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Sep 7, 2023 · Infected shrimp typically become sluggish and spend more time exposed in the open marsh, easy pickings for hungry birds.
- Overview
- Toxoplasma gondii
- Parasitic Hairworm
- Leucochloridium paradoxum
- Zombie Ant
- Tongue Biters
Mind-controlling parasites are just one frightening example.
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With Halloween coming up, we thought we’d take a look at nature’s real-life zombies—and how they get that way.
Several parasite species invade their victims’ bodies, turning them into zombies that do their masters’ bidding. Their methods are insidious enough to make James Wan and Stephen King run away screaming like Ned Flanders. Here’s a look at some of these masterful puppeteers. (See pictures of eerie animals ready for Halloween.)
Our first puppet master is a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, and it likes to reproduce in the intestinal tract of domestic cats. So how does it get there? Well, one way is that mice infected with T. gondii lose their fear of cats. (See “How a Cat-Borne Parasite Infects Humans.”)
That means the rodents become easy pickin’s for the cat, and the parasite gets a ride back home. Recent research has shown that even after the mice have cleared the infection from their bodies, they don’t recover their healthy fear response to cat urine, suggesting that the alterations in their brains are permanent.
About one-third of humans are infected with T. gondii, so it’s a common brain parasite. That’s a phrase that may haunt your dreams, but it’s only really dangerous for newly infected pregnant women and those with compromised immune systems. One study, however, linked the infection to certain human traits, including neuroticism.
If you’re about to stop reading because you’re neurotic about this stuff … oh, forget it. (See more pictures of animal “zombies.”)
Remember catching grasshoppers as a kid? Happy summers, good memories. Who would make these bugs want to kill themselves?
The parasitic hairworm, Nematomorpha, that’s who. Also called the horsehair worm or the Gordian worm because they sometimes mass and look like a knot (i.e., Gordian knot), these critters can also infect crickets and other bugs. In 2005 a team of French biologists studied how the hairworm manipulates its host by studying a group of grasshoppers trapped in a pool.
Hairworm larvae, possibly ingested by grasshoppers in the water they drink, grow to occupy the grasshopper’s body—the entire thing, except the head and legs.
The French researchers concluded that the hairworms release a protein that acts on the insect’s central nervous system, causing it to go to the water, which is where hairworms reproduce. The worms, now up to four times as long as their host, go out and mate, leaving the grasshopper to drown.
Snails infected with the endoparasitic worm Leucochloridium paradoxum go through a pretty horrifying physical transformation in addition to being driven to what looks like suicidal behavior.
The chain of events goes thusly: A snail eats bird droppings infected with the worm’s eggs, which eventually become sporocysts, or sac-like structures that move up into the snail’s eyestalks.
The normal eyestalks become plump, pulsating, striped cones, and the zombified snail, which normally prefers the shade, climbs up into the sunlight where birds see its hideous throbbing eyestalks and think they are delicious larvae.
The bird eats the snail and the parasite enters the bird’s digestive tract, where it develops into adulthood. The parasite releases eggs in the bird’s rectum, and the eggs are then excreted and ingested by other snails. It’s the circle … c’mon, sing! … the circle of parasite life.
Ants don’t have a lot of fans. Still, you’ve got to feel sorry for them when they encounter the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis.
A research team lead by David P. Hughes of Harvard found that O. unilateralis—actually four distinct species of fungi found in Brazilian rain forests—infect ants, getting into their brains and getting them to travel to a spot that suits the fungus. (See “‘Zombie’ Ants Found With New Mind-Control Fungi.”)
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TIL: This Wasp Turns Prey Into Zombies
These brutal parasites rob a cockroach of its free will before inflicting a slow and horrific death.
A 2009 study led by Hughes found that infected ants were inevitably found clamped to the underside of leaves about 10 inches (25 centimeters) up from the ground, in just the right conditions for the fungus to reproduce and to fall to the ground and infect other ants.
This last specimen doesn’t seem to mind-control its victims: It just eats their tongues and lives in their mouths as a replacement tongue.
The monster here is cleverly known as a tongue biter, or Cymathoidae, a group of isopods that swim into the mouths of fish through their gills. The tongue biter eats the fish’s tongue and takes up residence in its mouth, facing outward, as though the fish were a big rental truck and the invader was going on the road trip of its life.
While it doesn’t seem to mind-control its host like the others, it’s a lot bigger and, as Carl Zimmer reports, it does take the nutrients out of its host: Fish with tongue biters had lower blood countsthan those that didn’t.
Luckily, these tongue biters can’t hurt or sicken humans—though they may get stuck in your head for a while.
- Web-slinging Costa Rican wasps. Females of the Costa Rican wasp Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga lay their eggs on the abdomens of unlucky orb spiders called Plesiometa argyra.
- Jewel wasps and zombified cockroaches. When the female jewel wasp is ready to procreate, she finds a cockroach to serve as a living nursery for her young.
- Mind-controlling flatworms. As an adult, the lancet liver fluke—a type of flatworm—resides in the livers of grazing mammals such as cows. Its eggs are excreted in the host's feces, which are then eaten by snails.
- Flatworms and a fishy dance of death. The fluke Euhaplorchis californiensis begins its life in an ocean-dwelling horn snail, where it produces larvae that then seek their next host, a killifish.
Sep 19, 2014 · Absurd Creature of the Week: The Parasitic Worm That Turns Snails Into Disco Zombies. This is Leucochloridium, a parasitic worm that invades a snail's eyestalks, where it pulsates to imitate a...
- Parasites put pill bugs in deliberate danger. Roly-poly bugs, potato bugs, pill bugs: They're cute and innocuous members of the insect world, right? Sure, as long as they haven't been taken over by an acanthocephalan (Plagiorhynchus cylindraceus) parasite.
- Kidnapped cockroaches carry the larvae of wasps. It's straight out of Hollywood: A quick stab to the brain turns an innocent onlooker into the victim of a brutal assault and kidnapping.
- Ant zombies give their bodies to fatal fungi. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis is a pathogenic fungus that preys on carpenter ants (Camponotus) and snatches their body for their own gain.
- Barnacles turn crabs into cribs for their babies. It's a story of crab-meets-barnacle, with a twist. A female Sacculina barnacle (Sacculina carcini), also known as the crab-hacker barnacle, wants to nest inside a crab, so it looks around until it finds soft tissue at the crab's joint to burrow into, leaving its old barnacle body behind.
Nov 15, 2020 · Zombies are just really hungry and really angry. Once they catch a whiff of your flesh they can’t really think about much else until that craving is satiated. Increased appetite is one of the main symptoms of diabetes and is seen in some thyroid conditions.
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Nov 18, 2014 · An anthropological investigation by the ethnobotanist Wade Davis postulated that the process of making a Haitian zombi is neuropharacological, wherein bokor use a chemical found in many animals...
