A long time ago, everyone knew about the existence of clematis, but when people saw this parasite, there was no special sense of fear, until the 2012 release of a Korean disaster film "Clematis Invasion", which caused people a strong sense of discomfort, in the movie a group of men and women infected by clematis and mental control, rushed to the water, and then a cloud of black clematis under the surface of the water surface surfaced, leaving a psychological shadow for many viewers.
Although we know that clematis can manipulate the behavior of insects, after the release of this brain-opening disaster movie, everyone began to think involuntarily of a question: Can clematis really manipulate human behavior?
The host is sucked into sterilized clematis
Clematis is the same as the roundworms we are familiar with belong to the nematodes, but much larger, people who have lived in the city since childhood may not have seen or clematis, in fact, the distribution of clematis is very wide, there are more than 300 species in the world, the length is about 10-50 cm, the longest found so far, but also has a length of more than 2 meters, it is difficult to imagine how these insects with a diameter of about 1 mm are curled up in the host body.
Many places will call the clematis as hair snakes, wire worms, just as the classic line "a person's name may be wrong, but the nickname is absolutely not wrong", whether it is "hairstyle" or "wire", all vividly describe the characteristics of clematis.
Clematis hard shell thanks to a layer of dark cuticle wrapping, has been our understanding of the clematis is only to control the host to find water, in fact, not all the hosts will find water sources before exhaustion, some hosts will even die halfway, in these cases, you need clematis to continue to survive on its own, so the hard structure can not only ensure that it continues to survive after leaving the host, but also controls the rate of water distribution in the body, so that it can persist to the place where there is water.
The life of clematis is very simple, living and breeding in swampy river ponds, the eggs laid by female insects hatch in the water, the larvae will attach to aquatic plants or small aquatic animals, waiting for predators to swallow into the body, when these larvae are eaten by animals such as mantises, grasshoppers, etc., the real nightmare begins.
Clematis larvae will cling to the host digestive tract, crazy to absorb nutrients and grow rapidly, the parasitic host will rush the stomach and begin to be "squeezed dry" step by step, before the clematis matures, the host will not die of malnutrition in advance, but will be destroyed by the clematis to destroy the gonads, and the neutered host has no reproductive troubles and becomes a "competent" host who only wants to eat.
Because the host has an exoskeleton and will not become skinny, we will not directly identify which insects have clematis in the body, had to soak the insect in the water to observe whether its abdomen will be abnormal, when the parasitic host is immersed in water, the body of the clematis will get a signal to become active, the hard body surface is rapidly twisted, it is easy to break out, this scene is really uncomfortable.
Clematis control the secrets of host behavior
When the clematis matures, it no longer needs to continue to dwell in the host, but is ready to return to the water for reproduction, at this time the clematis begins a mysterious "ritual": they can control the spirit of the host, forced to manipulate the host to run to the place where there is a water source, the desperate host can only step by step to the abyss of drowning.
So what kind of "ritual" does the clematis launch to force the host to jump into the water?
In 2005, when scientists were studying insects parasitized by clematis, they found a special protein in their brains, which is not seen in healthy bodies, only another protein that is very similar to it, which means that clematis makes this special protein, and is a "high imitation" that mimics normal proteins in the host, and these "high imitation" proteins will have a special effect in the host's body, which in turn affects the host's central nervous system.
In order to test this hypothesis, the scientists repeatedly conducted a number of comparative experiments, and finally concluded that the clematis controlled the behavior of the host by secreting this "high imitation" protein that was falsely real, without stimulating a strong immune response, inducing apoptosis of nerve cells in the host's central nervous system, while changing the signals emitted by the brain and nerve center.
In the study, the content of this special protein was associated with the abnormal behavior of the host, and the host in the active state of searching for water reached the peak of the content of special proteins in its body, and the clematis took advantage of this to manipulate the behavior of the host.
Can clematis affect human activity?
Before discussing whether we can or not, let's first understand why we can.
Between the parasite and the host, there is a symbiotic relationship and a parasitic relationship, to put it bluntly, it is the relationship between whether it will kill the host, parasitism is a very old survival strategy, and the problem that the parasite considers when choosing a host is whether it can ensure its own growth and normal reproduction, otherwise it cannot establish a parasitic relationship.
Clematis is located in the nematodes have many members parasitic in humans, such as roundworms, roundworms have a much higher parasitism level, roundworm eggs after hatching, the larvae will enter the human digestive tract with food, the larvae will grow in the small intestinal wall for a period of time, and then pass through the intestinal wall into the veins, with the veins into the oxygen-rich lungs, after the lungs continue to grow, will cause the person to cough back to the digestive tract again, in the small intestine to develop to mature spawning.
Compared with the parasitic level of roundworms, clematis can not do it at all, and the various structures evolved by clematis are not suitable for human structure, so even if clematis larvae occasionally invade the human body, the incidence of cases is very rare, and only 14 countries in the world have reported cases.
The simplest physical effects are still so, but what about clematis controlling the human mind? The human brain and central nervous system are far more complex than insects, and it is really unrealistic to control thinking through just a few "high imitation" proteins.
epilogue
Clematis will not affect the human spirit, does not mean that there is no parasite that can affect the human spirit, for example, in 2016, the University of Chicago medical team found that after the infection of the human brain with Toxoplasma gondii, the chance of suffering from "intermittent explosive mental disorder" is twice as high as that of ordinary people, in addition, there are African trypanosomiasis transmitted by tsetse flies, trypanosomiasis can destroy the human nervous system to cause terrible drowsiness, confusion and other serious mental problems.
Therefore, maintaining a hygienic diet and staying away from parasites is the safest way.