One of those “looking for love in all the wrong places” things. Really, though, it is a caption in a diagram titled “The Life Cycle of the Fluke” that I just looked up in preparation for this week’s column, which will be devoted to science.

I remember this diagram, or one very much like it, from a junior high school science class. The diagram includes line drawings of a snail, some blades of grass, a sheep and a fluke egg with big swooshy black arrows in between, all in a circle representing the life cycle.

Presumably, the fluke is able to find the snail of his dreams, with whom he has some sort of brief relationship which is not explained. After this interlude the young fluke takes leave of his snail–probably with nary a backwards glance, although we are not told this either– and clambers onto some grass, where he somehow manages to turn into a cyst. A grazing sheep or cow eventually eats the grass along with the cyst, enabling the liver fluke to proceed at last to the liver, from whence comes his name.

To me, the fluke life cycle always seemed improbable and overly complicated.

Almost as improbable and complicated as the human menstrual cycle, which we girls also learned about that year in junior-high science class.

Perhaps “learned about” is too strong a term, since the subject was cloaked in mystery. We were shown a film distributed by a sanitary napkin company in which scientific terms like “that special time” were bandied about and we were told what to buy.

Ah, but we’re getting away from the liver fluke.

The liver fluke is just one of several disgusting parasites to which human beings may fall prey. Tapeworm is another.

This segmented flatworm may pass right through an infected human who never knows the difference, or may latch on inside the intestines (tapeworms have hooks and six sets of teeth) and reside there for 30 years, reaching a length of 50 feet. Or maybe it’s 50 years and a length of 30 feet. But either way.

Many people today suffer from feelings of fatigue, insomnia, upset stomach and weakness. They lack get-up-and-go. Wouldn’t it be great if they could just take anti-tapeworm pills, thereby immediately expelling enough 50-foot tapeworms to reach to the moon if stretched end to end? Nothing complicated or mysterious, just boom! Problem solved. Cured.

Our second science topic this week is monkeys and mirrors, less disgusting but possibly more disturbing.

The mirror self-recognition test, or mark test, was published by psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. in 1970 as a method for determining whether a non-human animal can recognize Its reflection. In order to ascertain an animal’s potential for self-awareness, scientists daub paint on its face and then see how it reacts to its reflection in a mirror. They theorize that mirror self-recognition indicates self-awareness and high intelligence.

Some scientists say that 46 percent of chimpanzees and most orangutans can recognize themselves in mirrors, but that gorillas and rhesus monkeys cannot.

Rival scientists are saying that gorillas and rhesus monkeys can and do recognize themselves in mirrors all the time, and deny that it proves anything anyway.

“Maybe gorillas aren’t liking what they see,” one suggested.

Subsequent studies have shown that Asian elephants, bottlenose dolphins, Orca whales, Eurasian magpies and “some ants” can recognize their reflections. I would say that all of the girls in my junior-high class exhibited self-awareness and high intelligence, as demonstrated by the ability to apply makeup while gazing into a mirror.

Neng Gong, director of the Institute of neuroscience at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, hypothesized that the monkey brain “needs appropriate training” to master mirror recognition. Neng’s training involved repeatedly burning (“mildly irritating”) the faces of seven captive rhesus monkeys with a laser beam in front of a mirror. Some of the monkeys eventually figured it out. Other scientists have suggested that Neng’s methods were too coercive to prove natural ability.

“I bet Kim Kardashian can recognize herself in the mirror,” said a laboratory assistant identified only as Rita, “and she’s not so darn intelligent and self aware.”

“Hold on, now, Rita,” a scientist jocularly interjected, “you don’t know if Kim Kardashian is self aware or not.”

“Well, pardon me if I don’t see the point in making these orangutans into a bunch of narcissists,” Rita said.

Have a good week.

(Martha Allen lives in Keene Valley. She has been writing for the Lake Placid News for more than 20 years.)