Let me preface this question by stating that I am not an anti-semite. This question might touch a nerve because it has to do with the holocaust. My very own Grandad survived Auschwitz. My Great-grandma and six of my great aunts and uncles (from that family, more from the other side) were gassed. I would ask my Gramps the question but he might be offended.
Why didn’t the prisoners eat lice? If any thing was in abundance in the camps it was lice. It would probably be tedious, but desparate times call for desparate measures.
Lice are really small – about the size of pinhead. I doubt that even a heavy infestation would have provided much protein. And perhaps the act of harvesting them would have damaged them to the point that there was not much recoverable protein. (This is a nice way of speculating that scraping them off with fingernails might have smeared them to uselessness.)
- Do you have any cites to back up your claim that they didn’t eat lice?
- I’d guess lice are edible but I’m not sure.
- Lice are pretty small and probably not all that abundant even in the worst of circumstances - compared to, say, an Australian aborigine eating from a hill full of termites all by himself - I wonder if catching and eating them would have made much difference.
Well, a simple search on “holocaust survivor autobiography” uncovers a fair number of hits some of which, I’m sure, can be found at the OP’s local library. May as well read the account of a direct witness rather than rely on us to perform tertiary research.
I believe the real question here is, do fried lice give you gas?
CMC +fnord!
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All the material lice contain originally came from their host’s body. Since they used energy to convert that into their own bodies, they necessarily contain less energy than they drained from their host.
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It takes energy to catch lice, and then to convert them into your own body. This is a further drain on the available energy.
Eating your own parasites is necessarily thus a losing proposition in terms of energy over the long term. But basically it’s just too much trouble to catch them no matter how desperate your situation is.
It takes energy to catch or harvest anything.
Who says you have to eat only your own parasites? You could eat your own plus those of others, which would make it economical.
Heck, it might be economical just to catch them and remove them, let alone eat them, as you might expend less energy removing them than the parasites themselves remove from you. Many social animals groom themselves to remove, and even eat, each other’s parasites. If this was too much trouble, the behaviour would have evolved away aeons ago.
I’ll echo the opinion expressed by others here that lice are too small to harvest. However, I’m sure some starving prisoners may have eaten other insects. For example, Empire of the Sun (the film, and probably the original semi-autobiographical book as well) depicts POWs eating weevils.
Of course, but larger animals provide an enormously better cost-benefit ratio than lice.
Eating parasites of others would be the only way it could possibly be energy-positive, but still lice are probably too small to make it energetically economical.
Assuming that the population of lice on your body is mainly derived from eggs that were laid on it, rather than individuals that migrated from another person, there is no way this is energy positive. As I said, the lice have removed material from your body and used up energy in converting it to their own bodies. This energy is lost from you.
Of course, removing the lice prevents future energy losses, but overall there is an energy loss.
The main benefit is almost certainly removing the parasites to prevent future losses, not an energy gain by consuming them. On average, there is still an energy drain for individuals.
Eating your own parasites of course cannot be energy positive, but it may be less energy-negative than doing nothing - if you don’t eat them, they will still be feeding on you (and of course in greater numbers if unchecked by harvesting).
I doubt there’s enough of a meal there to make it a worthwhile idea, but it would be wrong to definitively say that feeding on your own parasites must be worse than doing nothing at all.
I didn’t mean to indicate that it was worse than doing nothing. It’s possible it could slow starvation to some degree (depending on how much energy it takes to catch and digest the parasites). However, over the long run you would starve.
Along with all that has been mentioned, lice can act as intermediate hosts for other parasitic infections/infestations.