Unwelcomed guests

A popular attraction at a Thai zoo has gotten a fan in trouble.

The man visited the adorable endangered baby pygmy hippo named Moo Deng at the Khao Kheow Open Zoo, about a two-hour drive from the capital, Bangkok, last month. He broke into the enclosure of Moo Deng and recorded the animal with a tablet.

The intrusion was caught on camera, prompting the zoo’s management to file charges against the trespasser.

Zoo director Narongwit Chodchoy told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that a state prosecutor had informed him that the man was found guilty by a local court after his confession and fined 10,000 baht.

“We learned from this lesson and will not allow it to happen again — not to Moo Deng and not to other animals in the zoo,” Chodchoy told AFP.

Meanwhile, another intruder went unnoticed for weeks after straying into an unlikely place.

A 58-year-old Greek woman unknowingly hosted the unwelcomed guests while working next to a field of grazing sheep last September. Had she not sneezed on 15 October, she would not have expelled one of the parasites growing inside her sinus and causing her severe coughing.

On seeing the worm or larva that came out of her nose, she immediately went to an EENT doctor, who surgically removed 10 larvae and a pupa — a teenage insect between the larval and adult stages — from the big sinuses on the side of her nose, New York Post (NYP) reported.

The woman fully recovered from the bug infection, and the worm was identified through DNA testing as sheep bot flies (Oestrus ovis), a parasite with a well-documented history of taking up residence in the nasal passages of sheep and goats, according to NYP.

The flies that swarmed around the woman’s face while in the field in September apparently laid eggs that she inhaled, and it grew in her sinuses.