Chapter 6

SLIMEBALLS

Ants have this religion, and it's caused by slimeballs.

It all starts with a tiny creature called Dicrocoelium dendriticum - though even parasite geeks don't bother saying that out loud. We just call them "lancet flukes."

Like a lot of parasites, these flukes start out in a stomach. Stomachs are the most popular organs of final hosts, you may have noticed. Well, duh - there's food in them. In this case, we're talking about the stomach of a cow.

When the infected cow makes a cow pie, as we say in Texas, a passel of lancet fluke eggs winds up in the pasture. A snail comes along and eats some of the cow pie, because that's what snails do. Now the snail is infected. The fluke eggs hatch inside the unlucky snail's belly and then start to drill their way out through its skin.

Fortunately for the snail, it has a way to protect itself: slime.

The sliminess of the snail's skin lubricates the flukes as they drill their way out, and the snail survives their exit. By the time the flukes escape, they're entirely encased in a slimeball, unable to move. They'll never mess with any snails again, that's for sure.

But the flukes don't mind this turn of events. It turns out they wanted to be covered in slime. The whole trip through the snail was just evolution's way of getting the flukes all slimy. Because they're headed to their next host: an ant.

Here's something you didn't want to know: Ants love slimeballs.

Slimeballs make a delicious meal, even when they have a few hundred flukes inside. So sooner or later, some unlucky ant comes along, eats the slimeball, and winds up with a bellyful of parasites.

Inside the ant, the lancet flukes quickly organize themselves. They get ready for some parasite mind control.

"Do ants even have minds?" you may ask. Hard to say. But they do have tiny clusters of nerves, about midway in complexity between human brains and TV remote controls. A few dozen flukes take up a position at each of these nerve clusters and begin to change the ant's behavior.

The flukey ant gets religion. Sort of.

During the day, it acts normal. It wanders around on the ground, gathering food (possibly more slimeballs) and hanging out with the other ants. It still smells healthy to them, so they don't try to drive it off as they would a sick ant.

But when night falls, the ant does something flukey.

It leaves the other ants behind and climbs up a tall blade of grass, getting as high as it can off the ground. Up there under the stars, it waits all night alone.

What does it think it's doing? I always wonder.

Ants may not think anything ever. But if they do, maybe they have visions of strange creatures coming along to carry them to another world, like X-Files geeks in the Roswell desert waiting for a spaceship to whisk them away. Or perhaps Dicrocoelium dendriticum really is a religion, and the ant thinks some great revelation will strike if it just spends enough nights up at the top of a blade of grass. Like a swami meditating on a mountain, or a monk fasting in a tiny cell.

I'd like to think that in its final moments the ant is happy, or at least relieved, when a cow's mouth comes chomping down on its little blade of grass.

I know the flukes are happy. They're back in a cow's stomach, after all.

Parasite heaven.