"There have been a few reports of phorid flies opportunistically causing human myiasis."
*puts on best Star Wars Emperor voice*
Kill them, kill them all.
Parasites spark swarm of zombie bees
Researchers have found a type of parasite that turns bees into zombies, causing them to exhibit strange behavior before dying. The discovery was made by accident, after San Francisco State University professor of biology John Hafernik collected some bees he found outside his office so that he could feed them to a praying …
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Friday 6th January 2012 08:33 GMT Mako
This. A thousand times this.
I once saw a documentary where some poor bloke in Africa was pulling some sort of (very long) worm out of his leg by wrapping it around a stick. Since then, anything like that - even the thought of botflies - makes me want to puke in my shoes. Or possibly someone else's.
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Friday 6th January 2012 12:07 GMT Ru
"what's the difference between a beastie eating you from the inside..."
Easy... it is rather more difficult for guys to become pregnant than it is for them to become parasitised. Also, the brain-altering effects of parasites are seen after infection, whilst the brain-altering effects of human reproduction often precede pregnancy.
Now you may go and read up on Sacculina and think about how much worse life could be.
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Friday 6th January 2012 12:10 GMT Axe
IIRC
I think they are called Guinea Worms, I read about them years ago, they can be as long as your leg and they come out throught the top of your foot, if you pull them to hard they snap and die inside your leg but if you are gentle you can get them out a couple of CM a day (Hence wrapping them round a stick, couple of turns in the morning pulls it out slowly). They are mainly found in poluted water (wells and such like) and once the head comes through your skin they react to water and release eggs which then start the cycle again. fascinating but in the same league as bott fly for me, I remember the article everytime I get an itchy foot!
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Friday 6th January 2012 00:20 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Fracking chestbusters!
How come these things are discovered by accident then found to infect 77% of the hives?
It is pretty astonishing, we can photograph the arsehair of a peacenik from orbit, then pull his telephone friend list from a data silo before we dispatch Mighty Guy In Blue armed with capsicum delivery systems for a hold&confront .. but bees are just the outer limits?
And mobes influencing bees? Yeah right.
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Friday 6th January 2012 09:30 GMT Yet Another Commentard
re: why has this not been spotted, with a 70% infection rate?
By way of a reply, I would guess because we’d not been looking, or we’d been looking at the wrong bees and for the wrong thing. Bees have a complex lifestyle, but once pupated and out of the cell they are “house bees” for the first section of their lives, not leaving the hive at all. Eventually they graduate to “guard bees” who hang around at the entrance, and then, having learnt where the hive entrance is, they go off and forage. They then forage for the rest of their short little lives, usually dying in the field.
It would seem this fly attacks foragers, while they out and about, not while in the hive. It’s difficult as an insect to get in to a hive (wasps try, and after a short spell will usually reappear as a corpse), if the colony is strong. A weak colony will soon be overrun with other colony’s bees, wasps, or any number of other nasties).
Usually when you open a hive, even to check for disease, you do so during the day when the foragers (i.e. the infected ones) would be off foraging. The majority of the bees you see are young house bees. You do this because there are less bees there, so it’s easier to see what’s going on, and you get stung less. It also tends to be warmer, so the bee brood (bee eggs, pupae, larvae) won’t chill too much.
If the infection causes disorientation, then infected bees can’t return to the hive, so they won’t be collected for any sampling. As a rule bees out and about are not caught for examination, you have no idea where they are from. I do think the light thing is a red herring though, I once took a hive on the back seat of my car, it tipped and burst open as I went round a corner. The bees, all 50,000 or so, were a bit upset and flooded out. It was night, and I absconded from the vehicle at high speed. The guy behind me stopped, and the bees all made for his headlights, so I could scoop them back into the hive fairly easily. So, I think they may do it anyway. They don’t usually fly at night, so bright lights probably just confuse them.
Standard disease checks don’t look for these things, the big ones are all “external” so you look at the brood, or for mites you can see on the bees (varroa) or elsewhere in the hive (hive beetles and wax moths). If you suspect an “internal” disease you ask for that to be looked for, or just grab some bees and open them up. BUT you look for the disease you think they have, such as nosema (spores in the gut) or acarine (pull off the head and look for black marks in the trachea).
HTH. Interesting work in any event.
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Friday 6th January 2012 05:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Those are no zom-bees!
>"walked around in circles, often with no sense of direction"
>"stretching [their legs] out and then falling over"
Neither of those are really the defining characteristic of zombies, which is in fact "being raised from the dead under the control of an evil sorceror". What we have here are in fact the defining characteristic of drunks.
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Friday 6th January 2012 06:24 GMT Neoc
Nope
The original Zombie derives from a subset of Ye Ol' Voodoo where some practitioners mixed herbs together to create a potion which would rob the recipient of their will, allowing the practitioner to order them around (ancestor to roofies?)
The recipient, having lost his will, would just shuffle about unless ordered to do something.
Hence the original image of the zombie being a glassy-eyed individual shambling towards the "victim". (see http://zombies.monstrous.com/voodoo_zombies.htm )
It wasn't until later that the concept of the Undead was mixed with Zombie - not surprisingly, in popular entertainment (i.e. movies and TV). And the rest, as they say, is annoying history.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
