Hidden Creatures by Dino Martins review – the rebellious world of parasites | Books on science and nature

WChicken Craig Venter, one of the creators of the map of human genes, when he went on a boat to map the DNA in seawater around the world, he found that a teaspoon of seawater contained about 50m viruses. Although this does not sound encouraging, the bad news is mitigated by the fact that most of these are phages that destroy sea bacteria and are not interested in us.

Viruses are pathogens, and like all of their pathogenic counterparts, they can travel freely to living organisms. The whole point of multicellular life is to create a comfortable environment for the cells to live in, and evolution has created all kinds of mechanisms that require this comfort and ability to thrive, either outside or sometimes inside the cells themselves. While it is usually not good for this insect to kill its owner and be forced to find a new home, some come dangerously close. Many diseases in the developing world are linked in some way to parasitic diseases.

Dino Martins book is a fascinating collection of all the antagonists, some big, some small, some harmless and some deadly, who await the unexpected hot blooded creatures. It spreads in four different writing styles. The first is a musical description of nature itself written by an observant observer. The song reaches out to terrifying images: for example, a strange legend, it comes from the description of an elephant rotting in the Kenyan sunlight, slowly melting away with a multitude of maggots. “A bubbling liquid of maggots rises in waves of steam,” and Martins lifts his hands into the glistening flesh to test the colors of the maggots while noting that the air “glistens and stinks”. The tone then changes from musical to taxonomic, listing the genera and behavior of the various animals involved. Martins marvels, and so does the reader, at the creation of the universe.

Then comes the pay slip. One of the most dangerous parts involves the life of eye worms. I had never heard of them before and could not read it. They live in the tissues of the eyes – eyelids, conjunctiva, tear glands. Female larvae lay eggs that hatch, and larvae swim to cry. Flies attracted by the “crying of the maggots” there embrace the maggots; inside the fly, the larvae dig from the intestines to the testes or egg follicles, mature, then move to the head of the fly and wait. When the fly visits another animal to drink water, the maggots hatch and the cycle begins again.

It is understandable that in several places in the book Martins, perhaps reluctantly, changes to “killing monsters” after describing the terrible ingenuity, indeed the beauty, of the life cycle of other organisms that still cause problems or serious diseases, debilitating millions of people. Finally, just when you think you can’t take another word about a creature other than the domestic cat, he regales readers with fascinating tales of his travels in Kenya and conversations with students and farmers.

I once worked at a marine biology station at a time when zoology was moving into the cells of organisms and organisms, and remember I was concerned that the biologist was among the endangered species. I was wrong to complain: the zoologist has just changed, and now he has to be a half-dozen commercial experts to understand what nature does. In many of Martins words, germs make the reader feel like someone harboring clever, creative criminals: admiring the subtlety of deception, disgusted by the details of the sting, determined to eradicate it. But in the end, perhaps the most enduring feeling, and one that Martins describes so beautifully, is the amazing diversity and creativity of living things.