A reply to Dillard.

Read this bit from Dillard today:

Once, when the pond was younger and the algae had not yet taken over, I saw an amazing creature. At first all I saw was a slender motion. Then I saw that it was a wormlike creature swimming in the water with a strong, whiplike thrust, and it was two feet long. It was also slender as a thread. It looked like an inked line someone was nervously drawing over and over. Later I learned that it was a horsehair worm. The larvae of horsehair worms live as parasites in land insects; the aquatic adults can get to be a yard long. I don't know how it gets from the insect to the pond, or from the pond to the insect, for that matter, or why on earth it needs such an extreme shape. If the one I saw had been so much as an inch longer or a shave thinner, I doubt if I would ever have come back.

How do such parasites get to the pond, you ask? Let me help you out, Dillard. The internet has an answer: they turn their insect hosts into zombies.

Read all about parasites turning insects into zombies here, courtesy of Scientific American.
Watch a video of hairworms going all 'Dawn of the Dead' on crickets here, courtesy of the French internet.
Play a cartoony video game based on this biological premise here, courtesy of Nitrome.

Here's another little passage from Dillard that I dog-eared because it made me laugh aloud, not because it also mentions hairworms (but it does mention hairworms for those of you waiting to read any and all sentences about them).

Along with intricacy, there is another aspect of the creation that has impressed me in the course of my wanderings. Look again at the horsehair worm, a yard long and thin as a thread, whipping through the duck pond, or tangled with others of its kind in a slithering Gordian knot. Look at an overwintering ball of buzzing bees, or a turtle under ice breathing through its pumping cloaca. Look at the fruit of the Osage orange tree, big as a grapefruit, green, convoluted as any human brain. Or look at a rotifer's translucent gut: something orange and powerful is surging up and down like a piston, and something small and round is spinning in place like a flywheel. Look, in short, at practically anything--the coot's feet, the mantis's face, a banana, the human ear--and see that not only did the creator create everything, but that he is apt to create anything. He'll stop at nothing.