Whale Worm Horror Leaves Sushi Lovers Reeling

There’s a thing known as a Whale Worm. Seafood is good for you, right? After all, millions of people around the world survive on it, and others see it as a luxury vacation meal. But recently, a post trended on social media that turned the collective stomach of the internet. Read on to find out more about a rather oddly fascinating story.

An Interesting Sub

There’s a subreddit that goes by the name of r/intertsing, but recently a post went from mildly interesting to the thing that nightmares are made of pretty darn fast. At first glance, the OP who shared a short video of sushi, fit the sub’s name because it involved food.

Initially, folks who saw it observed a video of a gorgeous, glistening piece of fresh raw fish. But as the camera zoomed in, some folks felt a bit ill. 

There, wriggling with enthusiasm out of the flesh, was a translucent, thread-like noodle. Those folks who recently queued up at the sushi counter quickly started revising their opinions about dietary choices.

Educational Content

The viral post racked up tens of thousands of upvotes. That’s despite many folks in the sub wishing they could unsee what they just witnessed. Naturally, the comments section instantly brought a mix of horror and dark comedy.

But in public spaces, people from all walks of life meet and some of them really know their stuff. So, kudos to the parasitologists and veteran sushi chefs. Some of them dropped facts about seafood that seemed a bit unsettling.

Meanwhile, others dropped some educational things about the acid-defying “Whale Worm.”

Interestingly or regrettably, depending on your mindset, tons of people now know more than they really need to about a nematode larva known as Anisakis. It’s not the fault of that little threadlike worm that it ended up in a slab of sushi.

All it really wanted in its dull little life was to get eaten by a sea creature, which could be eaten by a fish that might end up in the gut of a whale or dolphin.

There, lies peak Anisakis existence, per Serena Cavallero et al in a white paper on the National Library of Medicine.

Humans And Anisakis Clash 

As the brilliant minds in the sub explained, when a human gets in the way and eats it raw, the little creature finds itself in totally the wrong environment. Inside the stomach acid pool it encounters, it doesn’t go “quietly” into the night. And, that’s unfortunate for the sushi diner.

Dropped into a pool of stomach acid, the parasite does what any living thing would do. It tries to escape.  So, it burrows away through the stomach lining of the seafood lover who might soon develop an allergy to all things from the sea.

From the video, everyone could see that the little Whale Worm thing didn’t look strong enough to burrow all the way out of a human. And that’s the rub. It ends up stuck inside, dies and that kickstarts an immune response. In panic mode, all without conscious thought, cells wall off the intruder, forming a hardened, ball-like mass.

That mass has a name: eosinophilic granuloma. Yes, someone studied it and named it. God bless all marine biologists. Anyway, while that’s going on, anisakiasis delivers some formidable symptoms for seafood lovers. They include intestinal agony, violent vomiting, and often, extremely bad allergic reactions.

Should You Stop Eating Seafood?

Of course, the imagination translates that into terrible feelings. One contributor wrote, “Vomiting out a hardened mucus ball containing the corpse of an angry worm sounds horrendous.”

Okay, your aversion to the attraction of the sushi counter might be taking place right now. But, it might be okay to queue up for spicy tuna rolls. That’s because the video represents exactly what health and safety regulations helped to prevent in many countries. 

There’s the comforting thought that modern regulations require flash freezing at extremely low temperatures which converts the unwanted wormy things into extra protein.  

Other Methods

Clearly, that video of the parasitic worm represents a short cut. Someone, somewhere bypassed the freezer.  But way before flash freezing became thing, master sushi chefs learned to slice the fish very thinly. Not so it looks pretty on the plate, but in an effort to slice the tiny creatures in half.

That, of course, makes life pretty miserable for the Whale Worm. But, it stops the complications of a visit to the E.R. Be grateful for the sushi plate squid that looks well cross-hatched and sliced.

Viewers React

Some genuinely horrified folks had their say, apart from those who know about these things. u/Spiritual_Priority79 wrote, “Vomiting out a hardened mucus ball containing the corpse of an angry worm sounds horrendous, and I am frighteningly close to googling what it looks like. EDIT: I don’t know if I’m strong enough Mr. LeBeouf.”

Here are a few more responses from the discussion:

• I had to read this. I didn’t want to read this. I tried not to read this. But I couldn’t stop. Nightmare.
• What a terrible day to be literate. “A severe eosinophilic granulomatous response may also occur”… uhm excuse me what??
• We’ve been educated through trauma I guess.
• Now I need to scrape it from my memory.

While it sounds hilarious, certainly, the post revealed just how interesting life on Planet Earth can be. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments below, and remember to come back here often for all your fascinating facts, the mysterious unexplained, and crimes against culinary art.