The fight to save pubic lice from extinction: 'They're being deforested' - iNews
According to a scientific paper published in 2006 by two STI doctors in Leeds, pubic lice are on the road to extinction because so many people are having Brazilian waxes. As a result, the lice don't have a natural habitat to exist in anymore. They're being deforested.
This discovery, made by Dr Janet Wilson and Dr Nicola Armstrong at the department of genitourinary medicine at Leeds General Infirmary, came about after the pair combed through medical data from a period spanning seven years and noticed that there had been a decline in cases of patients reporting lice.
Not only did they identify this trend for missing lice, but they also believed they had tracked down the culprits: seven sisters called Janea, Judseia, Jussara, Juracy, Jocely, Joyce and Jonice. The J sisters, as they're known, unwittingly started this terminal global decline in louse populations when they opened up a beauty salon in New York and introduced the Brazilian wax.
The first American recipient of the waxing was a 28-year-old woman called Sari Markowitz, who later told journalist David Friend about her experience. Markowitz was in for some beauty treatment, when one of the sisters, Janea, pitched the concept of a "Brazilian" to her. Markowitz was intrigued and decided to give it a go. However, as the J Sisters didn't have a room specifically for waxing, it ended up being done on an office desk with everything pushed off.
The next day Markowitz told her friends at lunch about her new "hairdo". One of those friends happened to be an editor at the magazine Elle, which then ran a story on the salon and the waxing, which is precisely when the hapless louse's fate was sealed.
You would imagine that when Armstrong and Wilson's paper – Did the "Brazilian" kill the pubic louse? – was published, it would have sent shockwaves through the world as we became aware of yet another endangered species. Surely the World Wide Fund for Nature would have promoted its plight, and placard-holding protesters would be standing outside beauty salons around the world chanting for the poor tiny creature's rights.
But no. Nothing happened. The paper was viewed more as a humorous piece than as proper science, and even the paper's authors considered it to be merely an interesting speculative question rather than fact. Articles still appear rebutting the claim, insisting that "No, the pubic lice isn't endangered," explaining that the decline in the number of patients reporting the sexually transmitted infection is more the result of over-the-counter shampoos being made available in pharmacies and so we don't know how many cases there are any more.
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Regardless, life on Earth is the only life we know of in this universe so far; it's precious. It's simply unacceptable that we're shampooing a species into extinction. Lice are important, and they can tell us a huge amount about our past. They've unknowingly acted as a mini Boswell to our Samuel Johnson.
For starters, according to Mark Stoneking at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, it's thanks to lice that we now believe we know when humans started wearing clothes. By using DNA sequencing, it has been worked out that around 170,000 years ago head lice on humans started diverging into becoming body lice. This was a seminal moment in the history of humans, as clothing meant we were able to successfully migrate out of Africa and start populating the world. Thank you, lice! What other secrets of our past might they help us to uncover?
Fortunately not everyone turned up their nose in disbelief when the Armstrong/Wilson paper was released. Spotting the news over in Holland was the chief curator of the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, Kees Moeliker. Moeliker often appears on TV hosting his own wildlife shows, and is the author of multiple books, including one titled The Butt Crack of the Tick. He's also known for a seminal scientific paper that recorded the first ever case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.
As soon as Kees learned about the Brazilian v lice paper, he put a plea: if you have pubic lice, please get in contact, we need your donation. This simple message attracted considerable media attention, giving pubic lice international column inches and inadvertently turning Moeliker into the world's first pubic louse hunter.
His aim isn't to actively keep them from extinction, I should add – he just doesn't want them to go the way of the dodo, an animal of which we no longer have any complete examples. Kees simply wants to build up a collection that he can keep in a jar for future researchers to study.
Every so often, a decade-plus after he launched the appeal at his museum, he still gladly accepts donations. He told me proudly that couples quite often drive up to Rotterdam and hand him a bag containing trimmed pubic hair with examples of the deceased critters in them.
While this is a noble task, and one that future scientists of the world will no doubt be grateful for, it still doesn't help the lice themselves from disappearing into extinction. I wondered whether I should catch a few of their number and offer them shelter? Surely an itch is worth the trouble. If their plight got bad enough, I could probably be granted national park status as the last refuge for a dying species.
It turns out someone else has had this idea too, along with a much better way of doing it. Her name is Frida Klingberg, an artist based in Gothenburg, Sweden, and she planned to run a nature reserve for them. Klingberg managed to find a group of volunteers who all signed up to the project, which would see them each harbouring the lice on their bodies for a period of two to three weeks at a time, before picking out some and giving them to the next volunteer via a jar, for them to be infected with the species for the same period, then repeat.
The only snag in Klingberg's plan was that she couldn't find any pubic lice with which to kick off the project. "I searched for a few years, mostly through the media," she told me. "I never found any native specimens in Sweden to start the reserve, which also says something about the situation!"
And just like me, she can't understand the underwhelming lack of attention that the problem attracts. Why does no nature organisation fight for the preservation of this obviously threatened species?
Fortunately, there's one place that does respect the cry for help from the pubic louse: an organisation that deals specifically with animals that have been ignored by mainstream organisations. Founded in 2012, the Ugly Animal Preservation Society is the brainchild of biologist Simon Watt. His idea is that cuddly animals like the panda have been getting all the attention for far too long now, and that we should start focusing on the more aesthetically challenged type of creature.
Admittedly, the Ugly Animal Preservation Society exists largely as a comedy night, but it has a serious conservation twist.
"The concept of what makes a thing endangered is tricky and requires agreement. For example, it's not rarity. There's a whole ton of stuff which is rare. Rare is the common state of most of life because it only exists in its own narrow confines. And if those narrow confines happen to be secure, then it is not endangered," Says Watt.
Watt believes the pubic louse is a fantastic example of an endangered species, because it can spark a conversation about parasites. There are only a few parasites on the endangered species list, but every endangered species will have its own unique parasites, which will disappear if that species disappears. Life, says Watt, is an ecosystem. You knock one thing away, and the chain reaction can be great. It's our job to make sure we look out for all life, even the itchy ones.
If you – reading this now – do have pubic lice, congratulations! You're harbouring an endangered species. You're a hero. Don't burn them off in the shower with chemicals. Get in touch with Frida Klingberg and help her begin a reserve, or contact the Natural History Museum Rotterdam – they need your donation.
The Theory of Everything Else: A Voyage into the World of the Weird by Dan Schreiber (Mudlark, £16.99) is out now
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