Cat Parasites...A Fjordian Essay

For those of you who are privy to my regular conversations (a lucky few these days) this post won't be much of an enlightenment, but I've been meaning to do an overarching summary of the news stories I've seen in the past regarding the Toxoplasma parasite. For those of you unaware of this particularly interesting little critter, here's a brief summary.

The Toxoplasma lives in cats, specifically cats brains. After it's lived long enough, it moves into the cat's digestive tract, and then is pooped out into the world. The primary goal of the Toxoplasma is to be ingested by a rat - feeding off the cat feces.

Once ingested by a rat, it changes the rat's normal behavior - and basically makes it unafraid of cats. Thereby assuring it being re-ingested by a cat. Here's this older link to the original story.

Now, it appears after further study, that the Toxoplasma parasite, can, and does, in fact, infect humans.

"Parasitologist Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague administered psychological questionnaires to people infected with Toxoplasma and controls. Those infected, he found, show a small, but statistically significant, tendency to be more self-reproaching and insecure. Paradoxically, infected women, on average, tend to be more outgoing and warmhearted than controls, while infected men tend to be more jealous and suspicious." (this quote from the good people at Boing Boing - summarized from the CORANTE article here. - warning - sloooow download, but worth reading.)

So, this little beastie not only changes the behavior in rats - but also manipulates the behavior of humans - in fact to such an extent that it changes human behavior according to gender. (Which I find especially creepy) Scientists have determined that Toxoplasma does not pose a health threat to humans as long as their immune system is not compromised. However, this statement doesn't seem to imply that psychological changes in human behavior BY A FOREIGN CREATURE IN THE BRAIN is a health threat. However...this is not the end of the story just yet.

Today, popping up on my news radar was this little tidbit. "Sea Otters Dying From Cat Parasite." It seems that infected cat shit is being washed into the oceans, filtered by mollusks and shellfish, which are consumed by the Otters, and are then infected. The interesting thing here is, 1) we now have a parasite that can live in 5 different hosts, (cats, rats, humans, shellfish, and otters(altho this article also implies the parasite can travel in birds - so maybe six)) and 2) 17% of all sea otter deaths from 1998-2001 were caused by brain infections brought on by the Toxoplasma parasite. With a brain infection, Sea Otters are 4-times as likely as healthy Otters to be EATEN BY A SHARK!

Here ends the fully educational portion of our essay.

However, I have a few other speculations I'd like to mention.

Here we have a very adaptable and insidious parasite, which is nearly proven to live in multiple species, and changing their hosts behavior for their own uses. What does that mean they're doing to a shark's brain? Sharkfin soup is a popular dish in many Asian countries...do they make sharks more catchable so they can get back into human system again? Or, perhaps the parasite waits till the shark dies - is consumed by scavenger fish, which are then controlled into being more easily caught in nets, whereupon they are deposited (with our help) back into cat food? These questions are better left to smarter people than I, however, this will shortly tie in with my current hypothesis on mummies.

-Tsunami-