Kids book about parasites: WHAT'S EATING YOU?

The publishers of What's Eating You?: Parasites -- The Inside Story were kind enough to send me a copy of this science picture book for young readers. This is exactly the kind of book I loved as a kid, full of gross and interesting facts about the incredible subject of parasites and their life-cycle. The book has loads of great gross-out moments (rabbit fleas leaving behind poo for their babies to feed on when they hatch from eggs) but quickly moves into the bizarre and wonderful ways that parasites manipulate their hosts (heron tapeworms infect stickleback fish, then turn the fish an easy-to-spot orange and cause them to swim to the surface, where the herons can eat them), the best being the Sacculina sea-crab parasite, which "grows tentacles into every single part of the crab's body, even its brain, to control everything it does...It doesn't breed, but rears Sacculina's babies instead...even male crabs."

Wittily illustrated with simple art, and written in a humorous and engaging style, this is a great kids' science book, and would be a wonderful accompaniment to an afternoon spent with a magnifying glass in the park, or online with a search-engine.

What's Eating You?: Parasites -- The Inside Story

• [pretentious platypus]

  The Radiolab podcast did an episode on parasites, a really fun and fascinating way to spend an hour :)

  http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2009/09/25

• [Daemon]

  Never would have occurred to me to write a kid’s answer to Parasite Rex…

• [Anonymous]

  Parasites control minds hosts masters chemical warfare camouflage cloak host molecules
  Majority species parasites
  Sophisticated organism
  Change DNA to rewire brain
  Host living dead
  Fundamental survival tactics
  Bizarre entities coping w/ self image never really capture
  It takes devices like mirrors, camera, video footage
  Internalized self image/ defense
  Sophisticated psychological strategies
  Namely what we remember facial familiarization impressionist
  Plastic transparent human model JC Penney
  Parasite different organism contributing nothing to the survival of the host
  Habitually exploits takes advantage generosity
  Parasitology such as physical mental cognitive emotional behavioral artificial Narrow AI parasitic bots arranged if one mechanism (viral) corrupts series of non-organic framework artificial surrogate subject to surrogate utility affection decommission series of batteries test subject mimic simulate (simulation) computer models, robotics, synthetic bio-chemistry
  Hardware to hardwired/software to wetware.

• [Anonymous]

  Daemon, that’s because you are not a children’s book writer. We’re all at it! I did one in 2006 and have another coming out next year… (parasites are only part of these, Nicola’s triumph is selling a whole book on the subject). All the best yuck is in kids’ books :-)

• [efergus3]

  But did they include lawyers and politicians?

• [Anonymous]

  This is awesome, i would love to have a copy of this (:

• [Anonymous]

  For adults and older kids, there’s Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer, and Riddled with Life by Marlene Zuk.

  Always remember (especially as you fall asleep): not counting bacteria, one in four species is not a parasite.

• [Ocker3]

  wait wait wait “the best being the Sacculina sea-crab parasite, which “grows tentacles into every single part of the crab’s body, even its brain, to control everything it does…It doesn’t breed, but rears Sacculina’s babies instead…even male crabs.”"

  so there is a parasite which infects it’s host, ends up Physically controlling it, and we weren’t told? Bring on Global Warming, if only to eradicate this horrible little thing before it starts jumping species!

  • [Jonathan Badger]

    There are plenty of mind-control parasites in nature — there’s another one (Cordyceps) that is a fungus that controls ants to climb up to a high place at which point the fungus grows out the ant head and showers spores down below to infect other ants. The natural world is a great inspiration for horror writers/filmmakers. Remember the xenomorphs from the Alien series? They are basically Ichneumonoidea, which lay their eggs in other insects and when they hatch, the larvae eat their way out.

• [Hawley]

  unfortunately kids these days were raised up by people who spent time in their own childhood examining insects with magnifying glasses and they found the experience so harrowing that they banned their own children from ever playing with something as sinister as a magnifying glass.