Восхитительная статья, почитайте ее непременно, если получится. Тут, кажется, у Иванов-Петрова кто-то рассуждал, что, мол, биологи - это инопланетный разум, простому человеку чуждый. Эта статья - сплошная иллюстрация к данному тезису. Хочется прям цитировать кусками.
“I couldn’t believe that I’d been looking at snails for as long as I had and missing all the cool stuff happening inside them,” says Wood, now a parasite ecologist at University of Washington. “I just totally fell in love with them. I like to say that they got under my skin.” (Pun intended?)
Nearly half of all known animals on Earth are parasites, Wood says, and according to one study, a tenth of them may already be doomed to extinction in the next 50 years due to climate change. (Хоть какая-то польза от этого глобального потепления!)
Most species, it turns out, are parasitized by multiple others. Take humans: Despite our efforts to be unhospitable, we’re excellent hosts.
The poster child for parasite conservation, if there is one, is the California condor louse, an ironic victim of the conservation movement itself. In the 1970s, desperate to save the California condor, biologists began rearing the birds in captivity. Part of the protocol was to de-louse every bird with pesticides, on the assumption that parasites were bad for condors, though it’s not clear they actually were. The California condor louse hasn’t been seen since. (Какая трагедия! Они еще забыли упомянуть вошь лобковую. Тоже ведь вымирающий вид, между прочим!)
Ну ок, ладно, если серьезно:
Even human health wouldn’t entirely benefit from wiping out parasites. In countries such as the United States, where we have eliminated most intestinal parasites, we have autoimmune diseases that are virtually unheard of in places where everyone still has those parasites. According to one line of thinking, the human immune system evolved with a coterie of worms and protozoan parasites, and when we killed them off, our immune systems began attacking ourselves.
Но, по правде сказать, зная то, что я знаю - я, пожалуй, лучше буду страдать от аллергии, чем от глистов.