Parasites: Friend or Menace?

Sometimes my Google Reader juxtaposes the weirdest articles. Last month I giggled incessantly at the grouping of “Just so you don’t get the wrong impression of Louisiana…” and “Louisiana: Epically Doomed.”

Now I have two back-to-back articles by Wired Science that I find somewhat ironic in their placement next to each other.

Power to the Parasites

The findings, published today in Nature, can’t be directly extrapolated to other ecosystems — but they’re greater by a full order of magnitude than previous parasitic biomass estimates, suggesting that parasites might be widely underappreciated.

Everyone go hug a parasite!  (But not too close now.)

Parasites May Fuel AIDS Epidemic

RUN!  RUN!  Parasites with AIDS!