Celebrating Biodiversity, Parasite by Parasite
Thursday, January 21 11:00 am
Parasites highlighted on the new blog include Hymenolepis microstoma, Wolbachia pipientis, and Sacculina carcini. Credit: Pete Olson, USCS and Hans Hillewaert.
For the next 365 days, Museum Curator Susan Perkins is going to wiggle through thousands of species, burrow through relationship networks, and siphon off the relevant and interesting facts for her new blog, Parasite of the Day. Perkins will post a daily profile of a parasite that she unearths as part of a celebration of the United Nation’s International Year of Biodiversity.
Parasites are those species that we blast with an arsenal of chemicals, pinch to remove from our pets and plants, and, well, generally try to shake off. But parasites have amazing evolutionary histories and biological adaptations, and Perkins, who studies malaria and other pathogens, is the perfect person to tout them.
Check out her blog each day to see what stories she finds. Recent posts include tapeworms that inhabit rodents via flour beetles, an insect-infecting bacterium that is a distant relative of Salmonella and sometimes feminizes males, barnacles that get crabs to care for them as if eggs, and Trypanosoma brucei, the single-celled organisms that use rapid costume changes to fool immune systems and cause the disease sleeping sickness.
