Before I tell you about the best email I've received yet, I'd like to briefly mention that I've won a "featured blog" award for a rather random site and received a rather awesome Follow Friday shout out on twitter from Nikon Small World Photography Competition. Weee!
This morning, however, I realized I had been neglecting my microscopic.blog@gmail.com account. Waiting for me, patiently, was an email from reader Denna from the UK. She writes:
Ok, I know I should let this go. Forget about it. But I can't; I am totally grossed out by what was in my sink this morning (attached).
I assume it's some kinda tapeworm? But where the fricking hell did it come from? I keep a very clean kitchen. In fact there are those who think I'm obsessive compulsive about keeping the kitchen clean. I am a rigorous vegetarian and an almost vegan (no milk no cheese) and have been for twenty years. The only meat that ever enters my flat is in cat food tins, and I only buy one brand...
Denna details her morning about eating coffee and toast, and later going back for some oatmeal. As someone who can eat oatmeal for days on end, I like this girl already! Additionally, she's a borderline vegan who knows that its cruel to force house cats to acclimate to a vegetarian diet, as their species requires meat for survival. +100 points for Denna! She continues...
I placed the oatmeal pan in the sink to fill it with water and that's when I saw the tapeworm. There was water in the metal lipped dish from when I rinsed the cat food tin. I was gobsmacked. And I felt seriously sick imagining where it came from. The only place I can figure is the cat food tin. It was a newly opened tin - I popped the ring pull this morning - could a tapeworm survive in an anaerobic tin of food? I guess it could since they live inside animals. Ugh!! But wouldn't factory processing kill it? I kept the little bastard on my windowsill all day in the dish just to convince myself it was indeed a parasite. It must be - it didn't drown it just kept swimming round like some freaking miniature Loch Ness monster. There was a tiny bit of cat food in the dish and it knotted its lower half around the food while its head snorkelled around. Christ, honestly it was worse than imagining what was in that Maryland forest in the Blair Witch Project. Totally totally repellant.
A few years ago, I camped in that same forest in Maryland where the Blair Witch Project was filmed -- no joke. It was very beautiful, and I'm sad to report that there were no witches, or tapeworms, to be found.
Wrong type of worm, Denna. Tapeworms don't usually enter the anus... That would be characteristic of a pinworm, which exits its host's anus each evening to lay eggs on the perianal tissue (skin between the anus and genitals). But either way, its a fun image, right?! This is definitely not a pinworm...so what is it!?Finally around 5pm I picked the dish up and hurled the contents against the garden wall. The little bastard is probably out there now negotiating his way back into the kitchen. Or worse, he's waiting for one of my cats to go out there so he can crawl up their backside and introduce himself and his billion offspring into my flat.
So you're the expert - can you tell me what this is and how it might have got in my sink?! BTW, it was about 3 1/4 inches long. And red. And horrible, disgusting and gross. And I am never eating out of that yellow dish again. Seriously.
Dena said the magic words: "You're the expert". Heart a'flutter! I'm sure she wont like it when I mock her fear of eating off of the yellow dish by posting this video of Bear Grylls eating a giant larvae (beware, not for the weak-stomached or the faint-hearted).
That man will put anything in his mouth, and drinks his own urine like its gatorade.
So why don't we play a little game? I've already responded to Denna Dearest, but I'm going to post the photos, and YOU see if you can identify who Denna's special friend is.
The first person to get it right will get a super awesome & artsy/science-y prize!
Email your guesses to microscopic.blog@gmail.com and I'll announce the winner in my next entry!
Eric?
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