The Strain: Dissecting del Toro's Vampires

to spoil this story for anybody during this episode. It's primarily about vampires, but they have a very particular kind of biology that's unique to this story. So what we were thinking was that we could take a look at that and how it relates to the biology of actual parasites and vampire like creatures in nature. Yeah, it's kind of in the same vein with some past episodes we've done with Monster of the Week blog series, Monster Science

video series, that sort of thing. And uh, you know, I know some of you out there I love The Strain. Some of you out there may hate The Strain, and a number of you have no idea what we're talking about. Perhaps you end up checking some of it out because of this episode. But but we're gonna use the show. We're gonna use the books, which you've read, but I

have not. I have. Yeah, I've read the books, and I've read the comics, and I've watched the first season, okay, and I've watched the first and second season up until like this right where yeah, where it's that now? So we're not gonna we're not gonna get into spoilers related what happens to characters in the book or on the TV show. We are going to discuss the biology of the fictional creature so as to discuss real world comparisons.

But but that's about it. So if you want, like if you want to enter into the show just on purist unspoiled, then I guess you should skip this episode and come back to it later. But but for the most part, you don't have to worry. Yeah, So for the most part, what we're gonna do is stick to the biology of these things. And I think I could place to start is with Del Toro himself. So if you're not familiar with his movies, Del Toro is I think it's fair to call him a horror mastermind. Or

at least he's considered one. He's done movies about vampires before, He's done of fantasy kind of fairytale movies, movies about demons. He's very into the gothic horror supernatural genre. Uh, he's has he done. He's also done some stuff that isn't supernatural, though, right, I feel like has he I don't know that he has. I feel like like even his you know, he has these two types of films. He has the more personal, artsy films and then the bigger budget stuff. But they

all seem to have monsters in them. Maybe he has a monster free um film out there. I am totally forgetting it. Yeah, I am too. Maybe maybe I'm I'm wrong on this, but yeah. So the first two vampire movies that he worked on, though, the first one was Chronos, which is what like twenty years old at this point, the first future film, yeah uh, and then he also directed the classic Blade, to which I love. Yeah, I'm

a fan as well. And uh, there is a particular kind of vampire and both of these that sort of we can look back to as the you know, uh vampire for Del Toro's Vampires in the Strain before we get into that. I think it's really interesting. There's a quote by him where he talks about why he was interested in creating the show in the first place, and he said that since he was a little kid, he's always kept a notebook full of ideas about vampire mutations, biology, sociology,

and mythology. So this is just something he's been thinking about since he was a child. He knows, you know, he put he put some of it in Chronos, he put some of it in Blade, But he really wanted

the strain to be like his his opus on vampires. Yeah, yeah, he and you and you really get that from these properties, you know, like, well, whatever failings there might be regarding you know, the main characters in this or that, or or the you know, the plot or the narrative, you can't thought the monsters because the man, the man loves

his monsters. And it's it's it's clear the amount of work he puts into it, the people that he brings into design, like he's always bringing in such a fantastic team of artists, And I understand he sets up when when he's developing any of these properties, he sets up in the middle of the art department, like it's not another room. He's there in the middle of its saying

that's great. That's I believe. That's his background is that he worked in television, I want to say, in Spanish language television as like an art director before he started directing and writing himself. But yeah, have you ever looked at um there? They may even have published a version of this of his notebooks there fascinating, Like each each project he works on, he just fills a notebook with

drawings and little writings and scribblings. And he's an amazing artist as well, so you get to see kind of his ideas for how these things flesh out, literally flesh out, because these really into them. Yes, but I mean it seems like there's always a monster autopsy scene and any film he does which is which is perfect, absolutely, and he is seriously got an obsession with jaws and mandibles

and tongues like pretty much everything. I remember watching Pacific rim which is what that's the last major feature that he came out with. And yeah, and even the giant monsters in that that the Kaiju had these like mandibles that separated off of their face and these huge tongues that shot out. He's he's really into that. Yeah. I but I believe most of his recent films he's brought in.

Wayne Barlow is one of the artists. Is of course his work designing alien physiologies and demonic physiologies all based on a background that he and his parents had in uh in in in Natural World Illustrations. This is Wayne Barlow. Yeah. But Wayne Barlow's work is just so I mean, you believe and he designed that he gives you it feels like a real, actually creature that you've just never witnessed before. Yeah.

So his his team that he works with, that he's kind of he's assembled this like a team over the years of working on project. But Wayne Barlow is a mainstay. Uh. And then another guy who I'm a fan of his, Guy Davis, who is a comic book illustrator who's worked on stuff like the bpr D, his own book, The Marquee. Uh. And he did a really interesting one of his first comics was like a punk rock take on Sherlock Holmes if Sherlock Holmes was a woman in the seventies who

was a punk rocker. It was fascinating. Uh. It's good stuff. But guy is also just an amazing concept artist, and so he's designed monsters as well along with that team with Wayne, and then looking at the research that we had for this episode, there were two guys in particular that seemed to work with them on the actual special effects and makeup. It was Steve Newberne and Sean Sansom, or the team on the at least the first season of The Strain, they were responsible for a lot of

the practical special effects. Now just go back to Chronos and Blade Too for a second. Um. In Chronos, we saw Vamporism as this kind of hybrid of an you know, alchemical insect clockwork contraption that was pretty interesting, like it kind of pins to you, sinks its teeth in, and begins to transformation. Yeah. I had actually forgotten the main plot of that movie because it's been so long since

I've seen it. So I reread the summary before we came into the studio, and it really immediately came back to me that what stuck with me was the aesthetic imagery of that clockwork bug thing, you know, piercing people more and and also the like sort of marble ish

white translucent skin yeah of the vampire. Yeah, that that definitely stuck with me, and that's something he came back to Emblade too as well for the Elder Vampire, and that where you have this this ancient creature that is, you know, at once beautiful and ghastly that it's it's taken on this nos Ferato appearance, but it also has the look of like a marbled statue. So it's that kind of dichotomy that I feel like he captures really well.

And yeah, there's he does a great job. You know, this is pop culture talking about science talk, but he does a great job of honoring the sort of lineage of vampire stories and incorporating aspects of notes ferra To or Dracula into these things, but also putting his own spin on it by adding weird science, I guess is the best way to put it. Yes. Yes, the reapers in Blade two, which is like bad new Strain of Vampires,

they are even closer to what we see in the strain. Uh. They have these cool mandible jaws that opened like the jaw, though the lower jaw splits down the middle and becomes mandibles, and then there's a probiscus type tongue that comes out to pump out blood and My favorite bit, which I think I mentioned in the Stigmata episode is that they have hardened bone plating front and back, so the only way to stab him in the heart is to go

into the side. Yeah, like under the armpit, right, Yeah, where where you get into this into the course of the Catholic imagery that del Toro is really into as well. Yeah, and uh, I think it's important to note to this is also part of the strain in a number of his uh designs, I suppose, but there's definitely a vagina dentata theme going on with his vampire monsters, and that like their monster mouth's kind of open up and have teeths in a way that like the vagina dentata mythology

I think represents. Yeah. I remember listening to The Blade to director's commentary, Oh, I have not heard that while back, because like I said, I really loved that movie came out and it's one of those I could probably watch anytime. But I remember del Toro pointing to like different scenes and saying, yes, that that door kind of looks like a vagina. This is far away, it kind of looks like a vagina. So who's like that Catholicism and monsters.

That's this thing. Did you ever see the third one? Yes, because in the third one, I think they took it, didn't they take his model? He did not direct it, but they took his model and like applied it to a Pomeranian dog. Yeah, it kind of has a cameo with a Pomeranian. Yeah, just just to mock you with how great that the second one was? So? All right before basically, this is how we're gonna play this out. We'll present to you how the vampires in the strain

are biologically formed, how their fictional biology works. And then the second part of this episode, we're going to talk about string oi, which is what they call them in the series in the natural World. So everything from wasps to uh, creepy worm, syphilis, you name it, we're gonna try to cover it. Excellent, alright, so let's do it. Let's dissect the strog i hear um. Do you want to take us through this? Yeah? I will try so. Uh. There. He definitely has thought out from beginning to end a

process through which these things go through. And it all starts with a worm, this kind of capillary worm that passes from one creature to another. Uh, and in the case of the vampires, they you know, they bleed the worms or you know, when they when they drink the blood of their victims, they passed the worms onto their victims. They might vomit it into your face. Yeah, is there one or two of those as well? Yeah, um, I

mean it can really happen. Happen like any way that like even if you like touch I think, like spilled blood by one of these things, there's worms in it that will burrow unto your skin. Yeah. They're always like wiping off their swords because they with you know that I corps on them with little little worms. So this worm is essentially responsible for the whole fictional biology of

these vampires. And the way that it works is you get infected by one of them, you lie in a suspended state of animation for about a day, and then the following night you rise as a vampire. And it's so it's not like the idea of the vampire from sort of past fiction where it kills the victim. They die, they're buried, and then they rise. These people are still alive.

They're just undergoing like a metamorphosis. Yeah, yeah, like that definitely, it's a situation where the parasite transforms the host um into really a different kind of organism, and they the primary thing, Like I think the first thing in these vampires biology that changes is they grow a six ft long stinger out of their mouth that fills up their

torso cavity. Uh. And I guess what's supposed to happen is the lungs and the throat tissue all kind of like melt down and recompose and modify into this stinger thing. And it's hideously long too. Yeah, yeah, and it and it uh is how they feed. They shoot it out of their mouths and latch onto people or they also that's how they pass on warms so other people to

spread the infection. Uh. And like the like we mentioned with the mandibles of the blade to vampires, their jaws are on this weird lower hinge and they kind of, you know, drop so that the stinger has room to come out of. And that I think in the storylines, at least from my experience the books and the comics, I think it takes like that's the first thing, Like within eight hours you've got a stinger, and you might

still have a little bit of your personality. But then it takes seven days for this other set of of traits to change within your body. So, uh, your skin becomes opaque, your digestive system gets fused together. Uh, the stinger forms. Of course, you lose your hair and your fingernails and your nose and also your genitals and ears. So the vampires are are sexless kind of Uh, they're they're very machine like you in a lot of ways. Right, They just kind of dump all of the non essentials

of the human body. Uh, and then their fingers grow into talent like things, which I don't know if they use them as weapons as much as they do for

like crawling around on walls and stuff. Right, Yeah, I think in the show you you do see them use less as weapons, because I mean they got that stinger, right, Yeah, why would you don't have to use your close So the idea then is that, you know, after seven nights, they're fully formed into these sort of hairless, white stinger beasts that troll around and you know, kill humans and turn them into more vampires. And most of them are kind of zombie like as apt to the very few

who have like a rational mind. Yeah, within the fictional world, I'd say like there's only like two or three maybe vampires that have sort of control or or individuality. The rest of them sort of turned into this hive mind of of almost like insects. Actually. Um So there are a couple of ways that they used science, or they tried to use science. It's kind of hokey pseudoscience, you know, sometimes when when fiction meets science, you have to you have to build the bridge a little bit between it.

Oh yeah, and I certainly I think this is the best part about the strain too. There was a lot of attention put into this. But uh so the mythology of vampires being vulnerable to silver, that's because silver has an anti viral bacterial quality that disinfects these worms and is somehow able to sort of burn through the tissue that they've created. Uh And then they're also vulnerable to UV light, which is where the you know, they can't go into sunlight thing comes from, because the UV light

also has germicidal properties. It's on a certain kind of wavelength that breaks down the tissue within the vampire bodies. Um this is an interesting sort of science e thing that del Toro thru into there. So his vampires can't vomit, and all of their waste is excreted from a cloaca.

Uh that you know, they're they lose their genitals and everything fuses down there into a cloaca, and their waste is all just ammonious spray, which they usually emit while they're eating, so like, while they're drinking the blood of their victims, they're also spraying ammonia out behind them. And he based this on ticks because apparently ticks have no space inside of their bodies for the food that they eat. So when like a tick is on you and it's

drinking your blood. This is all from Del Toro. I didn't do tick research for this episode, but uh, he says that they spray out their waist as they're drinking. You know. That reminds me. I was reading about scorpions recently, or actually it was a really cool article about the anus and the evolution of the anus, and they mentioned as a particular type of scorpion that can jettison its

tail when threatened, much like a lizard. Really yeah, autotomy uh and uh And in this case though, when they jettison their tail, they also jettison their anus, so they can no longer defecate at that point, so they just continue to balloon up with feces for the rest of their life and then die from it eventually. Like there's a toxic only here on stuff to blow your mind? Will you go from anus to scorpion to vampire? Um?

You know, I do want to throw in real quick that another interesting vampire myth uh tidbit that they employ in the Strain is the whole vampires cannot cross moving water of their own volitions, which which they never really flesh out because it's it's kind of more of a magical idea. But I think gets at least hinted that this might have to do with like the evolutionary history of the worm that like something in The Worm of

Whores moving water. There is I don't want to spoil it for our listeners are for you, but there is a explanation to it that comes in the third book, I want to say, and maybe you know, I guess if the TV shows a season for every book, it would probably be in the third season. Well, I have that to look for. Yeah, there is a sort of explanation. I don't think it's science though, but I like you.

I like your idea better. Yeah, because it will end up exploring um, you know, water moving water, parasites and parasitositic manipulation of the host. Hugely important, hugely important. Yeah, we do see that in the real world. So Del Toro himself has said in interviews that he based these worms in the strain on two real worms. The first one is the heartworm, which we're all familiar with if you have a pet, if you have a dog. I

just gave my dog is heartworm pill this morning. Uh and it you know, it's a worm that lodges itself in the heart of dogs. It's not a thing that you want. And then the other is an old friend of stuff to blow your mind, the horsehair worm. We did a video about this while back, and yeah, I'll link to it on the landing page. It is. Um. I gotta say this episode was a little tough for

me to research. Um I really, I really feel like I've gotten my uh my, my badge of of stuff to blow your mind courage this week, because there's some pretty disgusting stuff in the biology of these different parasites and insects. And just watching the video of the horsehair worms squirm its way out of a cricket's body is It just gives me goose bumps. Uh, it's it's chilling, but it's also fascinating. I definitely recommend that you go watch that video because I had not heard of it

before you did that episode. Yeah, that was one. I think I mentioned it in the episode that I saw it in like a junior high band class for some girl. You saw a real one. Yeah, yeah, Like there was a cricket on the floor and this girl on the

clarinet section. She was acting, she was acting like all you know, grossed out by she she stopped the cricket, which I thought was a little at the top, but then in perfect karma, she was then legitimately horrified by the side of the horsehair worm emerging, you know, impossibly long from the belly of the cricket and crawling across the band room floor. So yeah, they are. I mean a lot of these things that we're about to talk

about are are pretty vile. And I'd like to quote there was an article that I research I read for this episode that was about the strain, and it was the only other thing I could find that was like this episode. It was about the strain and the science behind parasites. Uh. And the science writer at Vox, her name is Susannah Locke. She was the expert that they spoke to about these uh and she had this quote

in this that I really liked. She said, for as creepy as you can make some monster, there are almost certainly ten or eleven things out there in nature that are even creepier, which is that's nice. I like that, and she's She's right, it's a there's just something about these things that just are revolting. Yeah. I mean that's the thing I find again in again with my Monster the Week and Monster Science series is that, like, sometimes I approach it by like, there's a cool article that

comes out and that's some neat biology. I wonder what that matches up with and fictional monsters. But in other times it's just if you think of any elaborate monster, if you watch a film and you say, hey, that's a really cool monster design, and then you wonder, is there something in the real world that matches up or exceeds that. There Almost always is, Yeah, I mean, obviously it's where the imagination probably comes from in the first place. Uh.

Del Toro himself. You know, we mentioned earlier about how he was obsessed with vampires as a little kid. Well, he also refers to himself as a biologically perverse guy. Uh And he said when he was a kid that he's always keeping jars of things, like jars of animals and blood, and he had little dissection tables. He would just do his own little autopsies on animals, which is terrifying and makes me think of that that old adage

that you know, the kind of people who torture. I mean, he's not torturing animals, but you know, opening up animals. His little kids are probably going to grow up to be a psychopath. Instead, he grew up to be an artistic genius. That's why I keep financing his films. Yeah, we're not. This episode is not financed by Crimson Peak coming to a theater soon near you. One last thing before we get into the examples, there was another great piece of research that we found that was actually Susanna

Locke's article led to it. A guy named Ed Young did a ted talk about parasites uh and, and the kind of zombie ish effects that they can have on various animals, mostly insects, but cats are covered as well. Um, and he says, I think this is part of what makes parasites so sinister and compelling. We place a premium on our free will and our independence, we being humans, and that the prospect of losing those qualities to forces

unseen informs many of our deepest societal fears. So this gets right to the heart of what scared me the most about vampires when I was a child. Uh, I very clearly remember my my first interaction with vampire fiction was an episode of Spider Man and his Amazing Friends, and Dracula was the villain that they fought in that episode. And something something happened where his Amazing friends Firestar, I

believe is the his female superhero friend. She was turned into a vampire, and it I was I mean, I was probably like four or five, and I remember like doing that thing where you stand by the door and you're watching the TV with one eye around the corner of the door because I was so scared of this cartoon Dracula. That's weird to Dracula himself showed up because what's the name of the actual vampire that is in

like kind of the Blade and marvel omrbeous the living vampire. Yeah, I don't know if he ever showed up in the cartoon. But Marvel the old one, right, you're talking about that really old Spider Man cart Yeah, the one from the eighties. This one. There was an older Spider Man cartoon, I believe in the late sixties, early seventies. But um, Marvel had a string of horror comics that came out in

the seventies, and Dracula was one of them. I think probably because I would assume the rights to that were open and they could just do whatever they wanted with it. Cool that I like that quote from from me young that because because the whole issue of parasites and free will, uh, the whole idea of vampires and free will, uh certainly certainly resonates because in vampires you often see themes of addiction.

Um are are explorer, themes of disease, themes of parasites, all things that suddenly turned the table on us and say, well, maybe we are not in control of our bodies. Of our bodies are telling us to drink this and making these things happen to ourselves. You know, some stories have gone so far as to make it a metaphor for like HIV, for instance, like a blood borne disease, and it again it changes our bodies against our will. We

don't have any control over it. Yeah, the I that idea is I think inherently revolting, especially to human beings

and maybe maybe specifically to Americans. I don't know. There might be a cultural study on that, but we value our independence so highly in our culture that maybe there's something to that that affects us more well, you know, and that brings us to syphilis um and And I'm we're not gonna go too in depth on syphilis because we have two episodes in the path that we did on syphilis, looking at syphilis as a disease, looking at the Treponema palladium, the the organism that causes syphilis, as

well as the history and cultural impact of it um. But just to to refresh Treponema palladium, it is a thin, tightly coiled spiral key, this little little worm creature that causes syphilis. Its sexually transmitted in the illness spread through Europe from the mid fifteenth century onward, and before the advent of antibiotics, it was one of the most common infections afflicting up to tim per cent of the adult population in Western in the Western world, and it was

an incura. It was incurable for four point five centuries UM. And when you really start teasing apart the impact of syphilis in the Western world, it's difficult to overstate it. Um. It was widespread spread again, it was incurable. Uh, it was a thing to be feared. And and of course when we as we've been discussing when we we take our monsters, where when when we create monsters, we're giving

our fears form and face and force all their own. Yeah, I think that it's important to recall, like how prevalent syphilis was at a time time before we were alive, and that I imagine from what I've read of of you know, the period that it was most active was that I say most active as if it's like a living you know, one single minded creature. But but but it was really had a huge impact on the cultural of zeitgeist. I guess, uh, you know, people were in fear of it and there was also a sort of

uh disgust towards those who had contracted it. Yeah, because it was I mean, you know, in the past, pretty much any illness or physical ailment is tied to the soul, but certainly with syphilis because it of course is is tied to sexual contact, right, and so you know, and not exclusively sexual contact. You could also there's also congenital uh syphilis, in which you're just born with it. Yeah, but there is an assumption in a lot of cases.

You know, if you found out that somebody had syphilis, you assumed that they got it from you know, loose sexual practices, right. Uh. And like I remember doing research for another project about the Franklin Expedition going through the Northwest Passage. This is in the mid eighteen hundred, and you know, there were there were members on board those ships who certainly had syphilis, you know, and the officers looked upon them as being, you know, less than because

they had contracted such a thing. So it's this thing that's spread from one person to another, and and it

has these various stages. And I'm not going to go into into to the first two stages, but the the later stage, tertiary syphilis, which occurs in ten to occurs ten to twenty years after the initial affection, so you know, quite a lot of time passes, and there are a number of symptoms that it involves and we're talking about tissue damage, muscle damage, organ damage, coordination problems, paralysis, numbness, gradual blindness, dementia, uh, death. But where it really ties

in nicely with the strain Uh. Not only you know the worms of course causing everything, but you would often see with syphilis the loss of the nose or the sinking of the nose into what was called saddle nose um. And this is where we saw increased use of wigs, the increased use of cosmetics, and the increased use of

fake noses to cover up your own essentially decaying nose. Yeah, this is uh ironic because just yesterday I was reading a piece that you had previously written in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind site on Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com about the fake noses artificial noses as prosthetics because of syphilis. But also there were other people like the famous scientists or astronomer Tycho brah Hey, he had his nose cut off in a sword fight, and I believe they were a gold nose. Yeah, I think

he had. I think he had a couple, but but yeah, I think he had a hit a like a brass or gold nose at any rate, he was. He replaced his nose, but was not shy about it. He was just oh, he was very brash. He made it as obvious as possible, kind of like I think. But in the stream, you see these, you know, these characters that have been degraded into these um, these nonspat tousque characters by the parasite. They still have to interact with the world, some of them. And in those cases, what do they

have to do. They have to put on wigs, they have to put on cosmetics, they have to put on a fake nose, um all in order to uh to appear normal again. Also, you would see syphilis sufferers who would use cod pieces. There's also where we saw a resurgence of cod pieces, or not maybe not a resurgence but a uh but you saw an increased use of them due to a potential damage to the genitalia. Well maybe that's why some rock stars wear cod pieces. There

you go, I think that's a holdover from syphilis. It could be, it could be um and uh in according to um Slavic and comparative literature professor Thomas lav Langevic, commentators have often drawn a line of comparison between hereditary syphilis and vampirism um because one of the one of the things that you see with the congenital um syphilis is the formation of sharp, pointy teeth, which which are known as Hudgetson's teeth. So it's you know, the different

deformations of the of the dums and teeth. You sometimes see long nails, you see elongated skulls, um and uh, you know, superficially, it's easy to look at extreme cases of late syphilis and congenital syphilis because when you have congenital syphilis, a lot of times the physical deformities are really I mean they're taking place in the womb and they're pretty severe early on in life. Um, but you could you could easily make a comparison between count orlock

in Nosferatu and severe syphilis sufferer. Yeah. I remember the research that I had done on syphilis again about the sort of Arctic expedition time. Some of the photos that I saw of like skulls or or or they had done like molds of people's heads. I mean we're talking like elephant man style deformations here. It looked incredibly painful. Uh. And this is a side note about syphilis I don't know if you've heard this before, but here's a little

tidbit fun fact. There's a theory that Leon Cholgas, who was the man who assassinated President McKinley, that he possibly had been in acted with syphilis and was in second stage heading into third stage syphilis, and that it was part of the disease acting upon his mind that made him go mad and try to kill the president. But well, you know, given the time period there, it seems very likely.

I mean, it's possible his nose didn't fall off, he hadn't started turning into you know, a deformed third tertiary stage syphilis victim. But uh, there's there's some some evidence people think that points in that direction. Yeah, there are people that argue that Bram Stoker may may he himself have suffered from syphilis, and that the novel Dracula is or was his own way of exploring his own syphilitic condition.

But there's not there's not any hard proof in that area. Uh. So I feel like we've we've gotten syphilis pretty well covered here. Uh And like you said, there's two previous episodes all about it. So if you want to learn more about syphilis, go back through the archives and certainly take the deep dive with Robert and Julie on that. Uh, let's get to another one. This is just one that that guy Young mentioned in his TED talk. He talked about the guinea worm. Is this one that you've encountered

in your various travels with parasites and monsters? I feel like we've covered guinea worm in the past. Yeah, I think we. I could be wrong on this, but I think we did a something with the Carter Center about guinea worm. Okay, well, yeah, that would make sense actually given the work that they do, because apparently the way that you are infected by these is from unclean drinking water. Uh. And the community that I live in a suburb just outside of Landing here are our water went off for

three days last week. Uh. And I don't think guinea worms were what people were worried about, but unclean drinking water was certainly on everybody's mind. We realized sort of how privileged our first world society is. But yeah, so you are infected by this thing, and then what happens is it creates a burning blister on either your leg or your ankle. So well, I guess your ankle is your leg and that what happens is hurt so much in it and it burns that your inclination is to

immediately go to the water. So here we go. This ties into this sort of vampire can't cross the water type thing and also vampire I'm not vampires, but parasites um twisting your behavior, manipulating you to do things exactly right, Like was it your idea to do this? Did the parasite consciously say I need to make this host of

mine walk towards the river? But what happens is people go toward the water, they try to wash the blister, and what happens is the worm bursts out because they can only mate in water, so immediately bursts out of your skin and moves on. And then you know more, I assume they must be microscopic in size when you're drinking them from the unclean water. More produced. But then let's get on. This is the big daddy monster parasite that really connects to you know, uh, the del Toro

string oy, the horse hair worm. We just mentioned it briefly earlier, but let's let's really investigate this thing. Yeah, we we mentioned if you look at any videos of this. It generally consists of some sort of an insect that's been squashed or it's near the water, and there's this enormous black worm. It looks like a like a thick horse hair, you know, just long black, doesn't have any others distinguishable features, extremely long, extremely wiggly, just writhing and

emerging from this creature's abdomen. And it's it's grotesque, its beautiful, and yeah, you're right, it's both those things. If you haven't seen it, I think it's important to to note, like these things are like three or four times the size of their host body in terms of like length. So you see them start pouring out of like a dead cricket or whatever, it's just wool. So nauseating because you just they unfurl. Yeah, there there are a number

of different ones. They're all from the phylum U Nematomorpha, And uh, the way it works is this, Uh, the adults are free living, but the larva are parasitic, can grow to adulthood in the body of an insect. Male and female horsehail hairworms mate and damp soil and fresh water. So you may if you were ever walking through the woods, which I was once and I actually looked in a puddle and I saw one squirming around. Yeah. Um, So that the males and the females they mate in damp

soil or fresh water. The female lay is just millions of eggs in this little puddle, and then the eggs hatch and tiny larva um that they insist on vegetation near the water's edge, which is probably likely to be eaten. Yeah, that's what happens. Cricket or other host drops. By they eat the vegetation, they end up consumingly insisted larva. Uh. And in the case of say are carnivorous mantis, it

acquires the parasite by devouring an intermediate hook. So something else eats the grass and then the antis eats it. And that's another common theme we're going to see with some of these creatures today. Yeah. Yeah, because the parasite is playing kind of the long game, right uh. And so once inside the final host, be it the thing that ate the plan or the thing that ain't, the thing that hint the plant um, theys covering dissolves an insects gut and it allows the juvenile warm to escape

bore through the gut wall and start absorbing nutrients. Uh. And and that's you know, similar to what we were just talking about with the guinea worm. That's when it bursts free right after after it's sort of taken as many nutrients as it can. Yeah, once it's reached full size. But here's the thing, and this is something that researchers are still exploring. So if you if the host dies, if somebody squashes it on a band room floor, the

worm emergence. But obviously this is a situation where spaceship cricket is going down, and so the parasite that is piloting the spaceship at this point it has to get off, has to has to just embark. But remember how we talked about the puddle, right, the puddle is where it needs to go, right, so it unlike the guinea worm, it doesn't encourage its host to go towards wet areas well,

or is that they happen. Still trying to figure that out, because there are two possibilities one either the the Either the horsehair worm waits until its host inevitably returns to an area in your water and then punches out through the abdomen, or it manipulates the host into seeking out water. Okay, so this is again very much very vampire vamporistic. And there's all there's actually some some compelling evidence toward the brain hacking situation, like observations of of of Mandis is

jumping into the water like you know, living style. You know now that you're saying this, I do remember from Young's talk that he said that there's evidence that they release a certain kind of protein into the crickets brains that addle their brains so that they head towards water. Yeah. Yeah, Like I said, I feel like the the evidence for brain hacking is pretty compelling here and ultimately makes the creature all the more fascinating. Now, I know what you're wondering.

Can it infect humans? Well, yes it can. They are. Human infections are possible, though not that likely. The human is not, of course, the intended host. But there were two Japanese cases reported in two thousand twelve, but these were due to, of course, just accidental ingestation of infected insects. So these two humans had eaten a cricket or something like that, and that cricket had yet to burst. It's uh,

it's horse hair worm. Yeah, I actually have a quote from the study here said the woman vomited a worm after gargling with a sailine solution as she felt something was caught in her throat while she was lying in bed. She had eaten vegetables harvest from a private garden. The other worm, from the mouth of a boy, was removed by his mother. So, so, uh, you said that you've seen these, So I'm assuming that they're indigenous to southeast United States, where we live. It sounds like they're also

in US to Japan. Are they just everywhere? I think they're just everywhere. Yeah, They're in They're in Asia, They're in Europe. There in the United States, they're um anywhere there is a warm, safe insect belly in which to grow. Here you will find the horse hair worm, and maybe inside us. Yeah, I think, right, how well you washed

your grains well. It also makes me kind of went right, like, how many autopsy tables have you know, somebody dies and then all of a sudden a little worm just kind of pokes its way out and makes its way over to the sink or something, you know. I mean, I don't think that they're that insidious, obviously, but this is clearly where del Toro got the inspiration from. Uh. There's one last creepy fact about the horse are worm I want to throw in here. This is also from Young's talk.

He said, there's a Japanese scientist named Takuya Sato who found one stream where there were so many of these things, and they'd infected so many crickets that it just had filled up the stream with crickets and over six of the local trout's diet where the crickets who had been infected by horsehair worms and then subsequently horsehair worms themselves. Uh. I also remember reading in one of these articles that generally the host has only one horse hair warm inside it,

but it is possible to wind up with twins. So you have two of these things. Wow, okay, all right, well let's let's move on. What else do we have on the parasitic pop ladder. Well, we've got a zombie fungus here, and uh, you seem familiar with this when we were first talking about this, but I believe it's pronounced opheo corti SEPs. That correct, court sps. Okay, so this is also commonly known as the zombie fungus. And what I had heard was that, I say, I heard

like down on the street. You know they talk about the zombie fun I read about it. It drives carpenter ants like so that they get infected with this fungus, and carpenter ants then go to find a more suitable home for the fungus and then it bursts out. So uh, young jokes about this and it's talk. As you can already tell. The common theme is something gets in you, it drives you to go somewhere, and then it bursts

out of your body and kills you. Now you had some other research on the there's more than one court of steps. Oh yeah, there are thousands of different court of steps, and each one is aimed at a different insects species. Uh. For instance, though bullet ants are infected by one particular type of court of steps, and it

manipulates the behavior of the ant. It causes it to climb up about five centimeters above the usual ant trail, usually facing northwest, clamp on with its jaws generally around noon and just not let go, and then within six hours it dies. A few days later, a tube sprouts out of its head, and this is the fruiting body of the fungus it you know, blast out the spores

and then these end up infecting a new ants. So um, it's uh, it's it's it's kind of essentially it makes the the ant go raise itself up like a flag on a flagpole, die and then spread. It's it's a sport. What's um? I mean, surely it seems very specific northwest at noon? What's the specific? Um? There must be some kind of reason for that, like as the sun as it's at its highest, and that subsequently makes it easier

for the fungest to bloom or something. I don't know, I guess though, Or it's you know, tapping into existing you know, behavioral maybe that's the ant. But um, if the generally what happens to in these these social ant colonies, if they discover a worker that is exhibiting some of the characteristics of a court accepts infected AUNT, they'll remove them and take their body out and dump them somewhere else because they know the real yeah, that they are prized.

So they're like the vampire hunter ants. Yeah, yeah, like they they are. They are aware of the vampire issue and they will remove them if there's something fishy. Huh. This reminds me of recent movie Aunt Man that's just come out to where apparently through some science, like they just wear like blue too. It's basically in their ear

that allows them to control ants. And now I'm wondering if they could backtrack and do a pseudoscience explanation of it by saying that they've they've infected these ants with the zombie fungus. Well, you know, there there's a lot of interesting um species that live among ants. Um one in particular I was reading about the other day as a as a type of beetle. And if you want the details on this, I did a monster the week about the thing. Carpenter is the thing, and I'll link

to it on the list pretty recently. Yeah, but but in that I tied in this this particular beetle that lives among the ants, and it uses scent and an audible cues to convince the other ants that it is either work or ant or sometimes even royalty within the colony, so that you can live amongst the ants undetected, eat their larva, and also benefit from the protection of the high because it's like it's like living in a bank vault, you know, it's like living in a medieval castle in

the insect world. You're pretty safe in there. And if you're if you can get away with eating some of the babies in the castle, all the better. Yep. Resolutely wasn't that dark. But I believe that they just said something very quickly about pheromones. You know, that's usually just pheromones. That's how we do it. So what do we we

have a parasitic castration next? Yes, because of course the Strain has some wonderful scenes where the characters who are changing suddenly realize that they're genitals are rotting and or falling off, and then whoops, they finally dropped their pants, look in the mirror and there is this kin doll like molding. Yeah. As I mentioned at the top, it's like they get rid of everything that that that that the the vampire biology no longer needs, and it falls off.

They I do remember this from the television show that they made a rather big production about one character going through that process, and um, yeah, it was grizzly. Yeah, but yeah, you're right, they've got the sort of action figure Barbie doll body, uh, and they're very smooth. So all that stuff falls off. So the pair citocratic castration

is similar to this. Yeah, and it's you know, it's ghastly, but it's purely economical because in the case of the strain, the little stragary worm, it does it doesn't need these host creatures to breed, and it doesn't This is not a part of its functional biology anymore. And so in the natural world we see parasitic castration as a as a tactic where they shut off reproduction in the host, generally in order to hoard all the energy resources for themselves.

Because this is your host. You're were you were gaming this organism, and so any energy expenditure, and and certainly in organisms mating, energy expenditures are kind of high. So if you can shut that off, then you've streamlined the

the the the energy efficiency of the organism for yourself. Um. There are numerous accounts of this, but one one that came to mind here is a parasitic parasitic barnacle called Sacculina carcini, and this parasite stops rep production in the host crab and stand and end up ends up stimulating

the female crab to disperse parasitic eggs. In this with the same behavior that you would normally use to lay her own eggs, So us want the same mouth well I don't know their mouthparts, but using the same the same physiological gifts to distribute the parasite young that she would normally use to distribute her own eggs. I you have a note here too about how trematode parasites also use this to destroy the gonads of their victims. Yeah,

because again, what does it have gonads for? This is you know, the parasites essentially saying this is not a free roaming crab or insect. It's it's it's my car now, and I my card does not eat gonads. Okay, So, uh, I'm gonna say this. There's a particular one that we're gonna get to that I had a nightmare about last night. So we're heading towards it, though, But the parasitic castration, and you think of about it. This is the first time working on an episode of stuff to blow your mind.

I've had a nightmare. Well, welcome to the show, Christian. So another one is this is not the one I was thinking of, but the the the hookworm which many of us are familiar with her which also called a nematode. Uh, you know, This is just your your average hookworm parasite that sucks the blood from within its host, very vampiric. Uh. It burrows into your skin and migrates to small intestines.

And we're talking about humans here. And yeah, especially in the South here, we're big on the hookworm not too not too long ago. Sometimes they can suck so much blood from within your body that you can get anemia, so you will probably be aware of this. And here is a stunning fact. When I was looking this up, they currently infect six hundred million people in the world. So that's a lot. I mean when you think about it.

You know, I was joking earlier about our sort of first world uh plumbing problems of having clean water that's readily available, but uh man, six hundred people and six hundred million people in the world are carrying around hookworms and can't do anything about it. Well, then you have the interesting situation where hookworm free individuals have sought them

out there. There's been some interesting content to come out in previous years about this where there's the argument that humans have had hookworms for so long that we've kind of co evolved with them, and we've reached the point where we kind of don't work right if if we're missing the hookworms. Really so you have you've had cases where certain individuals have claimed that as hookworm free organisms

there they don't work right, they're not properly. They have all these allergies, etcetera, or some kind of some some kind of modern maladay. Yeah, and I think a lot of times it is just excessive allergies. And then they seek out the hookworm infection and uh and and and the choir hookworms by saying going to treem filled field in Africa. There was this American life about this one

individual britishdividual who did this. I think he was British where he ended up fleeing to Britain anyway, he um, he went acquired hookworms and he was actually selling them online for a little bit to like minded individuals. Um. The thing is he's kind of acting ahead of the research. There's actual research that's looking into this, say saying, you know, to what extent, how do we uh, do we benefit

from a mild hookworm infestation in our bodies? You know, not enough to actually cause anema anemia, but enough to to sort of balance things out and give our body the in the the level of infection and occupancy that it has come to expect. So it's sort of like the symbiotic relationship many animals have with parasitic uh, parasites

have with their hosts. Yeah, I mean across the board when you look at parasites and symbiotic relationships, there's often kind of that gray area like when does when does the parasite stop being a parasite and start being becoming a symbiotic organism? At which point does it stop becoming a paras side and become a part of who you are, such as you know, all the bacteria in our bodies. Yeah, Like I'm thinking of Lamprey's where I grew up in

New England. Lampreys are really common in the rivers around there, and they certainly work off of hosts and kind of, you know, to maintain one another's ecology. But there's also, um, what are the what the what are the I'm forgetting the name right now. With the fish that cleaned sharks believe so yeah, the little yeah little cleaning Yeah yeah, yeah,

maybe that's maybe the hookworm is our remora. Yeah, I mean there, I've I've read some interesting speculative biology about about the origins of the vampire bat, and there are some there's some theories that vampire bats originated as as his creatures that would would feed clean up the wounds of giant you know, megafauna, and then over time that

develops into just full blown parasitism. Yeah, well that is you know, if your stomach hasn't hearn from our hookworms and syphilis and zombie fungus, what have we got next for you? That's like a vampire from a from a science fiction TV show. Of course, we could keep going. We're actually gonna have to cut a couple of parasites from our notes just to so that we don't go

too long here. But the next one we're gonna look at if simon Thoa exigua, which is this cool isopod creature that a number of you are probably familiar with. It kind of looks like a like a sand louse, a little bit like a kind of beetle or an enlarged tick or something like that. Yeah, I think it's actually kin to like the little roly poly creatures you see. If you've seen the horror movie The Bay, which came

out about to maybe three years ago. The whole movie surrounded the idea of these sort of mutated isopods infecting human being. Did you see it? I did. Does it actually like replace their tongue? Yeah? Yeah, I mean the whole movie sort of builds up to, uh that that's the big scene, but they cut it's found footage, so they cut it with footage of actual isopods inside fish

mouths replacing their tongues. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of our listeners are familiar with this one because I think we've covered in on the podcast before, and it's it's also one of these things that just really became viral because it's horrifying. This the idea that you know, you look at the fish's mouth and there instead of the fish's tongue, you have this little crustacean that is just setting there, perched on the on its tongue stump, acting as its tongue, just like you know, you open

this mouth and there's a little guy in there's hello. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's some some lovely cartoons out there they explore that. Um, this is so I mentioned earlier I had a nightmare doing the research of this episode, and this was I think it was sort of an amllegation of all the parasites that we're talking about here, but the isopod in particular is one that gets me. I before I went to bed last night, my my throat was a little inflamed, I think, like my allergies were

bothering me. And in the night I had this you know, horrifying there about something crawling around in my throat. It was probably mixed in with the strain as well, with the you know, the whole idea that your voice box and lungs collapse and fuse into the stinger thing. But the isopod is really I mean, that's that's pretty close to the strain there where your tongue is replaced by a living thing. Yeah, and it's horrifying to think of of a fish experiencing this because the fish can't just

reach in and do anything about it. It's just kind of it's just got to roll with it. At this point. This thing painfully like drains your tongue juice out and then you're just atrophies and then attaches to the stump and then it becomes your new tongue and then you know, feeding off of morsels of food and mucus it's it's horrifying. Yeah. And to be clear here, uh, my understanding is that they do not do this to humans. There hasn't been a case where humans tongue has been replaced by one

of these things. And that movie exists, it's fictional. Yeah, and the the the isopods in question here, they don't. Uh My understanding too that that we we still need a lot more research on and there isn't a lot of of of of there isn't a lot of study into their biology, uh and their their life cycle. But but hopefully in the years the years to come, well

learn more about their their marvelous lifestyle. But yeah, if you certainly, if you want to see some twitchy imagery, do an image search for isopods because just in general, not even just the ones the Simothia, as you mentioned earlier, uh that they're creepy, there's some there's something about them

that just doesn't doesn't work for me. Uh So, okay, wasps, there are a lot of different parasitic wasps, so there this is sort of a broad category, but I think it's important for us to cover in this relation to the strain because there's so many of them. But they They commonly have this this trait where they lay eggs

inside of a host. The generic one that I read about was that they lay eggs inside a caterpillar, right, and they these eggs hatch inside the caterpillar's body, devour it from the inside out, and then you know, burst out of its body again, like the stereotype of all

these things. Right. Here's where it gets even weirder. Some of these wasps stay behind in the corpse of this caterpillar to defend other wasps that are still metamorphosizing inside of it, and they will, like like people wearing a horse costume sort of, they manipulate the the caterpillar's corpse so it seems like it's still alive, and they try

to chase away predators. The move it and kind of twitch it around, and it's it's a horrifying Yeah, when you start looking at parasitic wasps, there's so many fables examples, Like there's a study that I was just reading, an embargo study that's coming out and we'll have come out by the time this episode airs, uh, in which a particular wasps actually makes the infected spiders build it build

a protection for it. Yeah, And One of my favorites is a particular wasp dino campus Cocanella, and it does the you know, the traditional parasitic set up here, It ambushes a ladybug, implants it's it's egg inside it, and

then and then runs off. Right, So, eventually the the the young wasp emerges from the host organism, and a lot of times, you know, you would expect the host organism to mercifully die off, but in this case, not only does the ladybug live, but a little behavior modification from the parasite forces it to hang around and guard the parasite baby as it grows into full adulthood beneath the protective bulk of the ladybug. And they think it's due to secretions that are left by the larva when

it bursts out that you know, functionally reprogram it. And then on top of that, the ladybug doesn't even dive. Then, um, the researchers found that of the cases, the ladybugs recovered normal behavior following the ordeal. Really, so this is really gets to the heart of that theme of taking away independence these parasitic organisms doing so, but also that it it gains it back, it gets it gets its life

back afterwards. If so, what I mean it has nice that I can't help but imagine like a human scenario, like we lived in a world where occasionally you're just impregnated by a parasite and you essentially give birth to this thing that emerges from you, you know, alien chess, but Verster style. But then you live on to you know, go to support groups for likewise parasite afflicted into well.

I mean I suppose that that you could argue that that's what's going on with some people of hookworm or codeworm and and such, but they're not reprogrammed to guard the tape worms layer. You know. Uh. There's another just one more parasitic wasp that I wanted to touch on here, the Ampilex compre us so, which is the emerald cockroach wasp.

This one does a similar thing that for the ladybug, but it's with cockroaches like that they all have their own like like specific breed of other insects that they you know, mind control and destroy. So this one lands on a cockroach, stabs it when it's fertilized with eggs.

The wasp the stinger that it stabs it with is also a sense organ, so it kind of roots around inside the cockroach and touches its brain, and it injects a certain kind of venom into the cockroach's brain that basically takes away the cockroach is motivation to escape danger at all. So the cockroach becomes placid and just follows the wats. Well that's a gift, really, right, yeah, I mean taking away you know, fear, so you know they give, they take. But this is where it gets really nasty.

It leads the cockroach away from where it lives back to the wasp layer, lays the egs in it, and then what do you think happens? Um, everyone goes through separate ways. Unfortunately no, uh, the uh wasp bags hatch and burst out of the corporach and kill it. So a lot of a lot of bursting, more bursting. It's a beautiful world, the beautiful para. I mean, I would say, you know, we're specifically trying to associate these with the vampires from the stream, but I would say that a

lot of these resonate with the xenomore from Alien. Oh yeah, definitely. And it's very very parasitic in that regard. And the crazy thing is like is is elaborate as the crigory um life cycle is as elaborate as the zenobore f

life cycle is. You look at some of the the the charts showing you various parasitic life cycles and all the different hosts they have to go through, and some of these are tremendously complex, Like you could never do a TV show about them, because everyone would have to keep referring to, uh, you know, flash cards to keep up with your life style, especially when you get these ones, which we didn't we didn't cover that much here, but the ones that go from one host to another host

to another host, so they they they're ultimate end goal. For instance, is like a flamingo that they get eaten by a cricket or something first, and then they they they're inside the cricket, and then the crickets eaten by a flamingo or something like that. You know, uh, it move on and on and on to get to the eventual thing that they can reproduce in yeah, and then and then I'm very often they're hacking the mind of the host. They're manipulating behavior in order to gain it

back towards that that that start point or that endpoint. Right, exactly. All right, So there you haven't the strain the world of parasites, and I'll make sure that the landing page for this episode includes links to a whole bunch of stuff to blow your mind content about parasites in their wonderful ways. Yeah, I was gonna say this research really, I think is in the uh golden zone for stuff

to blow your mind. There's a lot of previous episodes and videos and posts that you've done over the years on this, and uh, you know, I would love to hear from our listeners as well about their experience with these things, whether you know, maybe there's somebody out there who's had hookworm, or maybe there's somebody who's had experience researching these things and could tell us more about them. It really is stuff we're gonna just keep on covering

because it's fascinating and there's always more research. They were continually finding cool, new cool new parasites and new understandings without existence sites work. So if you want to tell us your stories about these you can contact us on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumbler where we are blow the Mind, or you can write to us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works? Dot com