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posted by chromas on Wednesday January 16 2019, @06:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the maybe-Tabasco? dept.

A carpet python from Coolangatta that was fished out of a backyard swimming pool on January 9th by a professional snake catcher was a Lovecraftian horror. According to this article:

A snake that was recently captured near a suburban home in Queensland, Australia, was covered with hundreds upon hundreds of ticks. So many of the bloodsucking parasites clung to the snake that the unfortunate reptile looked like it was wearing a second coat of living scales.

Currumbin Wildlife Hospital Foundation in Queensland reported that 511 ticks in total were removed from the python.

Facebook page here

Nightmare inducing images here and here.

A similar nightmare inducing polyticks infestation here

An extreme infestation such as this likely happened because the snake was already sick, likely with a compromised immune system, Emily Taylor, a professor of biological sciences at California Polytechnic State University, told Live Science. When a tick bites an animal and injects anticoagulants from its saliva, the animal sets off an immune response that can kill the tick or slow down its feeding. However, if an animal's immune response is dampened, "you may see a greater number of ticks feeding or concluding their feeding," Taylor said.

Rebecca Trout Fryxell, an assistant professor in the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture adds

sated female ticks can lay thousands of eggs. If the eggs are fertilized, this can blanket the host with more hungry mouths to feed.

Robots are always the answer.

Although now tick free, Nike, as the python has been named, is still suffering from anemia and "a nasty infection" but it is intended to return him to the wild once he fully recovers.


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 16 2019, @06:52AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 16 2019, @06:52AM (#787269)

    Oh, on the contrary! Ticks, and other parasites, weed out the weak, the white supremacists who cannot get job because of affirmative action, the conservative "scholar" who cannot get a tenure track position in a real University because of Liberal bias, the alt-right He-men who cannot get a date, maintain a relationship, or actually work a marriage. All these illegal immigrants replace as more healthy and successful examples of humanity. How hard is this to understand? Immigrants get it done! They are all like the Cable Guy, while Richard Spencer could not stop himself from beating his (Russian) wife [google.com], and Matt Heimbach, of the Traditionalist Workers Party, could not restrain himself from bonking his own mother-in-law, repeatedly [washingtonpost.com].

    So these, and other less desireable specimens, have been eliminated, more or less, from the gene pool of humanity, once again proving that White folks are stupid, and deserve to become extinct. Because if any of this is what it means to be white, I want nothing to do with it.

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