Speaker 1: You're listening to an airwave media podcast.
Speaker 2: On Monster Talk, we frequently talk about imaginary monsters or
Speaker 2: creatures of folklore, but today we will be discussing a
Speaker 2: real creature that preys on humans and our closest animal companions.
Speaker 2: It is often invisible, it drinks blood to survive, and
Speaker 2: it is responsible for many of the sightings credited to
Speaker 2: a chupacabra.
Speaker 3: Many of you will cringe and recoil.
Speaker 2: In horror when you learn the true facts behind the
Speaker 2: creature known as Sarcopti's scaby Eye. It's actually quite unlike
Speaker 2: anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 4: A giant, very creature, part ape is part mass in Larkness,
Speaker 4: a twenty four a mile long bottomless lake in the
Speaker 4: Highlands of Scotland.
Speaker 5: It's a creature known as the luck Nest Monster.
Speaker 2: Monster tal Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
Speaker 2: I'm Blake Smith, and together with doctor Karen stolesnow blogger,
Speaker 2: linguist and paranormal researcher, and Benjamin Radford, science journalist and
Speaker 2: managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer, we fish for the chunky
Speaker 2: pieces of science and the steaming bowl of soup that
Speaker 2: is Monster folklore. Today, we find some especially meati pieces
Speaker 2: as we get under the skin of the chupacabra legend
Speaker 2: and find out more about the lice that caused the
Speaker 2: often reported hairless canids the media seems to love so much.
Speaker 2: It's okay to scratch, but don't skip this episode once
Speaker 2: you get past the discuss factor. There is some amazing
Speaker 2: science going on in acyrology, and it is fascinating stuff.
Speaker 3: Moresrtal.
Speaker 2: So, I noticed the other day that we've actually been
Speaker 2: doing Monster Talk for a full year now.
Speaker 3: It does is kind of fantastic.
Speaker 6: Have you both day to us?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so this is.
Speaker 2: The first opportunity we've had to get together. Actually, we
Speaker 2: had an opportunity to be together, but nobody noticed. It
Speaker 2: was the one year anniversary while we were there.
Speaker 6: What date marks the anniversary?
Speaker 2: Ole It was about, I guess a couple of days
Speaker 2: before we actually went live with episode one, which would
Speaker 2: have been in July of two thousand and nine. So
Speaker 2: the specific date, I'll look it up and then we
Speaker 2: can put that on our web page.
Speaker 6: So we will over one now.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Yeah, so, And in fact, if I'm not mistaken,
Speaker 7: haven't we recently rechieved a milestone in terms of listeners.
Speaker 2: Yep, we've crossed the ten thousand subscribers milestone. So it
Speaker 2: was very very close to my one year goal. I
Speaker 2: don't know what my goal is for year two. I'd
Speaker 2: like to get a Nobel Prize winter On. How about
Speaker 2: that to be Nobel either when we'd do in my book,
Speaker 2: I would.
Speaker 1: You know, Hey, if we're gonna have doctors and believers,
Speaker 1: then we'll have to have both.
Speaker 2: I would love to get an Ignoble Prize myself. I
Speaker 2: haven't really posed.
Speaker 6: You're well on the way.
Speaker 2: When you have to do something real science, y uh,
Speaker 2: it just has to be crazy, So real sciencey doubles.
Speaker 2: I'll leave that off the show. We'll talk about that offline.
Speaker 2: My plans to get an Ignoble Prize.
Speaker 6: So it's got something to do with.
Speaker 1: You.
Speaker 3: No, it's something to do with bones. I think that.
Speaker 3: I think there's something to do with big foot, bones
Speaker 3: and big So there's that.
Speaker 7: So what's today's topic, Doctor Atlanta.
Speaker 2: Today's topic, We're going to be talking about a real monster,
Speaker 2: one that you can actually encounter in the woods near
Speaker 2: your home if you live in North America and probably
Speaker 2: all over the world. As a matter of fact, This
Speaker 2: is a of course, a bloodsucking creature that looks very strange.
Speaker 6: It's not a cheap of capra.
Speaker 3: No, but it is directly related.
Speaker 2: No, it's not a vampire either. These are all good guesses. No,
Speaker 2: Today we're going to talk about lice. I itchy already,
Speaker 2: lice and mites. We're going to talk about the creature
Speaker 2: is the cause the hairless canines that we see on
Speaker 2: the media so frequently that people attribute to being cheap oficabras.
Speaker 2: So we're going to be talking to doctor Barry O'Connor,
Speaker 2: who is an evolutionary parasitologist, and he actually specializes in mites,
Speaker 2: including the kinds of the cause mange, and mange is
Speaker 2: probably the most common cause for the hairless condition we
Speaker 2: see in Let's call them media chupacabra candidates, or then
Speaker 2: you may have some other shorthand for them.
Speaker 7: I'm not sure how. I usually call them temporary chop ofcabras.
Speaker 3: I like that supercabra. What's that in Spanish.
Speaker 7: Man uhbs temporarily that.
Speaker 2: Is like sounds very very romanic.
Speaker 3: Dost a lot of super cobra or l supercabra.
Speaker 7: It will probably be l but it's funny.
Speaker 6: What are some of the other.
Speaker 1: Causes if we're not talking mites in mange?
Speaker 2: Apparently there's a breed of dog that's naturally hairless or
Speaker 2: not a dog.
Speaker 3: What is the well, maybe it is a dog. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Therezola is a dog.
Speaker 2: And then there's those hairless There was the red wolf
Speaker 2: coyote hybrid they found and that was also hairless. But
Speaker 2: I'm not really sure if that was a genetic condition
Speaker 2: or if that was aristotism.
Speaker 6: Here the hairless cuts as well, Yeah.
Speaker 3: There are there are.
Speaker 7: There's of course also alopecia.
Speaker 3: That's true. And what's he got to do with it?
Speaker 7: No, al alopecia. He needs great pizza down in Chicago.
Speaker 3: I thought he was Irish.
Speaker 7: No, No, that's a different one. That's his brother. So
Speaker 7: we were talking about alopecia.
Speaker 2: We were I had a friend in college who had
Speaker 2: alopecia and it was completely hairless.
Speaker 1: It doesn't always result in complete loss of hair though. No,
Speaker 1: it does not be patches of hair loss.
Speaker 6: I know that's common with some thyroid.
Speaker 3: Conditions, that's right, and temper usually it can be.
Speaker 7: I was just.
Speaker 2: Listening to the Science Show from Australia and they had
Speaker 2: a bit with Sir David Attenborough talking about what are
Speaker 2: eyebrows for? And it was interesting because he talked about
Speaker 2: how that pattern baldness is obviously a trait that's not
Speaker 2: being prevented by evolution. I guess so being having a
Speaker 2: hair on your head late in life doesn't appear to
Speaker 2: be an important evolutionary trait one way or the other.
Speaker 3: But eyebrows rarely go away. And so there he was
Speaker 3: looking at why we have eyebrows?
Speaker 7: What Goldberg?
Speaker 3: I don't know. Does she not have eyebrows?
Speaker 7: I don't. I've never seen eyebrows on that woman.
Speaker 6: Women pluck them for fashion.
Speaker 7: Reasons completely like like will be.
Speaker 1: Well, I think not usually completely, but some get tattoos
Speaker 1: and then they don't grow back. Then they end up
Speaker 1: getting them tattooed on, which I don't. I don't think
Speaker 1: it looks very good.
Speaker 6: It's very convincing.
Speaker 7: No, wow, I guess is there a I mean, it
Speaker 7: wouldn't be Amrkan What would it be for for the eyebrows?
Speaker 3: What would it be for what.
Speaker 7: I said? It wouldn't. It wouldn't be American, which I
Speaker 7: know that you two familiar with. But what would it
Speaker 7: be forbrows.
Speaker 3: What would it be for eyebrows?
Speaker 7: What a to pay for the eyebrows?
Speaker 3: Oh? I see?
Speaker 7: Oh can I work with me here, folks?
Speaker 3: What would a two pay for the eyebrows be? No,
Speaker 3: it would definitely not be.
Speaker 7: American Murkans on the show today, And so that's a
Speaker 7: good word.
Speaker 2: And instead of defining it, let's let people look it up,
Speaker 2: because there we go. Yes, if you're over eighteenth, feel
Speaker 2: free to look up mrkin.
Speaker 1: Row herebrow eyebrows.
Speaker 3: That's rather low brow if you follow me.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I don't know. I like I say, like
Speaker 2: Karen just said, I think most people just you know,
Speaker 2: paint them on.
Speaker 3: Or tattoo them on, pencil them in, pencil.
Speaker 2: Them and me, I just keep trimming mine before they
Speaker 2: take over and become my new top hat. I mean,
Speaker 2: I've got like, no, no, not not even it wants
Speaker 2: to like crawl over the top of my head. It's like,
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm gonna I could be the skeptical
Speaker 2: Stanton Friedman.
Speaker 3: And that's saying something because that man's got some eyebrows.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't know if they're alien, but they're they're very powerful.
Speaker 7: Knits and mites. I may be mistaken. I think that
Speaker 7: the phrase nitpicking, if I'm not mistaken, it comes from
Speaker 7: the baby the eggs of mites and lice, which which
Speaker 7: you know, you can find in children's hair, heads and whatnot.
Speaker 7: And that's where the idea of nitpicking, you know, looking
Speaker 7: for little tiny details is. People would would of course
Speaker 7: pick picking, you know, these eggs and lice out of
Speaker 7: out of like children's hair for example.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wasn't sure. I thought it just referred to
Speaker 2: the lice themselves. But I know monkeys, it's part of
Speaker 2: their grooming, like to pick the lice off, and I'm
Speaker 2: not sure if they're eating it. I assume they are,
Speaker 2: you know, or at least crushing it with their teeth.
Speaker 7: And what also they do with them?
Speaker 3: Well, they could just kill them, I mean, you know.
Speaker 2: Collect them well like dogs, like dogs bite the like
Speaker 2: fleas or.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't think it.
Speaker 2: Actually, I don't know what else they would do it.
Speaker 2: And I'm just saying that I guess they could throw them. Well,
Speaker 2: I don't know, Okay, just never mind, fine whatever.
Speaker 7: I didn't mean to put you on the spot. I'm
Speaker 7: just asking they.
Speaker 3: Could have been pinching them or squishing them. I don't know,
Speaker 3: you know those.
Speaker 6: Those I think that's the point. Isn't it a bonding thing?
Speaker 3: Well? I think the points just to get the knits
Speaker 3: off of you, you know, I mean bond I mean.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the bondings evolved as an important social
Speaker 2: behavior among primates, you know. And I know when my
Speaker 2: wife combs my back hair and looks for nets, I
Speaker 2: really appreciate it.
Speaker 7: And what do you do for her in return?
Speaker 2: I have high serotonin levels and I make loud noises
Speaker 2: that make her feel part of the pack, and you
Speaker 2: paint on her part of the troop.
Speaker 3: We're primates, so.
Speaker 7: That's so romantic. Your wife's are lucky like a woman blake.
Speaker 2: Everyone's laughing and their ten hats are falling off. That's
Speaker 2: probably the least gross thing we'll talk about today, honestly,
Speaker 2: is my.
Speaker 3: I'm off?
Speaker 1: Really, I get freaked out about this one.
Speaker 3: No. Mites are disgusting. Mites and lice, uh and.
Speaker 1: Well the things you can't see. I mean, it's Howard Hughes,
Speaker 1: isn't it.
Speaker 2: Well you can certainly since when you're actually infected. And
Speaker 2: I'm not going to talk about what I know. Let's
Speaker 2: let's let the expert talk about it.
Speaker 1: But from my familiarity with the topic, have we got
Speaker 1: personal stories of infestations?
Speaker 3: No, no, no, will no, not personally. You know.
Speaker 2: We were public schools here and in the South, and
Speaker 2: I just imagine this is true nation. Why but every
Speaker 2: now and then a school will get a life's outbreak
Speaker 2: and then the next thing you know, you're putting on
Speaker 2: a special shampoo for your kids or shaving your kids heads.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of us.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of I mean that means, you know,
Speaker 2: actually taking baths and all kinds of breaks to the
Speaker 2: normal routine around here.
Speaker 6: I had them once when I was about eight years old.
Speaker 1: There was an outbreaking school and having long hair, they
Speaker 1: spread very quickly, so I remember having the special bath.
Speaker 7: Yeah, they dip you in like Achilles or something or no.
Speaker 1: I just remember um washing my hair and having to
Speaker 1: comb them out and comb the eggs out and dead
Speaker 1: creatures and wasn't very pleasant.
Speaker 3: Wow, So you can imagine how uncomfortable it would be
Speaker 3: for wildlife. I know.
Speaker 2: One of my first big skeptical investigations that I did
Speaker 2: for anybody besides myself was looking into the Jacob's creature,
Speaker 2: which was a bear photo. Well, okay, It was a
Speaker 2: photo of an animal in Pennsylvania a couple of years ago,
Speaker 2: and the bear experts said it was a mangy bear,
Speaker 2: but the bigfoot aficionados or enthusiasts believed it was probably
Speaker 2: some sort of primate. And it really to me it
Speaker 2: highlighted one of the big issues with unusual photos of animals,
Speaker 2: especially mammals, and that's that in support of the evolutionary theory, right,
Speaker 2: we look a lot alike when we don't have hair,
Speaker 2: all of us, all these little animals look quite similar,
Speaker 2: and even like at a skeleton level, if you have
Speaker 2: a carcass, you know, if you're not an expert, it
Speaker 2: can be hard to tell from a partial skeleton what
Speaker 2: an animal is. And in this case, you know, you
Speaker 2: had a big animal. You had lots of pictures of bears,
Speaker 2: and then these strange photos that look kind of like
Speaker 2: a bear, maybe something else. Some people thought they looked
Speaker 2: nothing like a bear, and and part of that I
Speaker 2: was looking at, you know, why was mange affecting these animals?
Speaker 2: So I did a lot of research on mange at
Speaker 2: the time, and it's just pretty prevalent. I think it
Speaker 2: was you Ben that came up with the idea that
Speaker 2: our at least first brought to my attention, the idea
Speaker 2: that we'll probably be seeing more major animals because with
Speaker 2: milder winters, they'll be able to survive.
Speaker 3: The winner better. So we might be seeing more of
Speaker 3: these kind of strange looking animals.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm not sure if that's true, because now
Speaker 2: we've had some harsh winters again.
Speaker 3: I don't know, but.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I had. I researched a Mange a fair amount
Speaker 7: for my Chupacabra book coming out early next year, and
Speaker 7: I ended up tracking down Mange experts and you know,
Speaker 7: getting some really interesting information that a lot of people
Speaker 7: apparently just had no particularly the chupacabra proponents, or at
Speaker 7: least the temporary chopacabra proponents really sort of didn't seem
Speaker 7: to have a clue about. So this will be interesting.
Speaker 2: I don't want to dominate the conversation, but I'll tell
Speaker 2: you one other thing that I noticed that I had
Speaker 2: a I don't want to call it a bias. I
Speaker 2: had some kind of an idea that maybe the reason
Speaker 2: these animals were being misidentified when I looked at these animals,
Speaker 2: I saw hairless animals. I saw hairless dogs, you know,
Speaker 2: hairless anything se to make people think monster. For some reason,
Speaker 2: I thought, typical, right, they are, they are atypical, but
Speaker 2: you know that they're not different species just because they
Speaker 2: don't have hair necessarily, right, So whatever they are.
Speaker 3: And I thought it was unusual.
Speaker 2: I thought maybe the problem was that these are animals
Speaker 2: that are being spotted by people from urban areas and
Speaker 2: they're just not familiar with what wildlife looks like.
Speaker 3: And I thought, well, that makes good sense.
Speaker 2: I got this idea in my head that maybe it
Speaker 2: would be like the you know, the city folk, you
Speaker 2: know problem that city folk don't know how to identify animals.
Speaker 2: But it turns out a lot of these animals are
Speaker 2: being identified by people from rural areas. The woman from
Speaker 2: Texas who had the hairless dogs in her yard, what's
Speaker 2: her name again? Then the woman who rides around on
Speaker 2: the tractor Phyllis Canyon, Phyllis Canyon, thank you, it's yeah,
Speaker 2: so Phyllis Canyon, for example. She she's a rancher, you know,
Speaker 2: she's familiar with what animals are out there.
Speaker 3: So that was wrong.
Speaker 2: That was It's not a country folks, city folk, urban
Speaker 2: rural problem. It's just a classical inability to identify an
Speaker 2: animal that looks different from what you expect. And I
Speaker 2: think that same kind of mistake is probably behind and
Speaker 2: I want to say a bigfoot some of the bigfoot
Speaker 2: sightings where people see a bear that's not behaving like
Speaker 2: a normal bear, or looks somewhat different or standing on
Speaker 2: its hind legs, and they don't see a bear, you know,
Speaker 2: they see something unusual that's not what they expect, and
Speaker 2: they're sure, they don't know what it is, but they're
Speaker 2: sure it's not a bear.
Speaker 1: I guess it's not encountering an animal in that sort
Speaker 1: of form. So that's all that is. It's not going
Speaker 1: to be a common thing. I mean, how common is this?
Speaker 1: I guess we'll find out today. Creatures to be affected
Speaker 1: by by MIT's in mange. And I'm still itching just
Speaker 1: thinking of it, don't you guys?
Speaker 3: No, well, you know, I just got groomed though.
Speaker 7: You just had your back, you know. Well, you know,
Speaker 7: there's definitely a psychosomatic element to it, not that anyone's
Speaker 7: imagining it, but you know, if you if you start
Speaker 7: thinking about bugs and creepy Crawley's and weird weird things
Speaker 7: in the bed, it's very very easy to convince yourself.
Speaker 6: That's a study.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it was in Scientific American, but
Speaker 1: it was about the psychological nature of itching. We'll have
Speaker 1: to track down the study if you want to mention
Speaker 1: it to point people to it. Yeah, but it was
Speaker 1: how there's definitely a psychological element to it.
Speaker 3: Surely.
Speaker 7: Well, speaking of that, let me let me throw in
Speaker 7: a plug for an excellent horror film that came out
Speaker 7: a couple of years back called Bug. It was directed
Speaker 7: by William Friedkin. Most people probably know him for The Exorcist,
Speaker 7: although I think his best film is a is a
Speaker 7: film called Sorcerer, which came out a couple years back,
Speaker 7: badly overlooked, but Bug. It stars actually Judd and Uh
Speaker 7: and it's it's a fascinating it's very very realistic from
Speaker 7: a psychological point of view, depiction of how people can
Speaker 7: sort of believe that they're being infested and sort of
Speaker 7: you have what what the French called folia do uh,
Speaker 7: in which you know, you have two people who are
Speaker 7: sharing a belief system and it's sort of a mild
Speaker 7: form of mass hysteria. So it's a symptom, right, Yeah,
Speaker 7: you never know, but it is a it is a
Speaker 7: good scary film, and it's it's very again, it's very
Speaker 7: realistic from a from a psychological point of view.
Speaker 2: You talk about Folia Do in your your book Scientific
Speaker 2: Paranoral Investigation, right, yeah, And I was just thinking, is
Speaker 2: that is that similar to a shared delusion? Like does
Speaker 2: that cover cases like where uh one that I remember
Speaker 2: recently where a woman thought she was.
Speaker 3: A divine I don't remember if she thought she was
Speaker 3: Jesus reincarnated or something, but her husband was going along
Speaker 3: with it. Does that cover that kind.
Speaker 7: Of Yeah, it's very similar to that. What you find
Speaker 7: is that you have one it's not just it's it's
Speaker 7: often just two people, but it can actually be larger groups.
Speaker 7: Usually you know, a handful, maybe no more than a
Speaker 7: dozen or so, but usually it's just two or three people.
Speaker 7: And usually they're related by by blood or marriage or
Speaker 7: you know, close relationship. Yeah, right, if you're in Georgia,
Speaker 7: who knows, or in Sydney. But but but that that's
Speaker 7: usually the circumstances. And so one person will will get
Speaker 7: the idea that they have you know, that they're they're
Speaker 7: afflicted by something. Uh, they they are they either have
Speaker 7: some something bothering them, or they have some sort of
Speaker 7: special ability, or they're having some unusual, unique experience, and
Speaker 7: it's it's always something that is it's really on the
Speaker 7: borderline between clearly true and clearly not true. I mean
Speaker 7: that is, you know, if a person claims that you
Speaker 7: know that they're being attacked by, you know, a bigfoot,
Speaker 7: then obviously that's not true. But if a person believes
Speaker 7: they're being attacked by something that's small or invisible or
Speaker 7: hard to detect, then that then to certainly another person
Speaker 7: who will begin to buy into that, that could be
Speaker 7: very believable more obstrutle.
Speaker 2: Today we're calling doctor Barry O'Connor, evolutionary parasitologist who specializes
Speaker 2: in mites. And you're also a medical veterinary acarologist.
Speaker 5: Acarologist, right, that's the person who studied mice and dicks.
Speaker 3: Excellent.
Speaker 2: All right, Well we're calling today because, well mostly because
Speaker 2: we want to talk about mites, mange, license, scabies, and parasites.
Speaker 2: And the tie into monsters is that a lot of
Speaker 2: times these hairless animals like dogs and coyotes are being
Speaker 2: found and called a monster, it turns out that later
Speaker 2: that they've actually got a condition called mange. So can
Speaker 2: you tell our listeners what mange is exactly?
Speaker 5: Well, mage is a skin condition, and we usually use
Speaker 5: the word when we're talking about animals rather than people.
Speaker 5: People get thee In some cases. The same kinds of
Speaker 5: mite parasites can attack both people and animals, but in
Speaker 5: humans we don't call it nange. In animals, generally, what
Speaker 5: happens is you get rather large populations of mites. That's
Speaker 5: not generally the case in humans, although there are variants
Speaker 5: on the human condition that resemble what happens with mange
Speaker 5: and animals. But what happens is you get lots of
Speaker 5: mites burrowing in the skin, and this is the normal
Speaker 5: thing that they do, that is their life cycle, and
Speaker 5: that elicits an immune response on the part of the host,
Speaker 5: either a human or an animal, and that usually takes
Speaker 5: the form of inflammation that can lead to thickening of
Speaker 5: the skin. The mites will often be burrowing in just
Speaker 5: the upper layer of the skin, but that will become
Speaker 5: quite thickened. That will cause blood loss to the hair
Speaker 5: follicles and so the the hair actually will fall out.
Speaker 5: And this can be either very generalized over the whole
Speaker 5: body or just in in parts and oftentimes in particularly
Speaker 5: bad cases, you will you will have secondary bacterial infections
Speaker 5: of the skin that that will give the UH, the
Speaker 5: suffering animal a very bad odor, and in many cases
Speaker 5: this can be fatal.
Speaker 1: In animals, what's the name for human nnge then, or
Speaker 1: does that take different forms?
Speaker 5: We well, actually the the bite that we're talking about
Speaker 5: that's causing most of these cases of complete hair loss.
Speaker 5: And you know this cubocover syndrome, if you want to
Speaker 5: call it, That is a mite called Sarcopti's scavy eye,
Speaker 5: and in humans the medical condition is called scabies. It's
Speaker 5: a rather common skin disorder. It does tend to run
Speaker 5: in kind of epidemics in that you will have high
Speaker 5: incidents of scavi's in a particular population and then as
Speaker 5: as most of those individuals recover. Because in humans it's
Speaker 5: generally a self limiting condition. Your your immune system will
Speaker 5: ultimately kill off the might, and when it does that,
Speaker 5: then pretty much you're going to be immune to reinfection
Speaker 5: for the rest of your life and self. When a
Speaker 5: basically a population grows up who's never been exposed to
Speaker 5: the MIGHT, and then the MIGHT gets brought into that population,
Speaker 5: it can spread easily through the susceptible individuals, who will
Speaker 5: then you know, recover ultimately and the immune and then
Speaker 5: the you know, the epidemic will will be over in
Speaker 5: that in that area, the same thing happened, I mean,
Speaker 5: the same might can cause and it's one of the
Speaker 5: main causes of mange in the mammals, you know, both
Speaker 5: domestic and in some wild mammals. One of the things
Speaker 5: that we've done here is to you know, do some
Speaker 5: morphological work showing that the sarcoptis might on humans is
Speaker 5: the same mite that's on animals. This had been previously
Speaker 5: hypothesized back in the nineteen sixties, but using modern methods
Speaker 5: we have verified that that is the case. And what
Speaker 5: appears to have happened is that at humans domesticated animals,
Speaker 5: this might which is really ancestrally a human parasite. I
Speaker 5: did some work many years ago, and this was followed
Speaker 5: up by some work done by a student of mine,
Speaker 5: Hans Klompen, who's now done at Ohio State University, showing
Speaker 5: that sarcoptis might actually has been with our species, that is,
Speaker 5: the humans, you know, from the outset. The closest relatives
Speaker 5: of this might occur on our closest relatives and on
Speaker 5: back through the primary lineage. So it looks like the
Speaker 5: sarcopts mites and their relatives have evolved with the primates.
Speaker 5: And then when we get the people, uh, you know,
Speaker 5: because and because the mice are transmitted by direct contact,
Speaker 5: they really can't live too long away from a host.
Speaker 5: And so you know, as soon as people started having
Speaker 5: close contact with animals, especially the livestock, as we domesticated
Speaker 5: those species with dogs, particularly, the mighte was able to
Speaker 5: transfer over onto those species. And as is generally the case,
Speaker 5: whenever you have you know what you can consider a
Speaker 5: new host parasite association. It's pretty nasty. We call it
Speaker 5: the highly urrulent. It does a lot of damage and
Speaker 5: mortality can be relatively high because it's a new situation
Speaker 5: that you know, that host species has not had any
Speaker 5: evolutionary history with that parasite, so it has not been
Speaker 5: able to evolve any defenses, you know, like we have okay,
Speaker 5: because it's been sort of our might all along, and
Speaker 5: you know we have you know what we say, co
Speaker 5: evolved with it, so that in humans ski normal scabies
Speaker 5: is an annoyance, Okay, it makes you itch, but like
Speaker 5: I said, it's it's self limiting and will go away.
Speaker 5: And you know, you're not the worst for war, whereas
Speaker 5: in animals who will get these, you know, enormous populations.
Speaker 5: What's happened subsequent to the transfer from humans onto domestic
Speaker 5: animals is that apparently the dogs then have taken it
Speaker 5: out into populations of their relatives, the wild canids like
Speaker 5: coyotes and foxes and wolves, and they get it, and
Speaker 5: they get it really bad. And then some of them
Speaker 5: have even taken it further into other mammal populations. There's
Speaker 5: a particularly bad condition in Australia with the sarcoptis might
Speaker 5: killing off wombats, which they presumably got the mic from
Speaker 5: the dingo, who you know, got them from the domestic
Speaker 5: dogs who got them from loss the.
Speaker 1: Same place as that before. It looks really nasty.
Speaker 7: But what is the typical pattern for hair loss in
Speaker 7: animals with advanced stages of mange? And I've seen quite
Speaker 7: a few of them in researching the chubicabre, but some
Speaker 7: of them seem to be completely hairless, other ones just
Speaker 7: seem to have some crest on the back. Can you
Speaker 7: can you sort of give us a typical pattern for that?
Speaker 5: Well, I don't know if you can say there is
Speaker 5: a typical pattern for for sarcoptic mange. I've I've done
Speaker 5: a little more work with some some related mites that
Speaker 5: that parasitized rodents. They're in the same family as as sarcoptis.
Speaker 5: There's one we have here in squirrels, and the squirrel
Speaker 5: mange is very characteristic because the hair loss is almost
Speaker 5: always restricted to the the anter you're part of the
Speaker 5: body so so, and not even the entire head, so
Speaker 5: sort of from the top of the head back to
Speaker 5: sort of mid body and then kind of down to
Speaker 5: the elbows and the rest of the body tends to
Speaker 5: remain you know, completely furt and you know, of course
Speaker 5: there a our exceptions to this, but that's that's the
Speaker 5: common pattern that you see with with squirrel manage. Some
Speaker 5: of the others, you know, will normally attack just around
Speaker 5: the ears. There's might it attacks cats. Cats don't seem
Speaker 5: to be all that susceptible to h sarcopic makes. They
Speaker 5: do get it, but it's pretty rare. There's another mite
Speaker 5: called Noto Edris that the Noto Eddy's cat hi as
Speaker 5: the species that attacks cats and also uh it's apparently
Speaker 5: transferred from cats to rabbits because it will parasitize rabbits.
Speaker 5: And it also occurs in the wild in the Old
Speaker 5: World tropics, on civets and mongooses and things like that. Okay,
Speaker 5: And and that one really likes the feet and and
Speaker 5: the u in the face. Uh, where you get the
Speaker 5: thickening of the skin again, and and some hair loss
Speaker 5: that you don't typically see, the kind of generalized hair
Speaker 5: loss that you see with sarcopies in dogs.
Speaker 3: And what actually determines whether or not mange develops.
Speaker 2: Does every case of this kind of parasite potentially cause
Speaker 2: maine or how does that work?
Speaker 5: Yes? Yeah, I mean that's I mean when when you
Speaker 5: get the light on on its normal hosts, which in
Speaker 5: the case of sarcoptis would would be a human and
Speaker 5: on humans, Uh, the normal place where the mites actually
Speaker 5: burrow into the skin is on the extremity, so very
Speaker 5: typically on the hands, okay, occasionally the feet, sometimes the genitalium.
Speaker 5: So scavies can be a sexually transmitted disease. And because
Speaker 5: humans aren't very well ferred, you know, we we don't
Speaker 5: notice any you know, any kind of hair loss because
Speaker 5: we didn't have much to begin with they don't tend
Speaker 5: to attack on the head. There is a condition in
Speaker 5: humans that's called crusted scabies that really does kind of
Speaker 5: mimic what goes on in these bad cases of sarcoptic
Speaker 5: mange and animals. Because a normal case of scabies in humans,
Speaker 5: the population size of the mites is anywhere from twenty
Speaker 5: to thirty mites, which isn't very many. But in these
Speaker 5: cases of so called crusted scabies, you will get hundreds
Speaker 5: of thousands of mites and you know, maybe even millions
Speaker 5: of mites that can you know, spread all over the body.
Speaker 5: And with that condition you get this thickening of the
Speaker 5: skin and all the things that go along with the
Speaker 5: condition we see in wild well, sorry, in other mammal species.
Speaker 5: For a lot of time people wondered about this crusted
Speaker 5: scabies condition and thought, well, maybe it's a different, different
Speaker 5: kind of might But now we know that it's actually
Speaker 5: exactly the same mite. It's just that the people are different.
Speaker 5: The people who get this crested scabies condition have compromised
Speaker 5: immune systems, so it's it's most common in u in
Speaker 5: the elderly, it's common in AIDS patients, and in people
Speaker 5: who have had organ transplants and have had immunosuppressive therapy.
Speaker 5: And one of the key tests of the fact that
Speaker 5: it really is the same might is that in a
Speaker 5: medical setting when when people with crested scabies are being treated,
Speaker 5: very often the physicians and nurses that are treating them
Speaker 5: will come down with a case of normal scabies if
Speaker 5: they hadn't been previously exposed.
Speaker 6: Barry, I wanted to ask you a question.
Speaker 1: It might be a silly question, but is there a
Speaker 1: connection between chicken pox and scabies at all? Or do
Speaker 1: people confuse the appearance of the stew.
Speaker 5: Well, there's no connection. Chicken pox is caused by a virus.
Speaker 5: But you know, in both cases, the you know, the
Speaker 5: initial lesion that you will see on the skin is
Speaker 5: going to be a you know, a reddish raised uh
Speaker 5: you know, papule that will be very itchy, and you know,
Speaker 5: all of that comes as a result of the immune
Speaker 5: response and in one case at the response to the
Speaker 5: virus in the skin, and on the other it's a
Speaker 5: response to the antigens that are present in the mice.
Speaker 6: So there's a similarity in the appearance.
Speaker 5: Then, right, babies might are actually going to be literally
Speaker 5: burrowing in the skin and they make little burrows that
Speaker 5: run parallel to the surface of the skin. One of
Speaker 5: the classic diagnostic methods for you know, for for diagnosing
Speaker 5: scabies in the absence of actually seeing a mite, is
Speaker 5: to put some ink on the skin around the lesion
Speaker 5: and and then you know, let it soak in and
Speaker 5: then and then wipe it off the surface, and ink
Speaker 5: will be actually taken up into the burrow and you
Speaker 5: will see these little lines then on the skin that
Speaker 5: marked the path that the mic has taken.
Speaker 3: I just wanted to say, gross. Yeah, I know you.
Speaker 5: Well, if you if you want, I can tell you
Speaker 5: about one of the grossest pictures I ever saw at
Speaker 5: a scientific meeting.
Speaker 2: That's saying something coming from yeah, yeah, don't don't deny
Speaker 2: our listeners.
Speaker 3: After that, we're ready.
Speaker 5: Well, no, I I went to a conference many years
Speaker 5: ago where the topic was you know, of human medical importance,
Speaker 5: and and a physician was was giving a presentation on
Speaker 5: uh sexual transmission of scabies, and the only photograph that
Speaker 5: he showed, which was sort of behind him on the
Speaker 5: screen for for the entire ten minutes of his talk,
Speaker 5: was was this human penis with a scabies mike burrow
Speaker 5: going up it okay, and of.
Speaker 3: Course it was.
Speaker 5: It was you know, like ten feet tall and anyway, Uh.
Speaker 3: Nice gis.
Speaker 6: Is that for the show notes?
Speaker 1: Hey?
Speaker 7: There you go.
Speaker 3: Copy that.
Speaker 7: Is mange sometimes fatal or is it really a secondary infection?
Speaker 5: Well, it's hard to say, you know, one way or another.
Speaker 5: With with animal mage Again, one of the things about this,
Speaker 5: you know history aspect, you know, the MC having really
Speaker 5: had a long period of co evolution with humans. And
Speaker 5: then when we look at animal mange, dogs appear to
Speaker 5: have had it longer than some of the other species, uh,
Speaker 5: dogs and pigs, perhaps because they both suffer from it.
Speaker 5: But you know, it's it's not necessarily fatal in dogs
Speaker 5: and pigs, and they can often actually fight it off
Speaker 5: as opposed to dying from it. But then when you
Speaker 5: get out into the wild mammal populations, it's almost invariably fatal,
Speaker 5: and you know, it can really do very serious damage
Speaker 5: to the wild populations. Years ago, when I was a
Speaker 5: graduate student at Cornell University in New York back in
Speaker 5: the nineteen seventies, there was a major what we call
Speaker 5: ePIE zolotic of sarcoptic mange in the red foxes there
Speaker 5: and the mortality was was, you know, between ninety eight
Speaker 5: and ninety nine percent, so it almost drove the foxes
Speaker 5: to extinction, and there was even talk among the wildlife
Speaker 5: biologists in the state of actually trying to trap the
Speaker 5: few remaining ones and you know, kill them and then
Speaker 5: just go find some foxes somewhere else and reintroduce you know,
Speaker 5: basically completely mange free animals. I don't think they did that,
Speaker 5: but you know, like I say, it does tend to
Speaker 5: run an epizootics, and it did take you know, some
Speaker 5: time for the population of house to uh, you know,
Speaker 5: to to rebound from you know, from that attack.
Speaker 3: Why is it that sometimes from well, you know, I can't.
Speaker 5: Tell you whether it's the you know, the infection or
Speaker 5: just the the hyper immune response, you know, the fact
Speaker 5: that that all the body's energy is going towards, uh,
Speaker 5: you know, fighting off these invaders, and you know, animals
Speaker 5: that that have mange are clearly weakened by it during
Speaker 5: during an episootic of squirrel range that that we had
Speaker 5: again back when I was in graduate school, and this
Speaker 5: is something I personally observed, but it's also been reported
Speaker 5: in the in the literature of literally uh squirrels falling
Speaker 5: from the trees, you know, because they have succumbed or
Speaker 5: they're just unable to you know, they're so weak they
Speaker 5: can't they can't hold on. And I even did a
Speaker 5: kind of an an informal little bit of data collecting
Speaker 5: that I never published because it wasn't it wasn't that rigorous,
Speaker 5: but you know, just just going out and looking at
Speaker 5: roadkill and then comparing the incidents of obvious mange conditions
Speaker 5: in the dead squirrels that I would find on the road,
Speaker 5: and compare that with the incident that I could observe
Speaker 5: in live squirrels just by you know, walking around town.
Speaker 5: And you know, the incidents in the dead squirrels was
Speaker 5: considerably higher than it was that I could observe in
Speaker 5: the live launch, which you know, suggested that, you know,
Speaker 5: if you were suffering from mange, you weren't as able
Speaker 5: to dodge cars as well as as if you were
Speaker 5: completely healthy.
Speaker 1: That makes sense, Barry, Could you possibly tell us about
Speaker 1: the life cycle of the mange causing parasite.
Speaker 5: Well, again, if we're talking, we're talking about sarcopti scavie.
Speaker 5: They start as an egg, so the females lay eggs
Speaker 5: in their burrows, and what hatches from the egg is
Speaker 5: a stage what we call the larva in the mites,
Speaker 5: the larva. Actually, you know, mice are arachnids, okay, like
Speaker 5: spiders and scorpions, and so arachnids are different from insects,
Speaker 5: and that they have four pairs of legs instead of three, right,
Speaker 5: and they don't have antennae. Well, the mites, integs, the
Speaker 5: acharai as we call them, are almost unique among all
Speaker 5: the irachnids in that the first life stage that hatches
Speaker 5: from the egg has only three pairs of legs, okay,
Speaker 5: So it's like an insect in that respect. They haven't
Speaker 5: got their last pair of legs yet, and so we
Speaker 5: distinguish that stage by calling it the larva. And so
Speaker 5: the larva will live for you know, some some couple
Speaker 5: of days or so, and then they will molt to
Speaker 5: what we call the nymph stage, or the nymph nymphs
Speaker 5: get their last pair of legs, okay, so now they
Speaker 5: have eight legs. The mage mites have two nimphle stages.
Speaker 5: We call them the protonymph for the first nymph, and
Speaker 5: then the tritonimph or third nymph. And you will ask
Speaker 5: me what happened to the second one. The free living
Speaker 5: ancestors of a very large group of parasitic mites that
Speaker 5: includes these manage mites, have a specialized deutonymph or second
Speaker 5: nymph that starts to disperse the species. And when these
Speaker 5: are the ancestral species became a full time parasite, they
Speaker 5: didn't need this special dispersing form anymore, so they just
Speaker 5: don't do it anymore. We can tell morphologically that the
Speaker 5: second nymphile stage is the tritonimph in the parasitic mites.
Speaker 5: So after that then they become adult males and females
Speaker 5: look rather different. They do have a direct mating, so
Speaker 5: the males and females have to get together, and after mating,
Speaker 5: the females are capable of laying eggs and starting to
Speaker 5: cycle over again.
Speaker 2: So the whole set of nymphs are the nympho mang x.
Speaker 5: I have never heard that. I'll have to write that
Speaker 5: down and give you credit for it.
Speaker 7: Okay, thanks, I think you mean blame.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: How is NaNs diagnosed? Is this sort of thing that
Speaker 7: a layperson can just sort of look at it and say, well,
Speaker 7: it doesn't have any hair it must be mange or
Speaker 7: is it something that really requires no.
Speaker 5: I mean, the conclusive diagnosis is is you know, you
Speaker 5: have to see the mite and and so you know,
Speaker 5: if we're talking about a domestic dog or or you
Speaker 5: know a cow or or a pig, uh, you know,
Speaker 5: a veterinarian and would do a scraping of the skin.
Speaker 5: Generally this is done with the you know, the backside
Speaker 5: of a scalpel, you know, and not the sharp side,
Speaker 5: because you don't want to cut into the skin. You
Speaker 5: just want to kind of scrape the skin. Put that
Speaker 5: material then in, you know, into some usually just mineral
Speaker 5: oil or something, and look at it on a microscope slide.
Speaker 5: And you know, then if you see the mites, well
Speaker 5: you have a positive diagnosis. I mean there's you know,
Speaker 5: there are other things that can cause hair loss. The
Speaker 5: general term for hair loss is alopecia. And you know,
Speaker 5: there's again a lot of causes for that, so it's
Speaker 5: not necessarily going to be a mite. And also there's
Speaker 5: something I noticed with in looking at the smirrel manage
Speaker 5: is that many of the animals that I looked at
Speaker 5: again the way these were roadkilled, I couldn't find mites
Speaker 5: on them, and yet they showed the very characteristic pattern
Speaker 5: of hair loss that I've described for it. And so
Speaker 5: it looks like what happened there was that those individuals
Speaker 5: had in fact been able to clear the infection, that
Speaker 5: the immune system had killed off all the mites, but
Speaker 5: they didn't grow their hair back immediately. And because the
Speaker 5: hair loss tended to occur in the fall of the year,
Speaker 5: these animals would be sort of half naked all winter
Speaker 5: along and again that would would seriously weaken them, and
Speaker 5: the normal pattern of molting in squirrels, you know, would
Speaker 5: would have them then grow their new you know, spring
Speaker 5: summer coat in the in the springtime, and if they
Speaker 5: did survive and get rid of the mites, they would
Speaker 5: grow a new you know, a new coat in the springtime,
Speaker 5: and you know, they would look fully furred again and
Speaker 5: not not really show any any signs of the mange,
Speaker 5: but you know the fur. I remember looking at the
Speaker 5: first few squirrels I looked at there. There weren't any
Speaker 5: mites there, and I was, you know, wondering about, you know,
Speaker 5: what could be causing this. Uh, But then I started
Speaker 5: to actually find them, you know, where I could uh,
Speaker 5: you know, I could actually find the mites and that
Speaker 5: was that.
Speaker 2: Are most parasites their hosts species specific?
Speaker 3: Is that correct?
Speaker 5: Well, I would say most of them are. Yeah, I
Speaker 5: mean there's a lot of them that aren't. And uh uh.
Speaker 5: The the sarcoptic mange miter or escape might is one
Speaker 5: of those that you know, if humans had had you know,
Speaker 5: never become humans and never domesticated other species, that might
Speaker 5: probably would not have ever you know, had the opportunity
Speaker 5: to get onto and establish itself on some other hosts.
Speaker 5: The few cases, again this code goes back to noncompums
Speaker 5: evolutionary work that he did with these, he was able
Speaker 5: to show that host switches in the entire family Psychoptady
Speaker 5: are fairly rare, but he could point to several cases
Speaker 5: of clear host switches where you know, closely related my
Speaker 5: species don't occur on closely related hosts. And since the
Speaker 5: most of the species in the Maine mite family Psychoptody
Speaker 5: are parasites on bat, you know, there's a few cases
Speaker 5: where species have moved from one of the major groups
Speaker 5: of bats onto the other one. And there's some cases
Speaker 5: where they've moved from bats onto rodents that live in
Speaker 5: the trees. So the squirrel made might which now really
Speaker 5: lives only on squirrels, has an ancestry that that goes
Speaker 5: back to the bat hosts. And there's a few that
Speaker 5: are on mice and rats as well, but these these
Speaker 5: are often found on oar boreal species.
Speaker 2: I read a few years ago about the relationship between
Speaker 2: guerrilla lies and human genital lize, and I was wondering, what,
Speaker 2: what can the genetics of parasites tell us about the
Speaker 2: evolution of the host animals.
Speaker 5: Well, there's a there's a long interesting history and in
Speaker 5: parasitology about uh, you know, what what we call co
Speaker 5: evolutionary patterns, and and you know, if you if you
Speaker 5: go back one hundred years, it was generally thought that,
Speaker 5: you know, every parasite was host specific and that every
Speaker 5: parasite had sort of evolved with its hoast. Okay, And
Speaker 5: so you could use then the pattern relationships among the
Speaker 5: parasites to be sort of a mirror, if you will,
Speaker 5: of the relationships among the hosts. Well, now we know that,
Speaker 5: you know, life is never so so uncomplicated and pretty.
Speaker 5: You know, what we call host shifting or column of
Speaker 5: new hosts does occur, you know, regularly, and so what
Speaker 5: we actually see when we look at these patterns is
Speaker 5: kind of historical associations like the scabies might and humans,
Speaker 5: and then relatively newer associations that are the result of colonization. Okay,
Speaker 5: So like the scabies might on on dogs okay, or
Speaker 5: the squirrel might again coming from or having its closest relatives,
Speaker 5: you know, not on other rodents, but on on that.
Speaker 1: Getting back to mange, how prevalence is mange? Is there
Speaker 1: any place on Earth where mange or life.
Speaker 6: Do not exist?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 5: Goodness, well, probably anywhere where people are and where dogs are.
Speaker 5: You know, you're you're going to find the parasites. You know,
Speaker 5: the the human and scabies does occur in every human population.
Speaker 5: Like I say, it kind of comes and goes in
Speaker 5: these waves or ePIE zolotics in a particular place. So
Speaker 5: you know, I remember owhen was it in the There
Speaker 5: was a big epidemic in many parts of the world
Speaker 5: back in the late nineteen sixties early nineteen seventies, So
Speaker 5: there were a lot of case reports. You know, I
Speaker 5: made it into the newspapers, and you know, then again
Speaker 5: it kind of faded away, as it does, but that
Speaker 5: doesn't mean it, you know, it went extinct. It just
Speaker 5: you know, went into other populations where not necessarily urban populations.
Speaker 5: I had a colleague who was working in Madagascar and
Speaker 5: you know, had come back and came to see me
Speaker 5: and showed showed me a spot on his hand and said,
Speaker 5: you know, is this what I think it is? And
Speaker 5: I said, well, probably, Why do you think so? And
Speaker 5: he said, well because one of the local people I
Speaker 5: was working with had scabies and well, anyway, there was
Speaker 5: some handshaking going on and you know, and and he
Speaker 5: had become infected.
Speaker 7: You we've talked some about the physical signs of mange,
Speaker 7: like the hair loss and whatever else. Are there certain
Speaker 7: behavior characteristics that are typical of banging animals? For example,
Speaker 7: anything that they do that would be a side effect
Speaker 7: of the mange that wouldn't be you know, a physical
Speaker 7: you know, that wouldn't be obvious in physical appearance.
Speaker 5: Well, they're going to clearly be itchy, you know, they will.
Speaker 5: They will scratch a lot because you know, the the
Speaker 5: the mightes do irritate them. Uh probably in the in
Speaker 5: the more advanced stages, that's going to be less apparent,
Speaker 5: just because the animals are going to be basically too weak, uh,
Speaker 5: you know, to to do a lot of scratching, you know,
Speaker 5: they they will uh Again in looking at at some
Speaker 5: of these uh Cubicaba accounts, you know, of the attacking
Speaker 5: of livestock and the like, because these animals are are
Speaker 5: greatly weakened, you know, they're they're going to have a
Speaker 5: hard time hunting. And because we're talking about carnivores here,
Speaker 5: that the dog family primarily, that they may be sort
Speaker 5: of forced into, you know, attacking livestock because they're they're
Speaker 5: easier than running down a rabbit or or a deer
Speaker 5: or something.
Speaker 2: Can you tell us what your thoughts are about the
Speaker 2: media's interpretation of this what seems like a common phenomena.
Speaker 5: Well, you know again, it's it's the combination of of
Speaker 5: myth meets you know, meets reality. Uh. And you know,
Speaker 5: as as is often the case when myth meets reality,
Speaker 5: there there is a rational explanation for, uh, you know,
Speaker 5: for for what people are seeing. If the myth is
Speaker 5: coming out of a population who's ignorant of the of
Speaker 5: the medical condition or or whatever. I mean, it's you know,
Speaker 5: similar to oh, you know different uh, you know, human
Speaker 5: anomalities that that you know get genetic uh diseases and
Speaker 5: things that have physical manifestations that are you know, offering
Speaker 5: interpret it in in some cultures, in you know, in
Speaker 5: some sort of mythic way. But it's you know, I
Speaker 5: I have you know, I did check. You know a
Speaker 5: lot of the pictures that are floating around on the
Speaker 5: internet of super cabares, and aside from the obvious paintings
Speaker 5: and drawings of monsters coming from the imagination, anything that
Speaker 5: looked like a real animal sure looked like a mengi
Speaker 5: coyote or a dog or a fox to me.
Speaker 6: And just going back to sorry, did you have a question?
Speaker 6: Play call?
Speaker 3: Well, I have lots of questions. We keep going there.
Speaker 1: Well, I was going to move back to scabies again
Speaker 1: unless you wanted to.
Speaker 3: And who doesn't want to talk about scabies?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't think I'd ever be asking questions like this.
Speaker 6: Let's go back to scabies.
Speaker 5: Are you are you all itching about now? I mean
Speaker 5: I usually have that.
Speaker 6: I am, And I want to ask you about that.
Speaker 1: I've read a study a number of years ago in
Speaker 1: a science magazine about the sort of psychosomatic aspects of
Speaker 1: itching and talking about this topic.
Speaker 6: What do you know about that?
Speaker 5: Well? I laughed, because there have been so many you know,
Speaker 5: sort of personal experiences with things like this. One of
Speaker 5: one of the things I learned early on is to
Speaker 5: sort of avoid shop talk in a restaurant. Uh yeah.
Speaker 5: I was at a parasitology meeting once and you know,
Speaker 5: with having dinner with some colleagues and just talking about
Speaker 5: things we normally talk about, and all of a sudden
Speaker 5: kind of looking up and seeing there was no one
Speaker 5: else left in the restaurant. You know, we were We
Speaker 5: were not actually asked to leave or anything. But it's
Speaker 5: just sort of second nature to you know, those of
Speaker 5: us in the in the business, but clearly is you know,
Speaker 5: is very troublesome to a lot of people.
Speaker 6: Does it affect you or not anymore?
Speaker 5: You know, I've been at this for you know, thirty
Speaker 5: years or so and and have never actually had scabies myself.
Speaker 5: You know, don't don't look for to the day when
Speaker 5: I you know, when I might Uh.
Speaker 2: Yes, okay, I was going to do that and I
Speaker 2: get to save it.
Speaker 3: Yet it would.
Speaker 5: There's there's there's a lot, you know, a lot of
Speaker 5: the headline and you know we've been through that with
Speaker 5: kids and all this, uh I mean, that's a completely
Speaker 5: different story. But and and there are you know, there
Speaker 5: are other mites that that do bother people and not
Speaker 5: causing mage or or Scavi's like conditions, but but they
Speaker 5: just bite. And I deal with a lot of that,
Speaker 5: and then we get this condition that's that's called delusional parasitosis,
Speaker 5: where you know, people have the feeling that that things
Speaker 5: are you know, on their skin or or biting them
Speaker 5: that they can't see. And because if they can't see it,
Speaker 5: it must be too small and therefore it must be
Speaker 5: a mite. Then I get a lot of questions from
Speaker 5: the public that you know, again, the first thing I
Speaker 5: I have to tell people is, you know, I'm not
Speaker 5: a medical doctor, and you know, and I can't diagnose
Speaker 5: a condition that if they can actually show me a
Speaker 5: specimen that's the MTE, and I can identify it. And
Speaker 5: and in cases where they can, then we can usually
Speaker 5: based on what it is, figure out what the source is.
Speaker 5: You know, for example, there are charasenic mites that live
Speaker 5: in the nests of birds and small mammals, you know,
Speaker 5: rats and mice, and you know, if the nest is
Speaker 5: in the house or around the house, and if especially
Speaker 5: if if it's a bird nest and the young birds
Speaker 5: have left the nest. The mites will come in the
Speaker 5: house and bite people. And those are the easy ones
Speaker 5: because you know, people will bring in you know, this
Speaker 5: might and I can say, oh, yes, that's that's a
Speaker 5: Dominus's galty, that's might. It comes in bird nests and
Speaker 5: you just have to find the bird nest and remove
Speaker 5: it and they'll take care of your problem, you know.
Speaker 5: But it's when they come in with you know, boxes
Speaker 5: full of hair and you know, pieces of paper covered
Speaker 5: with Scotch tape that they've rubbed all over their body,
Speaker 5: and or you know, plastic bags inside plastic bags inside
Speaker 5: plastic bags, tonite them, you know, with a kind of
Speaker 5: insect part in the last bag. You know, these are
Speaker 5: people who have kind of let the feeling kind of
Speaker 5: take control of their lives. And there are websites you
Speaker 5: know that I can refer people to that discuss this.
Speaker 5: I always, you know, people are always saying, don't I'm
Speaker 5: not crazy, you know? Or do you think I'm crazy? Okay?
Speaker 5: And I don't think they're crazy, of course not. They're
Speaker 5: they're obviously having, you know, some sort of sensation, and
Speaker 5: you know, the the the idea is to try to
Speaker 5: find out what is the course of the sensation. And
Speaker 5: I try to tell them that there's many things other
Speaker 5: than you know, a mite or a small insect biting
Speaker 5: them that could be causing those sensations, and that they
Speaker 5: certainly need to see, uh you know, a dermatologist right
Speaker 5: who can literally, you know, could diagnose skapies or something
Speaker 5: like that. But you know, I kind of tell people
Speaker 5: that it's a very common, uh phenomenon. I mean, I
Speaker 5: do introduce them to the idea of delusional parasitosis, and
Speaker 5: in an offhand sort of way, not by jumping back
Speaker 5: and saying you're crazy, That's the last thing I ever
Speaker 5: want to do, but to tell them that there's possible,
Speaker 5: you know, psychosomatic reasons for these sensations, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 5: So you know, that is something that when you're in
Speaker 5: this business, you know, you just learn how to deal
Speaker 5: with it because you are going to have people coming
Speaker 5: to you with with questions about it.
Speaker 1: Barry, do you work with dematologists.
Speaker 5: Not directly, I do. I work closely with the University
Speaker 5: hospital here with the diagnostic lab people. I've I've done
Speaker 5: some training sessions with them because they they will, you know,
Speaker 5: somebody comes in with a tick bike and they have
Speaker 5: the tick. The folks there have been trained to identify
Speaker 5: the ticks that occur in the local areas. Because ticks
Speaker 5: are known to transmit a number of pretty nasty diseases
Speaker 5: to humans. It's kind of crucial to know what species
Speaker 5: has bitten you, just in case you start showing, you know,
Speaker 5: some symptoms. But if somebody's been traveling and they come
Speaker 5: back and they've brought something back with them, then these
Speaker 5: folks don't know what it is. And that's where I
Speaker 5: get involved with them and try to, you know, try
Speaker 5: to pin it down.
Speaker 7: You were talking about some of your current research. What's
Speaker 7: what's the hot topic these days in parasite research. I
Speaker 7: have to I have to confess it's not something that
Speaker 7: I'm really tea into. What's cutting edge these days.
Speaker 5: I can tell you what we're working on right now.
Speaker 7: I mean, yeah, what are you working on.
Speaker 5: We're working on house dust mites, which maybe you've heard of.
Speaker 5: House dust mites are quite fascinating because the medical connection.
Speaker 5: It was discovered back in the nineteen sixties that people
Speaker 5: who are allergic to house dust, the vast majority of
Speaker 5: them actually turn out to be allergic to the mites
Speaker 5: that live in house dust more so than any of
Speaker 5: the other components that are that are in there. And
Speaker 5: what we're doing is is we've actually been able to
Speaker 5: show that the dustmites have done something almost unique in
Speaker 5: their evolutionary history, and that is they're they're not parasitic.
Speaker 5: I mean, they're they're living in our houses, in our beds,
Speaker 5: they live. Uh, other species live in the nests of
Speaker 5: birds and mammals, and some of them even get in
Speaker 5: and interest stored food products. Now, but that their ancestors
Speaker 5: were permanent parasites that lived on birds. And this idea
Speaker 5: that I mean, there's there's an old adage, you know,
Speaker 5: once a parasite, always a parasite, which implies that in
Speaker 5: the evolution of the parasitic association, Uh, the parasite is
Speaker 5: basically giving up, you know, its ability to live anywhere
Speaker 5: but on that host. Okay, so it's its hosts. Then
Speaker 5: completely becomes its habitat, and you know, it adapts to
Speaker 5: that habitat to the point where it really can't live
Speaker 5: anywhere else, and you know, certainly not going back to
Speaker 5: you know, being you know, a non parasite and living
Speaker 5: a free living existence. But our work on the dust mites,
Speaker 5: and this has been done with especially in collaboration with
Speaker 5: my colleague Powell Claimop, and we've been looking at DNA
Speaker 5: from the dust mites and a whole bunch of related mites,
Speaker 5: both parasitic and non parasitic mites, and our results, which
Speaker 5: I'm actually going to present at an international conference here
Speaker 5: next week in Brazil, to clearly show that the dust
Speaker 5: mights have evolved from an ancestor that was a full
Speaker 5: time permanent parasite living on bird. The interesting thing, there's
Speaker 5: a couple of really fascinating things that have come out
Speaker 5: of that, you know, with that evolutionary history, and one
Speaker 5: is that the group that's death knites are related to
Speaker 5: are usually called feathermites. They mostly live on the feathers
Speaker 5: of birds where they're they're really innocuous, I mean, they're
Speaker 5: parasites only in the sense really that they're living their
Speaker 5: entire life on the host and they can't generally live
Speaker 5: off the host. But they're not really doing anything bad
Speaker 5: to it. Okay, there's there's a you know, a definitional
Speaker 5: problem here that that most parasitologists would define a parasite
Speaker 5: as as you know, something that not only you know,
Speaker 5: lives on a house, but actually does damage to it.
Speaker 5: And these featamites are are not doing that. They're they're
Speaker 5: not really eating the feathers. Uh. Some of them moved
Speaker 5: on to the skin, and those are really classic parasites
Speaker 5: where they're they're doing some damage there. But the ones
Speaker 5: that live on feathers are innocuous at the worst, and
Speaker 5: perhaps even beneficial in some cases because we know that
Speaker 5: they'll eat fungi and perhaps uh, bacteria and and other
Speaker 5: things that are potentially pathogenic to the bird host. That
Speaker 5: you didn't get really big populations of these things living
Speaker 5: on a bird that you know that the bird doesn't care.
Speaker 5: I mean, they don't do anything really to try to
Speaker 5: reduce the populations of these feather inhabiting mites anyway. But
Speaker 5: somewhere along the line, you know, one of these mites
Speaker 5: did to developed the ability to digest keratin, which is
Speaker 5: the protein that makes up feathers and hair, and actually
Speaker 5: it's what largely makes our skin waterproof because carroten builds
Speaker 5: up in our skin cells and then as they they
Speaker 5: die and they're replaced from below. So we have this,
Speaker 5: you know, the outer layer of our skin. You know
Speaker 5: what what peels off, right when you have a sunburn,
Speaker 5: that's largely keratin, and it's a it's a protective layer.
Speaker 5: And keratin is a really interesting pro because it's a
Speaker 5: very strong protein. It has a lot of I mean,
Speaker 5: we can get into into the chemistry here, but basically
Speaker 5: it's it's such a strong protein and that's what makes
Speaker 5: it right for making stuff like hair and feathers that
Speaker 5: you know, are difficult to break down. So if you
Speaker 5: think about it, when an animal dies, right, and you
Speaker 5: know you can watch the decomposition process, you know what's
Speaker 5: the last to go, right, the last to go or
Speaker 5: sort of the bones and the hair or the feathers
Speaker 5: if it's a bird, because they're the most indigestible, and
Speaker 5: there are so few animals that are specialized or even
Speaker 5: microbes that are specialized to digest that that material. Well,
Speaker 5: somehow again one of these my ancestors evolve the ability
Speaker 5: to digest keratin, and we have species that now believe
Speaker 5: it or not live inside the feathers. Okay, feathers are
Speaker 5: hollow at it's the bottom part of the feathers on
Speaker 5: the inside. And then there's a couple of species that
Speaker 5: are known from parrots, and we've discovered quite a number
Speaker 5: of new ones that are living in both the parrots
Speaker 5: and in woodpeckers. They're related ones living in hummingbirds on
Speaker 5: the inside of their feathers, and uh, these are clearly
Speaker 5: eating the feather material from the inside. I mean, they're
Speaker 5: not eating through it and destroying the feather because that
Speaker 5: would not be productive, right it would it would, you know,
Speaker 5: cause dam you know, too much damage to the host.
Speaker 5: But if you think about you might that that can
Speaker 5: eat keratin and you know, and has to disperse, like
Speaker 5: coming out of the feather and you know, getting onto
Speaker 5: another bird. Well, the opportunities for that are well, sort
Speaker 5: of from parent to nestling. Okay, if you're in the nest,
Speaker 5: you can do it that way, or or when adult
Speaker 5: birds are mating. I mean that's a relatively brief encounter.
Speaker 5: But so mostly probably this this uh transfer is occrying
Speaker 5: in the nests. And so if one of these you know,
Speaker 5: might let's just say that can eat keraten, he's in
Speaker 5: the process of moving from bird to bird and it
Speaker 5: falls off. Okay, Well that's a bad thing generally speaking,
Speaker 5: because mostly you know, if you're a feather mite and
Speaker 5: you really need to live on the feathers and eat
Speaker 5: feather oil, and you know, microbes and things like that.
Speaker 5: You're not going to find that down in the nest,
Speaker 5: all right. But if you're a carroten eating mite, what
Speaker 5: you do if you fall down into the nest is
Speaker 5: find yourself surrounded with food. Okay, if you've ever looked
Speaker 5: inside a bird nest after the young bird's grown up
Speaker 5: and the lab there's all this white, fluffy, dusty material
Speaker 5: down in there, and all that is pure keratin. And
Speaker 5: that comes because when baby birds grow out their new feathers,
Speaker 5: they're surrounded by what's called a feather sheath, and that
Speaker 5: feather sheath is made out of caroten and it just
Speaker 5: sort of slups off as the feather grows out and
Speaker 5: kind of builds up in the nest. And so you're
Speaker 5: a carrot eating mic you fall into the nest and
Speaker 5: you don't have a problem with food. Okay, So as
Speaker 5: long as you're able to survive now the temperature changes
Speaker 5: and humidity changes, and you're able to get back on
Speaker 5: a bird when it's time to disperse, well, you've set
Speaker 5: yourself up for possibly a completely new lifestyle. And that's
Speaker 5: been rather successful because there are quite a number of
Speaker 5: species in this group now that are living in nest
Speaker 5: Snuveral of those have gotten into human habitations, right, and
Speaker 5: they live in our homes, and they're eating the same
Speaker 5: sort of stuff. I mean, they're eating our dead skin
Speaker 5: for the most part. You know, they can eat other things.
Speaker 5: They can eat fungi, and they can eat again. Some
Speaker 5: of them have gotten into stored food products, grains and
Speaker 5: the light. But they're still kind of doing what their
Speaker 5: ancestors did. And you know, to me, the most fascinating
Speaker 5: aspect of this whole death might evolution and the connection
Speaker 5: to the medical problems caused by death mines is that
Speaker 5: the allergists have actually identified well over twenty different allergens,
Speaker 5: different proteins that come from dust mites that people can
Speaker 5: be allergic to. But the one allergen that the majority
Speaker 5: of people are allergic to and the one that causes
Speaker 5: the most problems, it's the same one. And so people
Speaker 5: were wondering what this was, okay, And the early studies
Speaker 5: actually found that this particular allergen was concentrated not in
Speaker 5: the mites bodies, but in the mite feces. Okay, So
Speaker 5: it's coming out the back end of the mite as
Speaker 5: they're feeding. And it was suspected that this allergen what
Speaker 5: they what it's protein, because that's what allergens are, and
Speaker 5: the protein when mites and insects eat solid food like
Speaker 5: these mites are doing, and the food is going in
Speaker 5: their gut. The first part of their gut is lined
Speaker 5: with cuticles, so it's not you know, it's not damage
Speaker 5: and the food goes through it, but when it gets
Speaker 5: into the part where it's going to be digested, it
Speaker 5: can do damage to the lining of the of the gut, right,
Speaker 5: and so the might secretes what's called a paratrophic memorane,
Speaker 5: which is a little soft protein coat that goes over
Speaker 5: the food as it passes into the mid gut where
Speaker 5: where digestion will occur, and then it's taken into the
Speaker 5: gut cells for actual digestion. So people thought, oh, that's
Speaker 5: the obvious thing. Okay, it's it's it's going to be
Speaker 5: a you know, the ellergen will be this memorane that's
Speaker 5: going to be left over again, it's going to stay
Speaker 5: with the food as it goes through the gut and
Speaker 5: any waste material it isn't digested, will you know, we
Speaker 5: will pass out as fecal material and it will be
Speaker 5: surrounded by this stuff. Well, when they actually looked at
Speaker 5: the structure of you know that people have actually determined
Speaker 5: what the structure of the antigen is. And it isn't
Speaker 5: a paratrophic memorane protein. It's the enzyme that digests keratin. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so we have we have gone full circle here. Okay,
Speaker 5: so we have. We've gone back to the ancestors who
Speaker 5: lived on birds that evolved the ability to eat keratin
Speaker 5: all the way through the the shift from a parasitic
Speaker 5: to a non parasitic lifestyle, uh to causing problems again,
Speaker 5: you know, to to the humans at least because of
Speaker 5: the very enzyme that allowed them to make this transition
Speaker 5: in the first place.
Speaker 3: That's it. That's really interesting.
Speaker 2: So so the enzyme that less than digest the keratin
Speaker 2: ends up being a problem for the people who cohabitate
Speaker 2: with their environment, right, okay, exactly, That's that's really amazing.
Speaker 2: So now we just need to evolve not having those reactions.
Speaker 5: Right, you know, and in the in the meantime, we
Speaker 5: we just wrap our mattresses up with you know, with
Speaker 5: with plastic and my my son had a bad dust
Speaker 5: mite allergy, so we had to do that when he
Speaker 5: was growing up.
Speaker 2: Is there is there a distinction between people who study
Speaker 2: parasite in those who study how to destroy them.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's all it's it's all part of of
Speaker 5: you know, the big field of parasitology. You know, we
Speaker 5: there there are certainly many different emphathies. You know, there
Speaker 5: are people like me who who really get excited about
Speaker 5: working out the evolutionary histories of parasites and and their hosts. Uh.
Speaker 5: There are people who are more ecologically oriented that that
Speaker 5: get excited about. You know, what is it that the
Speaker 5: parasite is doing when it is living on or in
Speaker 5: the body of of this host. I mean, what is
Speaker 5: the the essence of the interaction? I mean there are
Speaker 5: folks who look at this at at the molecular level.
Speaker 5: You know, what what kinds of chemicals are being produced
Speaker 5: that that cause reactions or or don't cause reactions in
Speaker 5: in or prevent the reaction in uh in the host.
Speaker 5: And you know that that's all really basic science there
Speaker 5: and and when you get into the in the more
Speaker 5: applied ends of things, you know, the the medical side
Speaker 5: of things, where where the focus is on uh, you know,
Speaker 5: treatment and prevention, so you still need to know some
Speaker 5: of these other things. You know, if you if you
Speaker 5: want to know how to not get a particular parasite,
Speaker 5: you need to know something about its life cycle, where
Speaker 5: it lives, you know, how it moves, you know through
Speaker 5: or potentially moved through different hosts. So you know, and
Speaker 5: and then you know, then I suppose there are folks
Speaker 5: who's you know, who get paid to go on come mosquitos,
Speaker 5: you know, and and that's a good thing too.
Speaker 1: Well, just a final question. We like to ask our guests,
Speaker 1: what's your favorite monster?
Speaker 5: Yeah, my favorite monster? Oh my? Uh well, let me
Speaker 5: let me tell you about a movie I saw a
Speaker 5: very very long time ago. It was a wonderful old
Speaker 5: Mexican horror movie made back in the in the fifties
Speaker 5: or sixties called The Black Scorpion. And you know, it
Speaker 5: actually featured some some rather gigantic arachnids. You know, the
Speaker 5: title character was was this train sized scorpion. And and
Speaker 5: you know, the the folks who made the movie did
Speaker 5: a pretty good job with it. I mean it really
Speaker 5: did look kind of like a scorpion, you know, had
Speaker 5: its tail this thing and on big pintures and all
Speaker 5: of that. And you know it didn't have the right
Speaker 5: mouth parts for a scorpion. You know, it more had
Speaker 5: beetle mouth parts. But you know, I'll give him that.
Speaker 5: But my favorite part of the entire movie is when
Speaker 5: this this young boy who is one of the heroes
Speaker 5: of the story actually falls down this hole. Okay, he's
Speaker 5: trying to escape something and he falls into this hole
Speaker 5: and he's menaced by this giant mite. Okay, and the
Speaker 5: mite is actually pretty well done. I mean I can
Speaker 5: even identify what family it belongs to. It's a group
Speaker 5: of predatory mites that has very large what we call
Speaker 5: raptorial appendages around its mouthparts that they used to grab
Speaker 5: prey with. And you know, he's having to dodge the
Speaker 5: attacks of this might, And I thought, you know, that
Speaker 5: was pretty cool to actually bring a giant might into
Speaker 5: a monster movie.
Speaker 3: Actually, I was watching that with my daughter about a month.
Speaker 3: She's only four. She was she said it was too
Speaker 3: slow for her.
Speaker 2: She wanted to any But yeah, yeah, that was had
Speaker 2: special effect.
Speaker 6: I was king of joke that you'd seen it, blake.
Speaker 3: Yoh absolutely, I've got it. Yeah, yeah, it's got special effects.
Speaker 3: By Willis O'Brien. Absolutely, yeah, so there you go.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for spending some time with us today.
Speaker 2: More thanks for listening to monster Talk today. We've been
Speaker 2: learning about mites and lice and the role they play
Speaker 2: in monster folklore, as well as the.
Speaker 3: Science behind their life cycle.
Speaker 2: We interviewed doctor Barry O'Connor, an acharologist and evolutionary parasitologist.
Speaker 2: Your hosts for Blake Smith, Doctor Karen Stolesnow, and Benjamin Radford.
Speaker 2: If you'd like to come in on the show, please
Speaker 2: come visit the Skeptic Forum at skepticforum dot com. If
Speaker 2: you'd like to help out Monster Talk, please give us
Speaker 2: a review on iTunes. It's fast, free and helps us
Speaker 2: get the show out to more listeners. Monster Talk is
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Speaker 2: Did you hear about the geneticist parasitologist with Tourette syndrome
Speaker 2: He developed a tick