The Monstrefact: The Ceti Eels of Star Trek

eels of Seti Alpha ve. You will, of course remember them from the nineteen eighty two film Star Trek two, The Wrath of Khan, in which thawd twentieth century eugenics war tyrant Khan Noonan Singh, played by the superb Ricardo Montaban, uses larval Seti eels to torture and control two Enterprise crew members in his quest for vengeance. We also learned that set eels, native to the harsh world Singh was exiled to by Starfleet, killed many of Khan's people, including

his wife. The setiworm is a burrowing desert creature, but its larva, we're told by Singh, crawl in through the ear canals of host creatures to wrap themselves around the cerebral cortex, rendering the host organism highly susceptible to suggestion. Madness and death follow as the eel grows, unless the eel is removed or leaves of its own accord. The latter occurs with First Officer Chekhov, though the reason is uncertain. Was it responding to danger, had it lost control of

its host? Was it in fact leaving the host in order to continue its life cycle. We don't know any of these answers, in part because Captain Kirk instantly vaporizes the escaping eel, turning once more to the non canonical Star Trek. The Worlds of the Federation, written and illustrated by Laura Johnson, written as Shane Johnson in nineteen eighty nine, the author largely shares what we already know from the movie.

Adult Seti eels, one of the few native species to survive on the planet, grow to lengths of fourteen inches and carry their young in tissue or armor folds on their backs until such time as they leave the parent for a host organism. In Life Signs the Biology of Star Trek, Susan and Robert Jenkins briefly discuss the Seti eel in context with other neural parasites and symbians of

the Trek universe, and there are several classifying. The possession we see with the Seti eel is a kind of quote co conscious mind control, with the hosts made helpless by the superseding power of the parasite. Presumably, the whole reason for subduing the host organism is to keep it from interfering with the larva's occupation of set organism, and we might assume that the Seti eel also eats the tissue that it presumably burrows through to reach the cerebral cortex.

Mind control aspect of this fictional parasitic scenario is of course vary, in keeping with numerous examples from the natural terrestrial world, including various parasitoid wasps, flatworms, hair worms, protozoans, fungi, and more. In broad strokes, we see parasites that alter host behavior to help complete their own life cycle. This may mean mere survival or positioning of the host in such a way that a desirable new host will consume

the current host. Now with the Seti eel, we certainly see the former survival, but not so much The latter eel controlled humans don't seem to do anything other than

obey fellow humans. Though one could make a case that this alone might lead to say, uninfected human being either being expelled, which would at least be a choice, and you can imagine scenarios in which this would put the current host organism in a position to, say, be near water, or near another organism that it needs to enter, perhaps

some sort of a predator. Or you could also make the argument that well, okay, a human that is so easily controlled by fellow humans is going to remain in close proximity with humans, and perhaps it just needs to enter a new host organism once it's done munching and

constricting inside that individual skull. Either way, we also have to acknowledge that humanoids, and remember in the Trek universe, most or all humanoid species are very distantly related to each other, humanoids might not be the desired vector for the parasite, and in the world of actual terrestrial parasite studies, we do see dangerous results from parasites winding up either in the wrong host or the wrong part of the

right host. Now, I've long found this one of the more horrifying aspects of sci fi space horror and particularly sci fi space related body a human interactions with hostile biology that simply didn't evolve to deal with human beings. The xenomorphic threats of the Alien film franchise are great examples of this. Of course, on one hand, the creatures we see in the films are highly adaptive and make use of host DNA in the acquisition of their adult forms.

They have evolved and or been engineered to make quick study and use of new bodies. But the other horrifying way to think about it is that here is a creature that is truly an alien within the host body. It doesn't know what it's doing in there, and much like the scene in twenty twelve's Prometheus with the robotic surgery pod, this combination of high skill and lower context for the target body runs the risk of heading into very grizzly territory. Still, we don't have to invoke alien

to make the seti eel terrifying. The implantation scene in Wrath of Khan remains one of the latest moments of space horror in a franchise we don't generally associate with it. Tune in for additional episodes of the Monster fact the artifact or anomalius stupendium. Each week I'm going to try and press on with at least one more trek selection, so please send in your recommendations. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.