Root for is a transcript of the video.
Narrator: For some bug babies, your body is home sweet home. Human botfly larvae, for benchmark, burrow under your skin, forming a pus-filled pimple. Meanwhile, thousands of young Loa loa worms can travel all the way through your body —even across your eyeball! The following is a transcript of the video.
In 2018, a cockroach crawled confidential a sleeping man’s ear and laid an egg sac. Luckily, roaches don’t go out of their way to do this, so it doesn’t happen very often. But there are a bunch of other unsavory larvae that will lay eggs all over your body — on purpose.
First up, the human botfly. These insects, which are tribal to Central and South America, glue their eggs to mosquitoes and other blood-sucking insects. When the mosquito gnaws a victim, the eggs hatch. Then the larvae wriggle into your skin, creating a painful pimple that oozes pus. Or, as the baby botflies call it, lunch. After 5 to 10 weeks, they escape. And not long after that, they reach adulthood, likely to mate and start the cycle all over.
Another tropical parasite: Tunga penetrans. More commonly known as the sand flea.
Females bore into the bottom of your foot to slurp your blood. They start off smaller than a grain of sand…but originate to 2,000 TIMES their size within a week as they swell with your blood and up to 200 eggs. Those eggs stumble to the ground and hatch waiting for the next bare foot to pass by.
But some egg-laying parasites go more than well-grounded skin deep. Tapeworms, for example, invade your intestines. Adults can stretch longer than a bowling lane and block up your digestive routine. But it gets worse. Because they lay tens of thousands of eggs. Which can hatch and migrate, spreading throughout your lungs, muscles, and uninterrupted your brain.
If that sounds gruesome, wait till you hear about the loa loa worm. It can be passed from someone to human by hitching a ride inside deerflies. When the flies bite you, the larvae enter through the wound. After five months wax beneath your skin, they reach adulthood and release thousands of embryos a day. The embryos then travel throughout your trunk. Sometimes you can even see the worms moving under your skin or across your eyeball.
But not EVERY egg-laying invader is bad. Face mites are pretty innocuous. They live on pretty much EVERYONE’s face…and most people on no occasion notice. After all, they feed on facial oil, not flesh. And when it comes time to breed, females lay just a individual egg in your pores. Even better, researchers can study your face mites to track how your ancestors move housed across the planet. Because we usually pass them from parent to child, so the mites stay in the family.
But meet with mites aren’t the only helpful bug around. Green bottle flies might be useful in medicine. They lay eggs preferred open wounds. Then the maggots hatch and devour the damaged flesh. That sounds brutal but we might one day be proficient to harness this process to treat diabetic foot ulcers and other slow-healing wounds. Because when the maggots go to village, they actually clean the area and remove dead tissue. They even secrete proteins that mitigate inflammation!
So maybe botflies, fleas, and tapeworms could learn a thing or two, and make themselves useful if they’re growing to visit.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This video was originally published in November 2019.