There are occasions, if I am confident that the company I will be keeping will be sufficiently mature, when I wear my Stop Extinction t-shirt. It’s not a bad looking t-shirt, nice picture and motto on the front and the Birdlife International logo on the shoulder. It was a freebie …
Interesting sentiment but somewhat impractical, extinction is the fate of every species, most of the species that ever existed on earth have already done it.
Some, I hope, will do it soon. The malaria parasites would fall in that group. Another little beauty is the Guinea Worm, Dracunculus medinensis, that causes Dracunculiasis. An ancient and once widespread disease, it is now confined to four African countries. You catch it by drinking water containing copepods (water fleas) contaminated with Guinea Worm larvae. The copepods are digested leaving the larvae free to pass through the gut wall into the abdominal cavity. After a while the boy and girl worms mate, the boy worms then die.
The female heads for the surface, sometimes in the lower abdomen, more often in the legs. A slow journey, painful to the host. By the time she is a year old she’s 60 to 90 centimetres long and ready to shed larvae herself. The tip of the worm perforates the skin causing intense burning pain. For relief the host dips the affected part in water, the worm sheds larvae, copepods eat the larvae, someone drinks the water and the wheel of life turns again. Exquisite.
Once the worm has shown itself, the time-honoured treatment is to slowly and painfully extract it by winding it around a stick, a process that takes hours to months. It may be the origin of the medical symbol of serpent and staff – the rod of Asclepius.
If on the other hand you think that every worm is sacred then you should visit The Save the Guinea Worm Foundation. You might like to volunteer to host one …
But if extinction really turns you on what about joining The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
bobmcgee 