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It’s weird indeed. If you’ve ever been to a slaughterhouse and heard the pigs screaming, you’ll seriously consider never eating meat again. And then there’s bacon. Nature is truly messed up.

You make a strong argument. I’m going off meat!

Also persuasive. I’m back on meat!

I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll eat pretty much anything at least once, if i don’t think it’ll make me sick from food poisoning.

Like, the little bug in the tuna. Do you eat shrimp? Shrimp are bugs. Crustaceans are all pretty much just bugs.

Most of what folks think of as OK vs gross is just based on what they are used to… And frankly, most Americans are kind of weenies when it comes to food.

Yeah but shrimp don’t try to become your tongue, dude. That’s some serious Ceti Alpha VI type shit right there.

Ooohh! A sexy copy editor.

Ever eaten freshly caught shrimp? Where you break their backs and all those tendrils / nerves stick out like squid arms? Fucking disgusting. In general I find seafood to be aesthetically off-putting but I’ll eat it once it’s processed.

Not sure if this goes here or in the “Some people ain’t too bright” category.

Kinda iffy for NSFW

Cymothoa exigua attaches itself to the fish’s tongue. It eventually destroys the fish’s tongue, and then attaches itself to the stub of what was once its tongue and becomes the fish’s new tongue

That’s one of the cooler parasites, but it’s not as cool as Sacculina:

The slug plunges into the depth of the crab. In time it settles in the crab’s underside and grows, forming a bulge in its shell and sprouting a set of rootlike tendrils, which spread throughout the crab’s body, even wrapping around its eyestalks. Covered with fine, fleshy fingers much like the ones lining the human intestine, these roots draw in nutrients dissolved in the crab’s blood. Remarkably, this gross invasion fails to trigger any immune response in the crab, which continues to wander through the surf, eating clams and mussels.

Meanwhile, the female Sacculina continues to grow, and the bulge in the crab’s underside turns into a knob. As the crab scuttles around, the knob’s outer layer slowly chips away, revealing a portal. Sacculina will remain at this stage for the rest of her life, unless a male larva lands on the crab and finds the knob’s pin-size opening. It’s too small for him to fit into, and so, like the female before him, he molts off most of himself, injecting the vestige into the hole. This male cargo— a spiny, reddish-brown torpedo 1/100,000 inch long— slips into a pulsing, throbbing canal, which carries him deep into the female’s body. He casts off his spiny coat as he goes and in 10 hours ends up at the bottom of the canal. There he fuses to the female’s visceral sac and begins making sperm. There are two of these wells in each female Sacculina, and she typically carries two males with her for her entire life. They endlessly fertilize her eggs, and every few weeks she produces thousands of new Sacculina larvae.

Eventually, the crab begins to change into a new sort of creature, one that exists to serve the parasite. It can no longer do the things that would get in the way of Sacculina’s growth. It stops molting and growing, which would funnel away energy from the parasite. Crabs can typically escape from predators by severing a claw and regrowing it later on. Crabs carrying Sacculina can lose a claw, but they can’t grow a new one in its place. And while other crabs mate and produce new generations, parasitized crabs simply go on eating and eating. They have been spayed by the parasite.

Despite having been castrated, the crab doesn’t lose its urge to nurture. It simply directs its affection toward the parasite. A healthy female crab carries her fertilized eggs in a brood pouch on her underside, and as her eggs mature she carefully grooms the pouch, scraping away algae and fungi. When the crab larvae hatch and need to escape, their mother finds a high rock on which to stand, then bobs up and down to release them from the pouch into the ocean current, waving her claws to stir up more flow. The knob that Sacculina forms sits exactly where the crab’s brood pouch would be, and the crab treats the parasite knob as such. She strokes it clean as the larvae grow, and when they are ready to emerge she forces them out in pulses, shooting out heavy clouds of parasites. As they spray out from her body, she waves her claws to help them on their way. Male crabs succumb to Sacculina’s powers as well. Males normally develop a narrow abdomen, but infected males grow abdomens as wide as those of females, wide enough to accommodate a brood pouch or a Sacculina knob. A male crab even acts as if he had a female’s brood pouch, grooming it as the parasite larvae grow and bobbing in the waves to release them.

It’s not an argument against intelligent design, but it’s certainly an argument against a benevolent creator. Or at least, against one that doesn’t REALLY hate crabs.

I think it’s an argument that Neal Asher is secretly the creator of the universe.

Don’t eat strawberries, then. They are often infested with teensy little bugs to the point that their cleaning procedures have to be specially reviewed by rabbis or they are considered non-kosher.

Well thanks for nothing. From now on I’ll pick my food from that thread about technical food, and I’m gonna laminate myself.

I’m almost positive that if you do the second thing first, you won’t have to worry about doing the first thing.

hahahaha

They are often infested with teensy little bugs to the point that their cleaning procedures have to be specially reviewed by rabbis or they are considered non-kosher.

Pretty much all my favourite food is non-kosher, so I’m not sure tha says all that much. Kosher rules are very, very silly in the modern age, from a health perspective.

Weenies? Yeah. Fuck yeah. I could go for a weenie right now.

The above post was brought to you by none other than Tim Elhajj!

-Tom