know about the complex and horrifying life cycle of a particularly nasty kind of parasitic flatworm known as Dicrocoleum dendriticum, or the Lancet liver fluke.

This unbelievably villainous creature has a spectacularly gross life cycle that goes more or less like this :

1. Be born in cow poop. Wait for a snail to eat you. (Snails eat poop covered parasites all the time, I guess. Isn’t nature fun, kids?)
2. Drill into the snail’s guts and live off the snail until you reach adolescent stage.
3. Exit the snail via one of the slime balls they regularly secrete. (So that’s where BP execs from from. )
4. An ant then happens along and drinks the slimeball with you in it.
5. You make your way to what passes for a brain in an ant, and TAKE COMPLETE CONTROL OF ITS MOTOR FUNCTIONS. Yes folks, brain-controlling parasites really do exist in nature. That’s freaking nasty.
6. In your new life as a demon possessing a hapless ant, you act all normal and antlike during the day, but at night, you leave the colony, go find a blade of grass, and climb to the very tip. If you did this during the day, you’d fry from the heat. But at night, you can safely pursue this bizarre and seemingly random task.
7. It’s only when a cow comes along with the midnight munchies that the true genius of your evil plan becomes clear. The cow eats the grass with you on it (why? Because cows just don’t give a shit, that’s why. ) and you thus infiltrate the cow.
8. You then make your way to the cow’s liver, where it’s party time. You live large and have extremely disgusting hermaphroditic worm sex (also known as “doing the hermy wormy”with the rest of your crew,
and have lots of little horrible babies.
9. These babies exit the cow via cow poop, and we’re back to step 1.

So in your career as a terrifying life form, you’ve lived in poop, been eaten by a snail, lived in slime, been imbibed by an ant, TAKEN OVER THAT ANT’s BRAIN and basically worn the ant as a disguise, pretended to be an ant during the day but snuck out of the colony like a freaking ninja to await the Coming of the Cow, been eaten by a cow, then taken up residence in a cow’s liver, where you breed and die.

Being the massive nerd that I am, I can’t help but project this nightmarish life cycle into science fiction alien race terms. Imagine if the ants in that staggeringly complicated equation were replaced with human beings. We’d find these blobs of a harmless-seeming alien substance on some planet somewhere and discover that it actually tastes quite good to us and gives us quite a euphoric kick too. So this stuff rapidly becomes quite popular. But the people who drink it start behaving in odd ways. They start being attracted to high places. People who previously had a terrible fear of heights sudden start climbing anything they can find, the higher the better, and especially outdoors. By the time this becomes evident, lots of people have begun enjoying this new drink. And they all start climbing things, and they all insist on having their own peak or apex from which to just look up at the stars at night… waiting.

Waiting for what, people ask. We don’t know, the victims reply. But something is coming, and it’s going to be the most wonderful thing ever. We’re going to move on to the next level of existence. We’re going to transcend humanity. Something’s coming, and when it does, we’re going to Heaven.

And this turns out to be horrifyingly true, because these giant spacefaring creatures start showing up and messily devouring the victims and any other humans who happen to be nearby. Scientists discover that these people are emitting a signal into space, and the monsters are responding to that signal. It’s not the human beings who are going to the Promised Land, it’s their brain parasites, who have influenced them into doing exactly what the brain parasite needs them to do in order to move on to its final host, the space monsters, and the Promised Land of their livers (or whatever) where the creatures will breed and die.

The human beings with the parasite are just a snack for the monsters, a way to get them to eat the parasite, like hiding a pill in a sausage to get your dog to eat it.

Obviously, we humans would figure this out, and come up with a cure and/or fight off the angry hungry space monster or whatever.

But it would make quite the plot for an episode of Star Trek or Stargate or the like, wouldn’t it? In retrospect, it would be simpler if the whole plot took place on the one planet. Having giant flying creatures that somehow also go through space is a bit much and entirely unnecessary.

To me, as a writer, the most interesting aspect would be not just the horrifying plot, but within that plot, showing how these parasites influence us as if they are appealing to our highest ideals of transcendence and spiritual growth, when all they really want is to get us eaten. I would definitely have at least one character, a victim who is cured before he or she completes the cycle, who is incredibly angry, well past the point of mere rage, at this most horrible and intimate betrayal. They thought they were going to Paradise, and all they were getting was being food. Tragic.

Hmmm. Are there any planet-exploring science fiction shows in production right now? Because I might just have an episode to pitch them.

We’ll just leave out any elements that rely heavily on poop. No need to go there except maybe very obliquely, near the end, as a cheap joke.

“And how do the baby parasites get from the monsters back to the planet’s surface?”
“How do parasites generally exit a host?”
“Well, they…. EWW GROSS!”

Something along those lines.

Tags: biology, disgusting, evil, gross, science