When Abby Beckley started work on a salmon fishing boat in Alaska, worms were not high on her list of concerns. But it wasn't long before the 26-year-old woman became aware of something irritating her left eye. After several days, she finally went digging with her fingers… and plucked out a tiny worm. "I was just pulling them out, so I knew there were a lot," Beckley recently told National Geographic. Mystified, Beckley's doctors sent a sample of the errant worms to the state health department, who forwarded it to Richard Bradbury, a parasitologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Parasitic Diseases Reference Laboratory, which identifies thousands of parasites every year that are too rare for doctors to recognize.