You’ve probably heard of people collecting stamps or arts or even antique cars, but what about parasites? In 1892, the American government established a National Parasite Collection to learn more about diseases affecting livestock. Twenty million specimens have now been transferred to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History for safekeeping. Our correspondent Janot Bryan met the new curator at a swamp in Marryland.
It’s a little chilly.
We are hoping to find some blood suckers to add to the collection using our bare legs as bait. So we just stand here and wait for the leeches to come and latch onto our legs.
Well, leeches, they are blood-feeding, will be attracted by movement. So you have to do leech dance. So there is a special technique. You can either do sort of do this a little bit where you dance your knees up and down and create some ripples, you can also do it side to side. The purpose is to create lots of ripples in the water so if there’s leeches farther away, they will be attracted to this point.
The leech dance looks a bit like the self-conscious jiggling of mid-aged man at a wedding party. Needless to say, the leeches were not impressed. Is that a leech there?
Hum, no. No, that’s not a leech. That’s plants.
Fortunately, the National Parasite Collection contains some twenty million specimens including plenty of leeches. So undaunted, we returned to dry land.
This is the US National Parasite Collection. It was founded in 1892. It contains mostly intestinal parasites, intestinal worms. It also includes some ticks, fleas and lice and also a few mites.
The sheer scale of the collection is quite overwhelming. There is row-upon-row of jars and bottles of pickled parasites. Many are still attached to their unfortunate hosts while others are so small they can only be seen under a microscope. Some of the parasites here can also infect humans.
Many of the specimens collection are from wild life, and so looking back at the specimens and knowing which animals have hosted these parasites in the past, we can make predictions of what may be infecting humans in the future.
In fact, sixty percent of all human diseases come from animals. Stephen Higgs is the President of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
A collection like this, it’s a tremendous resource of material.