By Rebecca L. Johnson
Are zombies genuine? Scientists recognize this needless to say: useless humans don't get back to stay and begin jogging round, trying to find difficulty. yet there are issues that could take over the our bodies and brains of blameless creatures, turning them into mindless slaves. Meet nature's zombie makers--including a fly-enslaving fungus, a suicide trojan horse, and a cockroach-taming wasp--and their sufferers.
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Additional resources for Zombie Makers: True Stories of Nature's Undead
Example text
36 DINNER DISGUISE Last week, the snail would never have left the cool safety of the shadows. It would have stayed hidden among the garden plants. If danger threatened, the snail would have pulled in the slender, dark tentacles on its head. It would have crouched beneath its shell and waited for the danger to pass. But today, everything is different. Zombie maker: THE fLATWORM leucOcHlOridium ParadOXum The flatworm L. paradoxum (inside tentacle, right) changes amber snails (left) from timid shade dwellers into sun worshipers.
I had zombie makers in my own home! Interacting with scientists who study zombie makers was the best part of researching this book. In phone conversations and e-mails, their excitement about their work always came through. I learned that several of these parasite-host relationships were discovered almost by accident. The discovery of worm-infested giant gliding ants by Steve Yanoviak and his colleagues started with a chance observation. Amir Grosman first noticed a caterpillar’s zombie bodyguard behavior while raising caterpillars and the wasps that parasitize them.
The parasites invade. Many head for the rat’s brain. They zero in on the part of the brain that controls fear. 39 When a cat eats an infected rat, the parasite enters the cat, where it can then lay its eggs. There, the parasites release chemicals that somehow turn off the rat’s fear of cats. What’s more, the chemicals make the rat attracted to the odor of cats. One whiff and it wants to be near them. A rat that strolls up to a cat will very likely get eaten. Bad for the rat. But good for the parasite.