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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
🕵️♂️🕵️♂️🕵️♂️🕵️♂️🕵️♂️🕵️♂️🕵️♂️🕵️♂️
Scientists wrote a paper about this insect in which they had to explicitly explain that there was no sex with gorillas
Scientists wrote a paper about this insect in which they had to explicitly explain that there was no sex with gorillas.
The pubic louse, also known as the crab louse, Latin name Pthirus pubis. Its closest relative, Pthirus gorillae, lives on gorillas, and the two species diverged roughly three million three hundred thousand years ago.
That means humans got this creature from gorillas.
When the study came out in 2007, the authors had to comment separately: no, it’s not what you think. Most likely, human ancestors slept in abandoned gorilla nests. Or they ate gorillas. The authors considered both options more plausible than the first.
It gets better. Humans are the only primate that has two species of lice at once. Chimpanzees have only head lice, gorillas only pubic lice. Humans assembled the full set.
A separate point is the genus name. In 1958 the genus was officially fixed as Pthirus, although this is a misspelling of the Greek word. The mistake was noticed, discussed, and left as is. Now it’s the norm.
And one more detail for those still reading: it can also live on eyelashes.
And now the most interesting part.
In 1954 in Britain it was found in 0,8 percent of patients, in 1964 already in 3,2. Then a decline began: from 1997 to 2003 year the prevalence fell from 0,41 to 0,17 percent.
In 2013 dermatologists at a British conference announced the reason. They named a TV show: the Sex and the City episode in 2000 that introduced Western audiences to Brazilian waxing. A clinic in Sydney said they had not seen a single case in women since 2008.
A species that survived the Ice Age, the out-of-Africa migration, the plague and two world wars was nearly finished off by one TV series.
But in 2020 dermatologists declared the obituaries premature and predicted a comeback, because the trend toward waxing is weakening.
The fate of an entire species was decided not by medicine or nature, but by a screenwriter.
Now about the real crab lice.
The insect gives an accurate description of a type of person, and that description is unpleasantly practical.
They don’t attack. They attach. There is no conflict with them, because conflict requires equality of parties.
They settle not where the resource is greatest, but where it’s awkward to speak about them out loud. A relative. A childhood friend. A partner you’ve been through so much with. The strength of such people is not in themselves but in your embarrassment.
They take a little at a time. Just enough for you to tolerate and not start the procedure. It’s not greed, it’s calculation: a big bite is noticeable, a small one isn’t.
They are transmitted through closeness, not hostility. Those you trust bring them to you, almost always with no ill intent.
And they are eliminated only completely. Half measures don’t count. Negotiating, reducing, limiting access, giving a last chance—all of that only prolongs the term.
So what works here is not struggle, but the same thing that decided the species’ fate in Britain. Not medicine and not force. A cleared environment.
Getting rid of the parasite doesn’t mean defeating it. It means removing the place where it’s comfortable.
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