Guys am I the one not getting it or being insensitive toward the snails or is this just the classical “mildly alters behavior of intermediate host in order to spread to host more easily” again?
I may just have became desensitized to these things over the years, but if I could choose between having my eyes plucked out or dying I’d certainly choose the former, and that’s not even with my eyes being capable of regenerating.
Also the boogie-woogie they do is very grotesque but it’s not particularly scary for me either.
The birds don’t even eat the snails, just the eyes. They grow back and the snail is just fine apparently.
“Ah jeeze I’m blind on a leaf again! That’s the last time I eat bird shit!” says the snail, actively meandering it’s way towards a particularly appetizing pile of parasite-laden bird shit.
Iirc is to attract birds so it can infect the bird and use it to reproduce. After the bird has eaten the parasite out of the snail’s eyeballs, the snail can often regenerate and keep living as usual. This is what I recall from a YouTube video at least ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The snail has been taken over by parasitic flatworms that control it to seek out exposed spots and pulsate inside of their eye stalks to get eaten by a bird and enter the next stage of their life cycle, which they spend by living in the birds cloaca and spreading their eggs via feces.
That’ll be Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. It invades the ant’s brain and causes it to leave it’s nest and go somewhere better for the fungus then wait to die as the fungus errupts from its head.
If we’re talking about nightmare mind control horrors, we shouldn’t forget our old friend toxiplasmosis gondii, which infects rodents, then alters their behaviour so they’re not afraid of cats, in particular. This leads to the rodent getting eaten so the parasite can infect the cat, which is the only place it can reproduce, before spreading from the cat faeces back into the rodent population. It can also infect humans where there is evidence that it affects behavior too, particularly making males more careless of rules.
I don’t think they understand ‘rules’, rather they mess with the brain structures that control self regulation. It’s believed that around 30-50% of the human population may have a T. gondii infection, with a corresponding link to other diseases. High levels may also go some way to explaining the prevalence of high risk behaviors in certain areas, although proving a correlation is challenging due to confounding factors.
Oh come now, there are so many more interesting parasites that mess with your brain for their own benefit; Trypanosoma which messes with your sleep before slowly killing you, Naegleria fowleri that just straight up eats your brain and a host of others that do weird and wonderful things.
Look at it this way; before you were surrounded by mind controlled ants, suicidal rodents and other such horrors without even knowing it. Now you do know about them. What’s that? I’m really not helping? Ok, I’ll stop.
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