The most Frightning Animal in the world

[gurey25]

I am never going anywhere near the amazon.
shit.

The Candiru

It's just a little freshwater fish, the Candiru, only an inch or two long. It's classified as a "parasitic catfish," but it doesn't have much in common with Mark Twain's good-eatin' Mississippi catfish. If there had been Candiru in the Mississippi, Huck and Jim would've spent the whole trip downriver huddled together in the middle of the raft, screaming like Chef in Apocalypse Now, "Never get off the boat!"

Luckily for Huck, the Candiru only haunts the rivers and streams of the Amazon Basin. The Amazon may be romanticized in every PBS nature show, but it actually deserves its old name: "the Green Hell." And of all the nightmare critters infesting that Hell, the most horrific is our own little Candiru.

If you don't know about the Candiru, we'd like to tease you a little, make you wait. Here's something to ponder: the Candiru is the only vertebrate parasite on Earth to target humans. Think about that. We're good at picking parasites off ourselves and each other. It's a primate specialty. How would any parasite big enough for us to spot and grab manage to avoid our nimble ape fingers? It would have to wriggle into a place we couldn't reach.

You've probably guessed by now. You're probably thinking, "No, that's too disgusting, that can't be true...." But it can. In Schopenhauer's world, it can and it is.

The Candiru, you see, has a nose for urine. When it gets hungry, it sniffs the current of its stream or river for a urine trail, then follows the trail upstream to the source: someone pissing into the water. The Candiru swims up the anus, then chews, shoves and burrows its way into the urinary tract.

You may have heard a simpler version, in which the Candiru swims right up the Urethra, right up somebody's penis. That would actually be less horrible than the real method. Instead of wriggling right up the urethra and lodging there, the Candiru wriggles up the victim's anus, then gnaws its way into the urinary tract.

The pain is reportedly agonizing. And once the Candiru is in place, it's impossible to dislodge, thanks to several sharp, back-pointing spines which pop up when the critter has reached its destination.

Men who have been Candiru-ized have an option, at least: cutting off their penis. The pain and horror of infestation is so great that victims not only accept but beg for this radical therapy. Women aren't so lucky. They have no way at all to get rid of the spiked hook inside them.

People aren't the only species the Candiru chooses. It will chase, enter and suck the life out of anything it sniffs in the water. Its spikes are actually designed to force apart the gills or scales of other freshwater fish. It rides along with the victim, using its rasp-like tongue to scrape flesh and blood until the host fish dies. Then it settles down for a nap at the bottom of the river until it wakes up feeling like a snack. It could be a cow, a fish, or, say, a nature-show host unwisely pissing into an Amazon tributary.

The Candiru is so exaggeratedly awful that it would be wasted as evidence against the idea of a benevolent God. It works better as evidence for Schopenhauer's version of the natural world against Darwin's. Darwin might be able to explain how such a creature might evolve, but he would prefer not to dwell on it. He'd prefer to get back to more benign creatures, like those harmless little finches on the Galapagos. No matter which way their beaks bent after a million years cracking the same desert shrub's seeds, those finches never hurt a soul. You can see Darwin beaming at them.

Schopenhauer, by contrast, would wave the Candiru around with something like vindictive pleasure. This, after all, is not just another beastie doing its best to get by in a tough old world. It's too gratuitously awful for that. It's proof of a bad world, made by a giggling psycho who was proud of his work.

Blake famously asked, in "Tyger," how the same God who made the Lamb could make the Tiger. It seems like a silly question now; if anything, it's the Lamb who seems repulsive. The Tiger is glorious. It's the Candiru Blake should have asked about. But he was weak on biology. It took Schopenhauer to dangle the Candiru in Darwin's stolid, sensible face.



http://www.exile.ru/2003-June-12/schoep ... wards.html

[ChaneL-Lover]

OUCH!!..but what can the females do if one of those things swims up there who-haa. Do they just die

[gurey25]

If you can afford it,
you will go through an hour or so of surgery.

but if you were a poor amazonian tribewoman.
then you should shutupt ,
roll over and DIE

[Gacalisa]

, that is not cool.

[optimist_1]

good torture technique dont you think?

better than 2fast 2furious rat on stomach scene

[gurey25]

Yeah man,

I man cares more about his penis than some rats
nibbling on him.