People hate us by default. Its true that we can cause problems for our hosts, but all relationships have problems. Its not a one sided story, we’re not the bad guys. We don’t look out for just ourselves. Although at times we can be known as controlling, we do it for the greater good. We’re left out a lot. Initially, scientists put little value on our contribution to ecosystems by excluding us from food webs. How rude. Scientists have started to put the moves on us. They had a strong interest in our past relationships.
The first group of scientists that studied one of our relationships were able to see past our manipulating behaviour and instead saw the bigger picture. We were caught red handed using another species, I mean these crickets were whipped, but the scientists framed our transgressions as an ultimately philanthropic goal of saving endangered trout. Let us explain our troubled relationship with the crickets. Don’t get us wrong, they were great, but we had different goals in life. We parted ways in an unfortunate manner. We felt a little trapped and needed to get into open water, and the crickets were happy to oblige. Sadly this meant that they were exchanging our freedom with death at the mouth of a trout.
The next relationship was somewhat more complicated. People always pin us as the bad guys but this time we got the short end of the stick. It all started off well, we had a good thing going with the horn snail. Things were great until a newcomer arrived. This newcomer’s similarity to our current beau was appealing, everybody loved him, he fit in so well. We were enamored with this new potential suitor, the mud snail, but while he was great for everybody else, it turned out that he couldn’t meet our needs. Our current snail and the newcomer decided that the estuary wasn’t big enough for the both of them. So the competition began. And unfortunately for us, the newcomer out competed our beau to lower abundances, in some cases even drove them out of the estuary. Once the horn snails were gone, we were left with few to no providers which compromised our life in general. So while the other plants and animals were not too sad to see our beau leave the food web and it barely affected their everyday life, if we were included the food web diversity decreased. This relationship taught the scientists that we don’t always come out on top, we’re not invincible. We can be strongly affected by the disappearance of our beloved horn snails.
Because our previous relationships provided such insight into food web relations, scientists then wanted to know if we could be used to predict other ecological relationships. But this is for us to know and for them to find out. We don’t give it up on the first date. They need to court us first. Our relationship with fish is complicated. They are not monogamous creatures. The big time fish are the best hosts accommodating many of us at a time. Sadly, they are being removed by fishing nets around the world. Not only are we losing our best hosts, but also our fellow comrades. These large fish are players and they like to keep secrets, so we don’t know how many of us are with them at a time. Our numbers and diversity are greatly decreasing because of this unfortunate practice. Knowing the numbers of our loss between parasite abundance and fishing pressure would not only be beneficial to us, but to scientists as well.
With this new knowledge provided, we hope your views on us change. Yes, we often have very complicated relationships where we sometimes jump off ship and leave our host behind. But we also save lives. When we’re are contained, we just need to break free despite the costs. Although we have a dismissive tendency, we also get attached thus we can become vulnerable. When we get attached, we rely solely on our one host so when they are outcompeted by new kid on the block, we’re left cold and hungry. Our deep bond with our host is so strong that we simply can’t live without them. Scientists want to study the patterns of our attachments to better understand our ties to community structures. So hopefully one day, we’ll make into the prestigious world wide food web.
