Seeing the rhizocephalan barnacles, it is possible to lose your appetite. This insidious creature will not leave indifferent even people who are accustomed to such things, for example, parasitologists. The thought of him makes you shudder. This terrible crustacean leaves behind any monsters and villains from video games and films, moreover, it exists in the real world. To understand what fear this monster can bring, you need to be in the shoes of one of its unfortunate victims. For example, you can imagine a male crab.
He calmly crawls along the shore, warming his shell under the gentle sun. Cool water washes the gills of the crab, he managed to bypass all the dangers of the growing up period, turning into a rather large individual. But today the crab has a strange feeling. Something began to grow inside him - strange roots began to penetrate into the brain, intestines and flesh. The crab fell into the "clutches" of a root-headed crab, ready to enslave him.
The new tormentor is perhaps the strangest group of animals known to science. The adult female has a deformed and curved body, which does not at all look like representatives of crustaceans living in coastal rocks - there is no hard shell, limbs and eyes have turned into tangled ropes and pale yellow roots, which slowly and inevitably grow into living tissues.
As a larva, it looked like an ordinary barnacle several millimeters long, though with one big difference - the head, which ends in a needle sticking out from under the shell. It plunges into the crab's body like a syringe, injecting its own cells under the skin. Now it will grow and spread in the captured organism, like a cancerous tumor. The fibrous tentacles will suck the life energy of the unfortunate crab, stopping its growth and development.
But the worst is yet to come - soon the belly of the crab will literally explode: in place of its genitals, gonads with swollen ovaries will appear, attracting males of root-headed cancer. New larvae will begin to grow inside the female's body, ready for the next capture.
In the process of parasitizing, the roots invade the crab's brain, releasing chemicals that control the mind. He begins to believe that the bulges on his belly are his own brood. Soon the next generation of invaders is born, and the crab is now just a shell for root-headed crayfish.