The Prologue Part 2

After his trip to Tambura, Zimmer traveled to the jungles of Costa Rica with many other biologists, but one man stuck out in particular, a Mr. Daniel Brooks. The man really didn't look like a biologist, sporting aviator glasses and a jogging suit and rocking a large drooping mustache. As the biologists walked in the jungle, the man collected and bagged frogs and toads of many kinds and carried them in his pocket. Brooks took the frogs back to his lab, which consisted of a shed with chicken wire walls, to see what he had specifically found. He took a frog that he had collected out of a bag, struck it on the edge of his lab table, and got ready to dissect it. There were a multitude of parasites in the frog, from filarial worms to flukes, coming from every orifice of its body, like the lungs and even the ear canals. Brooks had seen a lot of parasite over the years in all kinds of places, from iguanas with tapeworms to nematodes in a deer's Achilles tendon. Brooks estimates that he had seen about 11,000 parasites and had identified 300 of them. Every organism has at least one parasite living along side it, whether they notice it or not. Some parasites even have their own parasites! And even those parasites may have parasites too! Scientist may not know a lot about parasites, but they do know that parasites make up the majority of species on earth. Parasites may even out number the number of species on Earth 4 to 1. It's basically a parasites world and we're just living in it. Zimmer made the statement "...the study of life is, for the most part, parasitology..." and now I can see why.