Mind control, ants, and parasites

A note on remote-controlled animals and interspecial mind control

Please familiarize yourself with RC animals on sister nodes here here here

Preamble

The need to control others be primal, part of our primate ancestry and hierarchy. Human domination AKA the brochure phrase stewardship, over all life, is an extension of this behavior.

Lets assume a nervous system isallabout control. The human brain is the greatest and arguably the most advanced emergent component of all nervous systems. The most complex. Technology — as wires, fibers, threads, transmitters, and receivers¹ — integrate these extensions forming an interface to interact with the host, and like parasites we become more mobile, and conversely more stationary, remaining in situ.

Yet if we are parasites, we are not the first parasites that have jacked another being's nervous system.

Here our story begins

Meet Dicrocoelium, a fellow parasite.

This lancet fluke's lifestyle is a migration through the fluids of three hosts; a cow, a snail and an ant.

Hungry snails eat the dung of the infected cows and swallow inadvertently the sequestered fluke eggs. Once hatching in the snail's intestine, they burrow through the gut wall and into a digestive gland. Within this gland, flukes reproduce a second generation - spewed back into the world by the tormented snail as balls of slime, each sticky drop, a seething mass of flukes.

It is in the third host, the ant host, where we observe mind control. Foraging ants come across the sparkling orbs of snot, sensing the source of moisture that they are, they quench their thirst on the slick beverage. Entering the third hypersea reservoir, the flukes undulate through the ant's fluids, most form cysts in the abdomen, but some home in on the nerve clusters that control the mandibles in the ants head.

The temperature drops into the coolness of evening, and the infected ant feels compelled to leave its brethren, forsaking them to climb a grass stalk spire to its apex - the pastures emergent canopy. Preparing to make itself a sacrifice, it anchors itself to the flimsy blade, attached firmly by its mandibles.

It waits motionless throughout the night to be devoured by the primary host, the cow. Herds like ruminating clouds pass over the ant, blotting out the stars, the hoof falls reminisant of distant thunderclaps. If the ant survives until morning the flukes relinquish their control allowing the ant to scurry back to join its fellow workers in the gloom and away from the solar furnace which would be death to both the host and the backseat driving parasite. By day the ant is a regular Joe indistinguishable from any other ant, but when night falls, again it makes its ascent into 'munch range' over and over until eventually consumed, drowned in cud, bursting open as a swarm of flukes within the cows stomach. The flukes complete the cycle by penetrating the bovines liver, becoming adult egg producers.

Flukes embedded inside another organism, use mind control. Though it could be argued not remote control, but the comparison remains at some level similar, implanting electrodes, the closest we can come to crawling inside another animals CNS. At least hopefully so.

The truth is parasites rule the world
they always have.