Washington, D.C., Is Home to America's Largest Collection of Parasites

Anna Phillips is delighted because I’ve just found her favorite parasite, which she had misplaced a year ago.

We are walking through what, at first glance, could be mistaken for an oddly macabre Italian deli. The shelves around us are full of chaotically arrayed jars, which contain what look like formless bits of meat and coiled balls of pasta. But this is actually part of the largest collection of parasites in the country, and on closer inspection, a bundle of tagliatelle is actually a tapeworm. A tangle of capellini is actually a cluster of nematodes. “You can make a lot of food references,” says Phillips. “I try to avoid that because it ruins food for people.”

But there’s one jar that Phillips is especially keen to find, and after 20 minutes of sweeping the dimly lit shelves with the light of our phones, I spot it. It seems to contain nothing more than a lump of grisly, amorphous tissue, preserved in yellow liquid. But its label, in just a few terse and unconnected words, tells a rich story.

A century ago, the—a common and occasionally fatal parasite of horses. Those worms—and a part of the zebra they fed upon—are now in the jar that Phillips is gushing over. She is fascinated by the creatures, but she also loves the way their stories thread through history. She picks up another jar containing a fish tapeworm that was pulled from a dog in New York in 1922. “That was someone’s pet,” Phillips says. “There are so many stories here.”