Hidden Creatures by Dino Martins review – the revolting world of parasites

From maggots to viruses, this gross-out compendium also manages to celebrate the awe and inventiveness of nature When Craig Venter, one of the mappers of the human genome, set out on a sailboat cruise to map DNA in seawater all across the globe, he found that a teaspoon of seawater contained on average 50m viruses. While this doesn’t sound particularly reassuring, the bad news is mitigated by the fact that most of these are phages that infect marine bacteria and have no interest in us. Viruse...

By Luca Turin