“Learning about the secret world of parasites turned my life upside down, leading me along a path that I would never have imagined for myself when I was sitting in my seventh-grade classroom. But among the most surprising twists in the tale of my scientific life is this one: I never thought that slimy, squirmy, poop-flecked parasites would lead me to – of all things – love.”
-Chelsea Wood, Power to the Parasites!
Dr. Chelsea Wood studies the ecology of parasites, and is the Associate Director and Graduate Program Coordinator of the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington. Among her many accolades, she is both a Kavli Fellow at the US National Academy of Sciences and a Sloan Research Fellow at the Alfred P Sloan Foundation.
But to me, Chelsea is the awe-inspiring roommate I had in grad school when we were both visiting scholars at the University of California Santa Barbara. We were working on our PhDs at other institutions, and visited Santa Barbara so we could learn parasitology from Drs. Armand Kuris, Kevin Lafferty, and Ryan Hechinger. I know I was stressed out of my mind at the time, but I still look back fondly on the days when I could stare at parasites for hours, and then talk about them with Chelsea in our office by the sea.
Anyway – Chelsea has a long history with science communication, and was formerly a professional editor at Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, the member journal of the Ecological Society of America. She recently focused her science communication skills on a brand new project: a book about parasites for middle-grade readers! This wonderful book is called Power to the Parasites!, and I recently interviewed Chelsea about this new project:
Q: Power to the Parasites! is written for a middle-grade audience. What made you decide you wanted to reach this audience in particular? Did you always want to write kids’ books?
The book has a curious origin story! I love talking with people about parasites, but until a few years ago I thought only adults wanted to hear about them. Then I was invited to be a guest on an NPR podcast. Laura Godwin, of Godwin Books, heard the interview on the radio and was charmed; she thought my parasite stories would make for a great children’s book. I was skeptical at first, as learning about parasites necessitates hearing a lot about blood, guts, death, and poop. But it turns out that kids love that stuff! I’m so glad to have a new audience to blab about parasites with.
Q: You’re clearly enamored with parasites. Was it hard to narrow all the possible parasite stories you could tell down to only ~15 topics for the book? How did you pick?
So hard! There are hundreds of thousands of parasite species in the world, and probably just as many stories to tell. I had to do a lot of winnowing, and in that process I was mainly making sure that I had good representation: some arthropods, some worms, some viruses, some bacteria; parasites of people, pets, livestock, and wildlife; geographic diversity; representation of the parasitological topics that get my undergraduate students excited, like behavioral manipulation, parasitoids, and parasite conservation.
It broke my heart that I wasn’t able to squeeze in a chapter about Ribeiroia ondatrae, the trematode parasite that causes its frog hosts to grow extra legs, or about Gyrodactylus, the monogenean parasite that reproduces like a Russian nesting doll: a mother worm can be pregnant with a pregnant daughter, who is pregnant with her own pregnant daughter. Power to the Parasites is just an introduction. There are still many, many more weird and wild parasite stories to tell.
Q: When I talk to non-parasitologists about parasites, they often become visibly uncomfortable. I think it’s not my poor communication skills, but probably the fact that most people find parasites disgusting. What tactics do you use to overcome this common response, and get people fascinated in parasites?
There’s a really common pattern that I notice when I’m teaching my undergraduate Parasite Ecology course: a hump-shaped relationship between knowledge and disgust. When students enter the class, they usually know nothing or next to nothing about parasites, and so they might have vague negative feelings about parasites, but they don’t know enough to be disgusted – yet. As we move through the first few weeks of the course, I can look out into the classroom and see from their expressions how revolted my students are by what they are learning – they’ve learned just enough to be terrified. But as students begin to understand how risk is distributed in the world, as they learn to trust their own knowledge of parasites to keep themselves safe, their disgust ebbs away. The only way over that hump is to go over it – to press on.
To help my undergraduates along the way, I try to go through the process with them, tapping into what I felt when I was first learning about parasites – way back when you and I, Kelly, were sitting in our office by the sea. That’s also what I’ve tried to do in Power to the Parasites: commiserating with the reader over the feelings of disgust, but letting that give way to other feelings, including surprise, respect, and even awe. I’ve walked that path myself, and nothing makes me happier than to retrace my steps alongside a crew of folks – undergraduates or young readers – who are on it for the first time.
Q: The illustrations in the book are lovely. I particularly enjoy the expressive faces on the hosts. Have you worked with an illustrator before? What was it like collaborating with an illustrator for the book?
I had never worked with an illustrator before this project, so it was a totally new experience for me. But I was shown Dave Mottram’s artwork early in the production process and I knew immediately that he was the person for the job. He is really good at nailing biological details while still managing to imbue the characters he draws with personality. I knew we would need that to depict the parasites – they are weird and mostly unfamiliar creatures, but I wanted the artwork to inspire sympathy, empathy, and connection between the reader and the parasites presented. Dave’s illustrations do the trick.
Q: Who are your favorite authors and why?
I really admire David Quammen, who has the ability to take a massive, complex scientific literature and boil it all down into a thriller without losing the science in the story. I read The Chimp and the River in one sitting, having just waded through the scientific literature on the origin of HIV, and I was stopped short by how many nitty-gritty scientific details Quammen was able to include without losing momentum.
Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene cracked me open when I read it many years ago as an aspiring biologist. It was the first I’d learned of evolution by natural selection and even though I was very, very young, Dawkins’ lucid prose made the whole drama plain. I’m a biologist today because I read that book and because Dawkins took the trouble to write in a way that I could understand.
I’ve got to mention Carl Zimmer, who was the first person to provoke the public to think differently about parasitism – as “the most popular lifestyle on Earth”, and even as something worthy of respect. I give Parasite Rex to all of my undergraduates as their graduation present.
I gravitate toward books about magic hidden in the everyday, which is why I loved Rob Dunn’s Never Home Alone, where I learned that Mycobacteria (same genus as the species that cause tuberculosis and leprosy) live in my showerhead and that the flavor of every baker’s sourdough will differ slightly due to the contribution their unique skin microbes make to how the dough rises. That’s probably why I also read magical realism (David Mitchell) and historical fiction (Hilary Mantel) – to imagine what could be going on under the surface of familiar scenes. It’s probably also why I love parasites.
Q: Tell us about your writing process. How is the process of writing a book different from writing a scientific paper?
When I first started, I thought that writing a book of (let’s say) 10 chapters would require about the same amount of effort as writing 10 papers. But I was very, very wrong. A book isn’t just a bunch of chapters stapled together; a book needs to have narrative arc, tension, pacing, and themes that stretch across the chapters. Being able to wrangle all of those elements across tens of thousands of words is a big challenge.
Q: Did anything surprise you about the book writing or publishing process?
I never expected it to be so much fun! I knew writing books would be interesting and that it would feel rewarding to teach readers about the parasitic creatures I love, but I literally need to be dragged away from my book projects at the end of a writing day. That, I did not anticipate.
Q: Do you have any tips for the aspiring book-writers in our community?
I didn’t realize until I started writing books that I had really missed having a creative outlet. I enjoy writing scientific papers, but the form for a paper is very rigid, whereas books can take any shape. It has been such a pleasure getting to tap into my previously dormant creative instincts, so I encourage aspiring book-writers to go for it, particularly scientists who don’t otherwise get an opportunity for creativity.
One thing I’ve learned is that the world of non-fiction is always looking for authoritative voices, making folks with scientific training and credentials very sought-after. In some ways, it’s easier for us to break into publishing than it is for trained writers, because we come with a set of credentials in our field – we have the standing to write about topics in our domain of expertise.
If you’re thinking of writing a book, I’d suggest first reading Thinking Like Your Editor and The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published. These resources really helped me hone my project. And your next step, after reading those books, should be to get an agent. Mine is not only awesome at the business side of publishing, but she works extensively with me during the conceptualization stage of new projects, and in the process she’s taught me so much about writing non-fiction. She’s better than all of the science communication classes and workshops I’ve ever taken put together.
One last piece of advice. In On Writing, Stephen King tells us,
“Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.”
King is talking about fiction here, but I think his advice is even more important for non-fiction writers. You’ve got to approach your book with an open mind, let it tell you what it wants to be about. Don’t try to squeeze it into the shape you envisioned at the outset. That’s how Power to the Parasites wound up being so personal – that’s the shape the story wanted to take. And at times during the research for my next book project, I’ve felt the excitement of excavating a fossil piece by piece, with one bone leading me along to the next…
Q: Is another book in the works? If so, can you tell us what it’ll be about?
Yes! I’m currently under contract with Basic Books (Hachette) to write a popular science book for adults. The provisional title is Netherworld: The Past, Present, and Future of Parasitism on Planet Earth, and it aims to answer the question: is the world wormier than it used to be? After the drumbeat of recent infectious disease emergencies, including avian flu, swine flu, MERS, Chikungunya, Zika, Lassa, Lyme, Hendra, Nipah, and COVID-19, many readers might have the sense that the parasites are winning. In Netherworld, the reader will discover that there is in fact a parasite biodiversity crisis afoot. Netherworld traces the trajectory of Earth’s parasites, finds that human meddling in ecosystems is pushing many parasite species to the brink of extinction and beyond, and explores what a less wormy world will mean for human lives and livelihoods. You can expect to see it in bookstores in 2026.
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