Blog 2

Blog 2

Fidelity: strict observance of promises, duties, etc.; loyalty; conjugal faithfulness

Although they say that love can’t be put under a microscope, I believe that fidelity can.  I am not suggesting that the collective jealous girlfriends of the world subject their boyfriends’ clothes and personal effects to forensic scrutiny.  As tempting as an all-revealing Luminol bath might be, I am actually talking about a fidelity separate of the human realm.  A fidelity demonstrated by creatures that could legitimately fit onto a microscope slide. 

These diminutive devotees are parasitic worms known as Schistosoma mansoni.  They penetrate human skin as flailing aquatic infants and make their way through the internal organs to look for a mate.  That in itself is unique to the world of parasites, since many similar creatures do not even have separate genders.  Tapeworms, for example, just hang out in the intestines and have sex with themselves all day; each of their segments has both male and female parts, allowing the tapeworm to become an undulating ribbon of procreation.  S. mansoni, however, use chemical signals to find a worm of the opposite sex.  Males are larger, with bodies that have been described as resembling canoes or taco shells; females are small and thin, like the hairs of some ethereal maiden.  Once the male and female select each other as mates, the female crawls into center of the male’s oddly-shaped body, called the gynaecophoric canal.  I would not assign such a gross and sterile name to it, though.  It is, in essence, a site of eternal embrace.  These squirmy little blood-suckers mate for life, something many of us, with our big ol’ wise-ape brains and warm bleeding hearts, can’t seem to handle.  In my opinion, renowned science writer, Carl Zimmer, described S. mansoni best in his book Parasite Rex when he said, “they may be the most monogamous couples in the animal kingdom—a male will clasp onto its female even after she has died” (37).  That sort of devotion is pretty much inconceivable to humans outside of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha.  While they are joined together, the male worm takes care of all the female’s needs, including feeding her a majority of the blood he steals from the human host’s intestinal blood vessels.  Additionally, of course, they have a ton of sex, allowing the female to produce astronomical numbers of spiny spherical eggs, or oocysts.  The eggs are shed in the human host’s feces, hopefully into fresh water where they can begin the life cycle anew, and the parent worms are left to continue their endless honeymoon.

 

It may seem disgusting, but if I ever get married I don’t want a diamond or gold band; I want a pair of Schistosoma mansoni embedded in a ring of Lucite.  I can think of no better symbol of fidelity.             

Resources:    

Drisdelle, Rosemary. Parasites: Tales of Humanity’s Most Unwelcome Guests. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010.

Wojcik, Jonathan. "A Bogleech Guide to Platyhelminthes." The Insidious Bogleech: Biology. 27 June 2013. Web. 30 Jan. 2015. <http://bogleech.com/flatworms.html>.

Zimmer, Carl. Parasite Rex. New York: The Free Press, 2000.