9 CREEPY DISCOVERIES OF 2013

Bugs That Live Under Your Skin and Other Creepy Discoveries This Year
By Nadia Drake, Wired, 23 December 2013.

Science can be many things. Ambitious. Awe-inspiring. Confusing. Elegant. Wrong. And Creepy. Fortunately for you, the WIRED Science team doesn't fear the creepy and instead (often) finds it fascinating. We've been enjoying some really weird, gross and shiver-causing science this year, and we've collected our favourites here for you.

Several of these stories elaborate on the rather stomach-churning theme of scientists growing parasitic organisms...in their own bodies. Right. So, to that end, please don’t miss this discussion of the botfly, which - though not a new discovery - is probably among the foulest of Earth’s creatures.

1. Giant new tarantula

We happen to like spiders, so finding a new giant tarantula with an 8-inch leg span and bright, geometric patterning doesn’t so much creep us out as make us go "Eff yeah!”

But the fact is, the newly discovered Spider The Size Of Your Face (a phrase that even Stephen Colbert adopted) is probably among the top creepy science discoveries of this year...for most people. We broke the story in April after reading a description of the new species, named Poecilotheria rajaei, published by the British Tarantula Society.

The spider belongs to a family known for being colourful, fast, and venomous. It was found living in trees and the old doctor’s quarters of a hospital near Mankulam, in northern Sri Lanka, by naturalist and educator Ranil Nanayakkara. Unfortunately, as is increasingly becoming the case with many spider species, P. rajaei is threatened by habitat destruction and loss.

2. Buddy, the parasitic nematode living in your mouth

Buddy, the nematode, suspended in ethanol solution.

It takes a certain kind of person to realize that, for months, their mouth has been harbouring a roving, parasitic worm and respond with, “Wow, that’s really interesting” instead of fighting the urge to light their face on fire.

But that’s how biologist Jonathan Allen reacted when he discovered that the rough patch of skin traveling around in his mouth was really a coiled up worm, embedded just below the skin. So, he did what few people would do, and took the worm out himself. Obviously. Then, Allen carried the small, writhing critter to his lab at the College of William and Mary, and plopped it into some ethanol preservative. His colleague named the worm “Buddy,” then sequenced Buddy’s DNA and confirmed his identity.

Buddy was a parasitic nematode, Gonglyonema pulchrum, and Allen was only the thirteenth person in the U.S. to have been infected by the species. Yay.

3. Bat-eating spiders are everywhere

We hate to say it, but it’s true: Spiders eat bats, and they’re probably doing it somewhere near you. Earlier this year, we reported a study describing the incidence of bat-eating among arachnids. Take-home: It’s way more common than we thought. The study included some totally rad and creepy photos of spiders caught in the act of ingesting flying mammals. Orb-weavers, social spiders, fishing spiders, tarantulas - they all eat bats. On every continent except Antarctica.

4. Rodent mind meld

This year neuroscientists connected the brains of two rats with wires to create a rodent superbrain. Well, sort of. They showed that one rat was able to use signals from the other rat's brain to solve a problem it would otherwise have no clue how to solve (in this case, which hole to poke its nose into to get a reward). In other words, one rat had knowledge of something only the other rat had experienced. How creepy is that?

5. Facebook kind of knows if you’re going to break up with your significant other

Image: Xtreme_i/Flickr

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Facebook is sort of smarmy and totally into exploiting all the information you reveal about yourself. But, in October, scientists showed that your data reveals how strong your relationship with your spouse or significant other is. The team came up with the algorithm that can do this by studying 1.3 million Facebook users.

They found that 60 percent of the time, they could predict who your spouse is (out of all your possible friends), based only on how that person is connected to different, non-overlapping clusters of your friends (say, co-workers or college buds). For unmarried couples the algorithm guessed the right partner 50 percent of the time (which is still impressive given that the people in the study had between 50 and 2,000 friends for the algorithm to choose from). But here's where it gets really creepy: When the prediction algorithm failed to identify the (unmarried) significant other, it turned out the couple was 50 percent more likely to break up in the next two months. Dislike.

6. Skeleton shrimp

These are not the mangled, desiccated corpses of clawed aliens. They’re shrimp, and they swim in the ocean off the coast of California - near Los Angeles, actually. Unidentified until this year, Liropus minusculus would be a lot more terrifying if they were bigger. But we’re glad they’re not, because look at them.

7. The tick in your nose could be a new species

Image: John Tann/Flickr

“When you first realize you have a tick up your nose, it takes a lot of willpower not to claw your face off," veterinary epidemiologist Tony Goldberg said in a statement.

No kidding.

Goldberg had been studying chimpanzee diseases in Uganda. Soon after he returned to the U.S., the University of Wisconsin professor discovered he’d been harbouring a stowaway: A tick, lodged in his nostril. Nice. So, Goldberg did what any curious scientist would do. He plucked it out. Then, wanting to know what, exactly, had hitched a ride to North America with its head shoved through his skin, Goldberg sequenced the tick’s DNA.

Turns out, the stowaway could very well be a never-before-identified species of bloodsucking arachnid (yes, like spiders, ticks are arachnids). But that remains to be determined. One thing is for sure, though - in their efforts to prevail over nit-picking, well-groomed chimpanzees, ticks might have discovered one of the better hiding places on a chimp.

8. Bees know how much sex their queen has had

Image: Eugene Zalenko/Wikimedia Commons

Bees. Normally favoured among insects, these precious - and necessary - pollinators live in colonies with complex social structures. But those honeybees in hives also have a dark side.

Worker bees, the daughters of the queen bee, decide when to kill their queen. Usually, that happens when the queen starts sending chemical signals that tell her workers she’s not in such good shape. But, workers can dispatch their queen if they sense that she hasn’t had enough sex. In other words, “Bees can smell how much sex their queen has had,” wrote Elizabeth Preston, on Inkfish.

Rrrright.

Bees emit what are called pheromones - chemical messages that relay information to other individuals. Queens that have mated with many male bees, called drones, produce different pheromones than those who have only mated with a few - or none. Because keeping levels of genetic diversity high within the hive is beneficial, queens that have mated with more males should be more favoured by the worker bees. And, as it turns out, workers are more attracted to pheromones produced by queens that are full of semen than those that have been artificially mated with saltwater-producing syringes.

9. Sand fleas reproduce after they bury themselves in your skin

The sand flea in Thielecke's foot between the day she discovered it and 61 days later.

Yeah, that’s right. If you isolate a sand flea that lives in your foot - by wearing socks and shoes, for example - it’ll grow really big and live for a really, really long time. Like, months. That’s weird, because your typical sand flea - Tunga penetrans - only lives for about four weeks.

But it gets better. That abnormally large parasite embedded in your sock-clad foot lives for way too long because it hasn’t been able to mate, lay eggs, and die. This leaves open the possibility that sand flies procreate while embedded in your flesh (that is if you take your sock off long enough for a mate to join them).

How on Earth do we know that? Because Marlene Thielecke, a PhD student at Charite University Medicine in Berlin used herself as a developmental biology lab. She found a sand flea embedded deep in the sole of her right foot.  “I saw that it wasn't harming me at all, so I decided to leave it to observe the stages of the flea,” Thielecke told The Atlantic.

So she left it there. For months. And, curiously, noted that it hadn’t reproduced or expired. Turns out, male sand fleas look for already-burrowed females to mate with - they don’t procreate pre-embedding. Then, the females lay their eggs - by extruding a goopy, white substance through the hole in your skin - and die.

To make matters worse, embedded sand fleas cause a disease called tungiasis, which afflicts people in tropical Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and India. One embedded flea often attracts others, sometimes leading to an infestation in the dozens. Persistent or recurring infections can cause a multitude of skin problems, foot deformation, and make it hard to walk.

Top image: The new giant tarantula, Poecilotheria rajaei. Credit: Ranil Nanayakkara/British Tarantula Society, via Live Science.

[Source: Wired. Edited. Top image added.]