Created by Oatmeal
Cute quiz--love the lipstick on the *female* tapeworm!--but horribly misinformed with regard to tapeworm anatomy, reproduction and habitat. Anyone who has studied tapeworms knows that these parasitic flatworms have a scolex with hooks and suckers (no mouths or eyes), are nearly always self-fertilizing hermaphrodites (no separate males or females), and live in the host's intestine (not the stomach), where they absorbs nutrients through their body surface (tegument). The tegument, by the way, protects the tapeworm from being digested by the host's intestine. The scolex is used only for attachment to the intestine, so that the worm itself does not get passed with the feces--only the mature proglottids with fertilized eggs get passed.
See for yourself:
It's too bad that this quiz and the creator of Tickles Tapeworm don't strive for accuracy before they put their work online because these could have been fun tools for educators to use to help students learn about tapeworms. As it stands, they spread misinformation and are useful only as a caution, which is my intent in this post.
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