Science is Stranger than Fiction...

Sacculina carcini - the nastiest parasite I’ve heard of.

Purportedly, this little bugger was the inspiration for the classic film Alien and it’s myriad sequels.

Lately, I’ve been browsing a lot through my copy of Kunstformen der Natur (German for “Artforms in Nature”) by Ernst Haeckel. I find it to be quite inspiring and just generally interesting when I’m bored.

So I was ogling the lovely ‘Plate #57’ which focuses on infraclass Cirripedia, which is basically Barnacles and the like. However, I was perplexed by the large central image dominating the page, because it appeared to be just a funky-looking crab and not a barnacle-thingie. So I looked into it, and boy was I in for a surprise.

It turns out I was gazing at a rendering of a crab infected with a horrible parasite that takes it over and controls it like a walking zombie-crab! The sac-like thing on the bottom of the crab is actually the main pod of the gooey, slug-like Sacculina carcini, and the veiny-looking parts are actually showing the network of the parasite coursing through the entire crab’s body!

Basically, these things float around like little slugs until they come across an unwitting little crabbie. Then they pierce the guy’s body with a hollow knife and inject themselves through it into the carapace. They then take control of the crab, moving it around like a puppet and consuming all the nutrients the crab unwittingly catches for it! Adding further insult to injury, they sterilize female crabs (who then care for the parasite’s eggs as if they were her own), and if they happen to infect a male crab, they screw with his hormones and basically turn him into a female!

Nature is crazy and just plain evil sometimes…

I leave you with some photos of the gnarly little buggers.