To balance the weight of the barrels sailors dumped out loads of gravel and soil. They exchanged English tutor for Virginia tobacco when they arrived in the New World . Stowed away in this there was a creature that have been wiped out in North America by the last ice age , the common earthworm. It is almost a certainty that in the tons and tons of soil brought over as a part of the tobacco trade, earthworms we're on an unexpected stowaway period upon arriving in the New World, they quickly began to reproduce and transform the landscape. Earthworms created networks of tunnels in the soil that allowed air and water to circulate through. They also clear leaf foliage from the grounds of densely-wooded forests thus removing much of the nutritional value from the soil. This detrimental effect to the soil resulted in fewer shrubs and trees seedlings which in effect resulted to a more open and dry environment. These earthworms also competed with insects for food, working to drive down the numbers of native species , and by proxy the birds lizards and mammals that prey on them and who also happened to pray on …show more content…
Of these 200, four of them are capable of infecting humans, and two in particular are responsible for over 95% of malaria cases. Plasmodium Vivax and Plasmodium Falciparum are the two most common forms of the infectious disease. This organism has a peculiar life cycle, because half of it is spent in the hosts bloodstream. Once they have lived within the hosts body for some time, they then attach and burrow into the red blood cells of their host and multiply rapidly. They use coordinated cell signaling that causes those cells to burst in unison, at which point the host become symptomatic. In the time the immune system is fighting back the infection, some of the parasites invade more blood cells, while others float around the bloodstream hoping to be picked up a hungry mosquito. Plasmodium falciparum has the potential to cause blood clots, organ failure, and death in 10% of cases, whereas Plasmodium vivax is almost equally debilitating but decidedly less-deadly. The real threat from Plasmodium is its ability to stay dormant in the host for months at a time and then reemerge at full strength. Its ability to severely compromise the immune system is one of the most dangerous effects of the antigen. These outbursts occur almost every three days, giving malaria it's old name of Tertian Fever, based around the Roman convention of counting days. Once the parasite has been