You care for and clean these eggs, as if they were your own. You now believe you are female, and the bulge in your abdomen is a brood of your own eggs. She’s been secreting chemicals to control you–you’ve forgotten who you are. She has woven her threads through your brain. She now has everything she needs for her next takeover.īut none of this bothers you now. These grow into testicles within her body. Her tumorous ovaries now attract a male rhizocephalan larva, who injects his own cells into her. You’re now sterile, and her gonads are erupting out from where your genitals used to be. Just when it seems it couldn’t be worse, your abdomen explodes. Her fibrous tentacles are consuming your extra energy. All that’s left of her is now growing and spreading like cancer through your system. When she found you, she used her body like a hypodermic syringe: stabbing you and injecting her own cells under your skin. But her juvenile body had one terrible difference: her head was tipped with a needle protruding from her shell. As a juvenile she looked like a normal barnacle larva, only a few millimeters long. But she looked normal once: when she was young. She has lost her hard shell, her legs, her eyes, and transformed into sickly yellow roots and sinuous twisting filaments that are slowly growing like black mold through your tissues. The adult female body of the rhizocephalan is twisted and deformed, not resembling in any way its barnacle cousins living on rocks near shore. Your new tormenter is a member of one of the strangest groups of animals known. It’s a rhizocephalan barnacle, and it’s about to take you over. Its roots are crawling through your tissue, your gut, your brain. Can you feel her roots growing in your body? Illustrated by Haeckel. But today you begin to feel strange–maternal almost–as if there is something growing inside you, and in fact, something is. You’ve reached a large size, dodging the many dangers of youth. You’re lingering on the shoreline, the warm sun on your back, cool water in your gills. Imagine you’re a crab, and for full effect, imagine you’re male. These poor creatures are its victims, and you see them all the time. To understand the full terror of this monster, you have to put yourself in the place of another animal. And unlike those monsters, this one is real. I’ve never watched a movie monster, heard a fairy tale, or seen a video game with a villain more horrifying than this one. Even now, the thought of one makes me shiver. I was taking a parasitology course, and even though I’d developed a thick skin, something about this insidious creature deeply disturbed me. When I first learned about rhizocephalan barnacles I lost my appetite. A rhizocephala bursting from the abdomen of a crab.
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