Nematodes
This is a story for you to read while eating lunch.
So as you all know I went fishing this weekend.
What you don't know is that in the process of catching fish I saw one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen.
I was catching small bream (sunfish) to use as bait to catch catfish when I noticed that the first bream I caught had eyes bulging way out of its head. I chalked it up to just being a sick fish. So I then caught ten more only to find that all of them had the same thing. And around their bulging eyes I could see what looked like inflamed blood vessels. The weird thing was that the "vessels" were moving.
I think "what the hell is going on here?" and proceed to take one of the fish and cleanly pop out its eyeball (after removing the head first of course). Underneath the eyeball I found the most horrific thing I've ever seen. Each fish had within its eye cavity (behind the eye - not in it) hundreds of small red roundworms. The eye socket was FULL of them all squirming around.
Needless to say I didn't eat any of the fish. So when I got home I popped on the web, found the organization in charge of the pond and sent them a little letter. I just got off the phone a few minutes ago with the guy in charge. It turns out they know about the parasites. They are caused by the hundreds of geese shitting in the pond too much. Fortunately they are completely and totally harmless.
The guy actually called to thank me for sending the email to a higher up person in the bureaucracy. He said that I scared the shit out of all the administrators with the thought of their pond infecting hundreds of people with red worms in their eyes. The guy in charge has been trying to get something done about the infestation for two summers now and my email sparked the administration to pay attention to him. Pretty funny if you ask me.
Apparently Charlotte, NC had a similar problem, so they used a huge net to catch all the geese and haul them to Louisiana and released them. Unfortunately Carrboro can't afford to do that. Plus all the hippie activists in Carrboro won't let them get rid of any of the geese. But they are working on other options to fix the problem such as an oxygenating water fountain that will reduce the bacterial load (which the wormies feed on).
That's my story for the day.