Tapeworms are NOT Beautiful
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Every purchase brings you closer to a new GM vehicle. Hello.
Welcome to "Weird, Gross, and Beautiful", a casual discussion about animals that I think are weird, gross, beautiful or all three. And today we are talking about the tapeworm. Why are we talking about tapeworms? I don't know. Cause one of y'all suggested it. All right. Tapeworms?
Pretty gross. Yeah. They live in your butt. They live inside an intestinal tract. And they can be so long. They can be up to 20 feet long, and live for years. My producer is like, gagging is in the corner. Ah, man. There's just so much to cover. It can live inside the intestinal tract of a dog, of a fish, of a cow, of a pig, and us. Yeah, man.
So even though what the tapeworm is doing is like stealing all these nutrients from the host, it actually doesn't have its own digestive system. It's just sort of absorbing it through its weird, creepy tapeworm skin. So the head of the tapeworm is called the scolex. And it's got little suckers and hooks, and it'll use that to attach itself to the inner wall of the intestine. Because otherwise, the animal would be able to just-- to just poop it out. It would push it out, so it hooks on so that it can stay living and thriving inside of you. And the rest of it is made up of these little segments called proglottids.
And some of them are male, and some of them are female. And a female proglottid can have millions of eggs. They're basically just little egg sacks. Each individual proglottid has muscle control. And that means that they can crawl by themselves. They break off. The female proglottids break off of the tapeworm, and it can crawl out your butt, but most of the time it just gets pooped out with everything else. And then it crawls away from the poop so that it's got better chances of being eaten by something else. And then it hatches inside of the intestine of whatever ate it, and then the lovely circle of life begins all over again. You know what the worst part about this [BLEEP] thing is?
Is that most of the time a tapeworm infection is relatively symptom-free. Like, you might have some diarrhea or like, abdominal discomfort, but nothing really like, red flaggy. Until you look down in your poop and you've got like a [BLEEP] worm hanging out your [BLEEP]. Ah.
Ah.
[BLEEP] disgusting. Thanks so much for watching "Weird, Gross, and Beautiful".
My name is Catie Wayne. And if you would like to, you can follow me on Twitter @catiewayne and suggest an animal for me to cover. This week's animal monster thing was suggested by Ryan. Thanks, buddy. Mwah.
If you much feel like taking a little trip down memory lane, you can watch this hella old "Weird, Gross, and Beautiful" about leeches.
The leech is sectioned into 32 different parts, and each part has its own brain. That was a fun time. It's OK. We need more gross animals on this show. I get too carried away with all the cute ones. Please remember to like and share this video if you didn't vomit all over your keyboard. I love you all, and I'll see you next time. Bye. Mwah.
This episode of "A News" was brought to you by the BuyPower Card from Capital One. Every purchase brings you closer to a new GM vehicle.