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Oh hey, it's your friend's nice dad who always pronounces your name wrong. Oops, Ali Ward and welcome to the thrilling conclusion of spooktober here it is let's turn our brains right over to zombies, shall we? But actual natural zombies. So this guest who someone I met interviewing for a panel at the beloved Natural History Museum of Allie County. I was immediately thrilled to meet another high caliber dork, big dork who spent his spare time researching our weird world.
You're gonna love him. He's a longtime science writer. You've likely already read his work in Wired magazines Absurd Creature of the Weak column. Perhaps you've enjoyed one of his many books, such as The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar, or Plight of the Living Dead, What real life Zombies reveal about our world and ourselves? Or a Poison Like no Other, which is his latest book. His books are really deeply researched. They're also hilarious. They're such a joy
to read. I'm a really big fan of his, and his Plight of a Living Dead came out a few years ago, so he was not expecting me in his inbox. But I reached out to him and was like, hey, oh buddy, Hi, Hi remember me? And I was like, since you spent years writing a book about zombie creatures and traveling all over the world to interview the best scientists across this wide range of species, may I beg you to talk about it onologies, since an ologist is
anyone studying something. And he was like, sure, dude, so my.
Dream has come alive.
And he joined me from his recording studio slash closet in San Francisco, and it was just a joy to delight in his encyclopedic brain and his very dry wit. We're going to get right to the episode, but first, thank you to everyone who submitted questions ahead of time via patroon dot com slash ologies it costs a book a month to join. Thank you to everyone posting pictures of yourself in ology smirch that you got from ologiesmirch
dot com. And thanks to the folks who leave reviews that you know I read on purpose, such as this one from Ked ninety eight, who wrote five stars. Hi, Ali, I know you're reading this. I love every episode more than I expect to. Every time I hit play. Your asides remind me of how my brain likes to be too. kN ninety eight we probably have the same fungus. And with that, let's get into the business of neuroparasitology, the science and study of organisms who have been fiddled with
in their domes. Again, this author studied this study with various people who study it from different angles and species, and thus, in the totally legit sense of the terminology
ologists belongs on ologies. So hunker down and get ready for snake headed club fungus, bellies of worms, brains of zombies, wasp stings, hapless cockroaches, the attraction of light, moonlit skinny dipping, the philosophy of where I stop and you begin, decapitated ants, and the two of us discussing the last of us with author and gatherer of all facts neuroparasitology, Matt Simon.
These are bad, uh, at least terrible.
Yeah, but we can at least talk about ants.
It's not as terrible as it is for ants.
Fuck. Bugs are fucked, Yeah, so fucked. First thing I'll have you do if you could say your first and last name in the pronouns use absolutely.
My name is Matt Simon. I go by he him.
So you are a science writer. You're very, very accomplished in this field. Several books under your belt when you wrote your first book, did that spark the idea for your next book?
Sure? Yeah, it certainly did. The first book was kind of a roundup of weird stuff happening in the animal kingdom, and in that reporting and kind of gathering up those different creatures, I had come across several instances of parasites that have evolved to mind control their hosts, and I decide it deserves a full length book treatment, which is
what this is. It is a kind of a deep dive into the science as to this weirdly pervasive phenomenon that has evolved many, many separate times across the tree of life. Parasites are more often than we think, actually mind controlling the hosts that they.
Inhabit, coming from inside the house the.
Min So more parasites than we realize. It's more than just Courtyceps fung guess.
Much more than cordyceps. There are worms that do this, there are wasps that do this, bacteria. So this is when I say that it's more common than we realize. This is more common than scientists realize. So this science of zombification isn't all that old. It's really the past couple of decades, it's really gotten going. So they're finding more and more of these interactions between pairs site and host, and there's actually a lot of these that we are just totally unaware of.
Matt says that these universes are called umwaltz.
What It's a German.
Word that means environment or surroundings as experienced by an organism. Now, umwaltz is a fun word, but not as fun as the companion term ungebung, which is an umwaldt as seen or experienced by a different observer. So socially, your neighbor Tim, who works at an insurance firm, might exist in a different umwalt than Cardi b, but her Instagram stories provide an entertaining umgebung.
The parasites are playing with senses of taste and with sight and with hearing and smell. We don't inhabit the same universe that an aunt does, right, so there might be much more subtle and complex manipulations by these parasites that we just don't even know.
Is that in terms of like chemosensory cues that we just can't even detect.
Can't even wrap our heads around. And it wasn't that long ago that, like, people didn't understand how bats moved
the world until fairly recently in human history. There was a theory for a while, think it was like one hundred and fifty years that bats were actually feeling through the air with their wings or feeling by touch, and that was the wisdom for one hundred and fifty years, And then they finally did good experiments to show that there's this thing called sonar, these bats sensing the world, moving through their world in this completely alien way to humans at least. So it's like we are naturally self
centered as people, some of us more than others. But I think as a species, we just don't fully comprehend these sensory worlds, these umvelts that these other creatures have.
I feel like as soon as science does figure out how something works in the animal kingdom, they're like, how can we weaponize this?
Yes, turn it against somebody?
Yeah, how can we figure out to duplicate this in some sort of militarized fashion.
Gee, I wish we had one of the boomsday machines.
Let's go back to you a little bit. Had you been taking notes in a nature journal since you were a child, did you want to be a field biologist? And then there were too many shots you had to get what's your origin story?
It was mostly too much school, you know, kind of go get your bachelor's and on and on and on to eventually get a PhD. Now, I've always been totally fascinated by the natural world. I spent a good amount of time of it as a kid, rambling through forrest. My grandparents lived in the country, rattlesnakes and such. I was not bitten by arald snakes, but fascinated by them. So those sorts of things kind of set the stage
for me. And I kind of spent my twenties just wandering around aimlessly as a freelance writer, not really having much direction, because a lot of people do in their twenties.
But Matt loved science and is excellent at studying and communicating it.
I got to wired in my late twenties and I just started writing more about science and focused in on animals and did this column called Absurd Creature of the Week that ran for a couple of years where I profiled these weird evolutionary tricks in the natural world. That turned into the first book. The second book and then I just wrote a third book about microplastics, which is entirely different and entirely more depressing, and we don't even talk about it here. I just forget I mentioned it, so.
Ignore, completely ignorish his new and lauded book, A Poison Like no Other, How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our bodies. Forget we even linked in the show notes along with his other books about weird animal stuff. I feel like zombification of cockroaches is somehow going to be more uplifting than that book about microplastics, right.
Weirdly, Yes, yeah, I can guarantee you I'd rather think about you know, an's getting zombified.
Well, then we'll move away from the true horrors microplastics for spooptober and go into lighter horrors, such as zombies in the real world. Okay, so when you started to tackle this subject, you already had some notes and some ideas from writing your first book. So did you have to figure out a list of how many neuroparasites or perisitoids? I guess let's start there. The difference between something being a parasite and being peristaitoid.
Is there a difference?
So a parasite is an organism some sort that can be like a virus or we're talking about ants getting zomba fid, we're talking about a fungus that invades their body and feeds on their energy and eventually kills them in these really really elaborate ways. Then a parasitoid is one of these parasites that ends up killing its posts in the end. So in the case of the ant, obviously the most famous example, but we have lots of examples of wasps that do this in really horrific ways,
to cockroaches and caterpillars. Vis parasite a general kind of energy exploiter, parasitoid, one that actually ends up killing its Oh.
So one is lethal and one just keeps you alive for as long as it can to drain off of you.
Yeah, so I think of a tick as a parasite, right feeds off of your blood. Hopefully it doesn't give you limes disease, but drops off and goes about it's mery way without killing you.
M M, it's merry way.
It's like, yeah, but it was so good, it was so nice.
Great meeting, exchanging fluids. See you later.
And if you're thirsty for more on ticks, lime disease, and other achroologically born illnesses. We have this great mega episode linked in the show notes below about ticks that will just have you check in your crevices forever. But back to Matt. So he had been researching and writing a column for Wired called the Absurd Creature of the Week, but had this giant spreadsheet of horrifying critters that many people would call assholes but others would say are just behavioral manipulators.
You get into conversations with scientists and just reading through the literature, and you find really like classes of these behavioral manipulators different kinds of worms, but there might be hundreds of different species of a particular worm that manipulate different hosts in you know, subtly different ways, these extremely
interestingly evolved behaviors and manipulations. So yes, it was a matter of finding a list of scientists who would bother talking to me, and some of which I actually was able to visit in the field, but a whole lot of reading literature. So much literature like this is fun to read, though it's not like organic chemistry. Sorry to organic chemistry.
All right, don't tell Matt but the debut novel of Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry, has been a New York Times bestseller since it's released in twenty twenty two, and it's about a woman who studies abiogenesis, the origins of life via carbon containing compounds, which is organic chemistry, and it was instantly snapped up into a TV show for Apple, for which doctor Tiagen Wall of the WGA Strike episode was a supervising producer if you remember that. And I
think organic chemistry are doing fine at the library. But from the stacks and the journals and the notebooks and the interviews to tucking his pants in his socks and hopefully crimes checking, at some point Matt got sunburnt and dusty alongside the researchers.
So we all know about the Afio Cortceps fungus that manipulates, and that's what The Last of Us is based on. But there are all sorts of scientists all over the world working on these less well known interactions between parasite and hosts. So I was able to visit a scientist who took Man a hike through New Mexico looking for horsehair worms that do crazy things to crickets. I was able to bother these people for their time and energy, not unlike a parasite, actually inaction.
Can you talk to me about horsehair worms as long as were there? Wow, you've never seen anything come out of a butt like a horse hair worm, have you?
It's an experience. And I was lucky enough to see them both in the wild on that hike in New Mexico and in the lab that I went back to with this researcher. So this guy was nice enough to take me out into the wild and we were looking for bodies of water, which is not a place that you typically find crickets, right, But we eventually came upon this cattle bucket trough. Wasn't only trout, was more circular. I don't know anything about farming. It was where cows drink.
I think it's a stock tank, just in case you're listening while operating a tractor and screaming as a stock tank.
And we looked into here and we through the water, and we found these wiggling, pale colored worms horse hair worms. They're like I think I'm described in the book, is like Ali Dente angel hair pasta. So where did these worms come from? It is a very interest and horrifying story, especially if you are the cricket. So what happens is a cricket's doing its thing. It's hopping along eating basically
whatever it can on the ground. They are not picky eaters, so they will typically eat something like a mosquito, and the mosquito has these larvae, these eggs of this parasite called the horsehair worm in that body.
So the cricket snacks on this mosquito, not knowing that it is stuffed with parasite eggs like cheese in a crab rangoon. Yum, yum, Yummy'm worth it.
And then once the cricket consumes that those eggs hatched into larvae work their way through the tissues of the cricket, which I can't imagine it feels particularly good, and grow. Sometimes many of these can actually grow in the abdomen of a single cricket. One of them is actually quite interesting. One of them will actually snake its tail through the cricket's body and around its brain. And the thinking there is that it is releasing some sort of chemical to
then mind control the cricket. That my control entails jumping into a body of water, where again, a cricket is not meant to be on a kind of drown So once that cricket hits the water, the worm knows to escape because it's actually poking part of its body out of the exoskeleton of the cricket. It can taste that water, and once it is in that water, that's when it makes its break and it wiggles out of the cricket, this very very long worm. And we were actually able
in the lab to he just like you do. He just went and grabbed a couple crickets that had a bunch of horsehair worms in their bodies, toss them in a little pan of water, and very quickly these worms, several of them, would just squirm out and the cricket. You would think, well, that's it for the cricket, right, like, what's what's the point of living anymore?
Embarrassing too, You don't need to see this.
You think that would be the death of the cricket.
It is not.
Actually, the vast majority of them survive. Sometimes again several of these worms coming out of their bodies in this really horrific fashion. So where this gets extra interesting is around this idea that the scientist was telling me about called the mafia hypothesis. So we know, like the old shakedown, like if you don't pay us money, something bad could happen to your shop. We would hate for that sort
of thing to happen by our hand or otherwise. So there's this theory actually that the cricket wants to get rid of those worms. So as the parasite is in its body, it is sucking up energy and nutrients from that cricket. It's quite a burden. There might be a component here that the cricket actually is maybe partly behaviorally modified into jumping into water, but also to a certain degree, would want to to relieve itself of the burden of these worms, especially given that it can go on to
survive perfectly fine. It is not I can imagine a fun experience for the cricket to go through.
Please just sleep, okay, bye bye.
But it hops along only to probably eat another mosquito, ingest more worms and then do it all over again.
And well, I know that you want all the answers buttoned up tidally. A twenty twenty one article titled new definitive host record for Nomtamorpha in Nebraska shrugs. The life cycle and ecology of the horsehair worm in Nebraska remain unknown, but don't let that deter you from finishing the article, which includes tasty tidbits such as the male chloacle opening is surrounded inside and outside by bristles that buy for
kate deeply, and adhesive worts are lacking. Do scientists know what part of the brain the worm is wrapping around to poke at to make it say water or I mean, obviously if it's like, you know, what might help get these things out of my butt?
Of some water?
But any idea what's happening in the brain with the worms.
It's not necessarily like poking into the brain. I think it's getting in the proximity of the brain. They're still trying to work out what the chemicals are involved here, But generally speaking, across these parasites, we're looking at things like very reasonable, well known steps like dopamine, GABA, serotonin, and these sorts of things that serve very different functions and these different creatures across the tree of life, and they do of course in the human brain.
And in the case of the crickets and the horse hair worms. Studies like the twenty eleven Behavioral Ecology Journal article water seeking behavior in worm infected crickets and Reversibility of parasitic manipulation found that it wasn't necessarily a great thirst for water that got the crickets to soak their butts, but rather a modification of phototaxis or an attraction to light.
And given that these horse hair worms tend to taste water and unfurl out of their hosts nocturnally, they think the glimmering light of the moon on water maybe what gets the poor souls to just finally rid themselves of their squirmy burdens via a moonlit skinny dip.
But it is a wildly complex manipulation that has evolved again so many times independently. That's what's so fascinating to me about this is that, like it seems that this is just a tendency for biology to mind control, and it actually makes a lot of sense because it's actually an excellent strategy if you're trying to reproduce and pastor genes along to the next generation.
Do they find that it occurs in all kinds of biomes and environments, Like you talk to me about new Mexico, and I think of a very arid place and looking for water must be difficult for horsehair worms. But does it happen more in extreme environments where resources are certain, habitats are scarce, or is this everywhere?
As far as I can tell, it's mostly everywhere. It's so again because the science is so new, and because these interactions are so complex, so I justn't really just beginning to work their way through how much of this is out there? Where it is, but so you know it's in New Mexico. There are actually species of Affio Cordyceps that do this sort of manipulation in North Carolina, in addition to the famous ones that we know of around the tropics. This is very common among worms that
infect crustaceans in lakes around the world. Doesn't matter where those lakes are, it is so so pervasive. And again, we're just the tip of the iceberg because we're stuck in our own oom veldt here. We're kind of flailing in a sense that we only really know our spectrum of visible light right or the sounds that we can hear, tastes that we can taste, and smells that we can smell. There's a much more out there, I can guarantee you well.
Speaking of light, what other ways are the brains controlled? Is it through electrical impulses, Is it through the amount of light they're getting, Is it neurochemicals, any idea other ways that they're telling the brain to do different things.
I think a really good example here is these worms called canthocephalins. These go after crustaceans known as amphipods in freshwater lakes.
Amphipods.
There are over nine thousand species on the books, and I did not know they existed until now rude, but they live in water mostly and their name means that they got feet on all sides of their body, and they look like stumpy shrimp, but tiny. And sometimes they answer to the name scud when they're feeling up to it and aren't being turned into aquatic zombies.
So this is a super fascinating behavior change because it depends on the life cycle of a particular a canthocephalin. So they will either want to get into a fish or a bird to complete their life cycle. So they get into the body this little tiny crustacean. It's got little, tiny hooks. It's actually kind of cute in a sickle kind of way. It like sickles in front of its face.
It's harmless, but it ingests these worms, and the worm then needs to somehow steer it into a bird or a fish, which live obviously in different parts of a lake. So depending on the species, if it wants to guide the amphipod into a bird, it'll actually guide it toward the light, right up toward the surface where it's more likely to get eaten by bird and complete its life cycle. But the ones that manipulate these crustaceans into fishes, they'll
actually keep them away from the surface. They don't want to get eaten by birds because that's a dead end. They're not going to be able to reproduce in that organism, so they'll keep them in kind of shallower depths, but out in the open where fish are more likely to consume them. So when we're talking about behavioral manipulation, I think it's really important to consider these as vehicles. So these parasites have in a sense extended their own bodies
into the body of a new organism. So it's not only controlled the behavior of this poor little crustacean to move either toward the surface or into the open to get eaten by a fish. It's assuming it's oomvelt in a certain way, right, Like it kind of has eyes that it's using by way of the poor little amphipod.
Just a side note, Matt writes in his book that this behavioral manipulation was discovered in nineteen sixty nine when two scientists were trying to get amphipod samples in a lake and some of the creatures clung desperately to their leg hares, and the researchers were like, these ones are weird.
Let's take them out of the lab.
Let's get to know.
And according to the twenty six study, altered host behavior and brain serotonergic activity caused by acanthosephalins evidence for specificity. Amphipods injected with serotonin displayed the same traction to light as infected subjects. So serotonin did it, and maybe maybe psychments can lift the darkness thanks serotonin.
These neurotransmitters that we know full well how they work in humans, but they have u tell the different functions and other animals. And I think the science now is progressing into learning more exactly how these wasps or worms, or fungi or fung guy, however you want to pronounce it, are actually fully manipulating these creatures because it is such an intricate and elaborate process.
What about those little critters that eat a fish's.
Tongue, Oh yeah, tongue an the isopods those, oh my god, those aren't behavioral manipulators. But I think maybe in certain ways more horri find These are little, not always a little, kind of big, but they'll get into a fish's mouth in the ocean, eat its tongue, and then replace the tongue with itself so the fish can keep eating and the paris I can keep feeding on its energy. Nobody's gonna know, They're gonna know. Yeah, Happy Halloween.
First off, how do scientists feel about the term zombie when you approach them about this book, which has the best title ever apply to the living dead? Were they like enough of the zombie stuff or they like whatever gets people to care about our research.
It depends on the crankiness of the scientist, right, like anything. Informally, it is totally fine to call these things zombie. Zombie is a difficult term to define in popular culture because there's so many different kinds of zombies. Now they'll say it is behavioral manipulation on part of the parasite influencing its host, which is a it's a mouthful. Let's just call them zombies. But is it a brain eating human that rose from the dead. No, but it is zombieesque.
Just a wee background on this from the twenty eighteen paper The Undead in Culture and Science. So the English word zombie emerged, oh two hundred years ago, but it comes from the older Haitian French zombie, most likely originating in West Africa. But zombie persons are part of Haitian folklore.
They're usually someone who's had a short illness and then dies, is entombed, and then is brought back to life via witchcraft to serve the person who resurrected them, kind of like a finder's fee, I guess, And as you can imagine from dying and reanimating as a corpse, usually zombies are pretty wiped out. They have a loss of coordination
or a taxia. They're not very chatty and while a lot of horror movies took their cue from Haitian folklore, a BBC episode of Planet Earth inspired the video game and subsequent hit TV series, The Last of Us, starring my future best friend Pedro Prescal, and this game and series kind of launched the spores of zombie animals into all of our brains. Speaking of, let's talk about Cortes EPs. First off, did you watch The Last of Us? Did you play the game? How did you feel about it?
Having written this.
I have not played the game, but I watched this seia that thought it was fantastic. Even though there weren't that many zombies. It was more of a people story,
which is fine. People are great, But I thought they did really interesting things with the Affio cordyce EPs that I'm not sure if this was true in the game as well, but like, I don't know if you remember if there was a point where they're looking out on this vista and there's this mob of zombies that have been parasitized by this fungus and they're kind of rippling like the way that they're moving, and they're saying like, oh,
they're somehow connected because the fungus is growing throughout everything and everybody. That's reallyter That doesn't happen with Affio in real life, but it is like if you heard of like micro Reizel networks in the forest. So these fungi actually connect trees and exchange nutrients and things like that. There's this constant communication underground.
We cover some of this in both the Mycology and the Dendrology episodes. But yes, tree fungus friendship is real and it's beautiful.
It's interesting thing that they just threw in there. I thought it was fascinating, but not actually what alfio does in real life.
Do you know if they had any fungus consultants? I mean they must have, right.
Yeah, the guy David Hughes that I interview in the book, and I went and visited him at Penn State for the book. But he's the guy Matt, He's he's If you want to know about afio, go to David Hughes.
If you ever sit next to a doctor David Hughes at a dinner party and he says he studies fungus. Do not let him change a subject. Rather tell him you love his twenty ten paper Ancient death Grip leaf scars reveal ant fungal paristitism or let's also not sleep on the twenty twenty one hit, an agent based model shows zombie ant's exhibit search behavior and this episode, here is an overview of a lot of different zombie animals.
But maybe next year I'll camp out on doctor hughes loan and I'll ask him to talk to me specifically about this genus which means snake club headed for now Matt, who has spent much time asking Doctor Hughes and his colleagues lots of questions for his book, will fill us in. I do I want to know about Affio, But because you've studied so many zombies, I'm coming to you. But let's get into it, because I feel like that's one
that really has captured people's attention. Can you give me a rundown of what Affeo the fungus does and which is it just ants or does it get anyone else like bees or hornets?
So Affio cor accepts this genus that again has hundreds of different species that each specialize in a single species of ant. Because these manipulations are so complex, you'll hear about it infecting caterpillars, and in fact, this is used in traditional Chinese medicine. So it infects the caterpillar in the ground, manipulates the caterpillar to point its body upwards vertically in the dirt, the fungus kills the caterpillar grows out of its body as a stalk that comes out
of the ground. It's pretty cool. That's not a particularly complicated manipulation because caterpillars, I love them. They're not particularly complicated creatures for all their charms. But so what Alfio does with ants is by necessity, wildly complicated. So think about what an ant colony is. It is a bunch of sisters working really hard to further a colony. Ants do not like intruders, as you might have known from stepping on a colony. They have certain ways to detect
smaller intruders, so smaller insects, that sort of things. So they have this thing called social immunity, which is each ant is a worker but also a century that is sniffing out trouble coming into the colony. So if you have a sister that is acting weird, maybe stumbling around,
they're not sentimental about this. They will pick up that worker, drag her to a graveyard, and dump her because there could be something wrong for her, disease that she has that she could very easily spread through the whole colony. Because the ants in very close contact with one another, and that is a major problem for a parasite like Coffield Cordi steps. So what it has evolved over many, many generations is this intricate manipulation of an individual ant.
So it begins as a spore that sticks to the cuticle of an ant, the exoskeleton. At the same time that it's building up these enzymes that are kind of rotting away that exoskeleton, it's also building up pressure, so it's the pressure equivalent to what's in a seven forty seven jet tire. So what happens is the enzyme weakens the cuticle, it explodes through it because of that pressure, and then injects that fungus into the ant's body. The
ant is pretty much done for at this point. But the issue here is that if the fungus were to grow thoroughly throughout its body, you would assume that there would be some sort of behavioral problem with the ant. I don't know, I would feel a little weak if this was happening to my body and start acting strange.
Going to convulsions would probably be the least of your worries. Yeah, So if that were the case, some other sister would see that pick up that ant dumper in the colony, and that would be the end of that fungus is life cycle. Right, So what it has evolved is all right, well, don't want that to happen. It is somehow growing not only through the ant's body, but growing through its muscles and actually ripping apart muscle fibers and growing in between it.
The scientists that I talked to, David Hues for the book, I have a quote in the book of him saying that it might be that we're actually seeing a sort of puppet master at work, that if the fungus is growing through the actual muscles, it might actually be controlling individual muscles. Also growing around the brain, like the worm is kind of getting in proximity to the brain of a cricket, but never infiltrates the brain itself, and it
is dosing that brain with chemicals. So all the while this is happening again growing through individual muscle fibers, the ant is not acting strange, because that is the end
of the life cycle if it is found out. So it does this for twenty twenty one days, growing, growing through the body of the ant until the time comes where it wants to finish that ant off its vehicle is no longer useful to it, So it orders the ant to walk about ten inches off the ground and bite down on the underside of a leaf, so it's hanging upside down, biting into the vein of that leaf.
It then kills the ant, dispatches it, and then grows out of its mouth, and then further attaches the mandibles to the leaf vein and then grows as that kind of characteristic stock out the back of the ant's head, releases more spores, hits more of the colony soldiers and workers below, and then that's how it keeps perpetuating, over and over and over. It is like consistently ten inches off the ground where the humidity and temperature is just right for the growth of the fungus. How does the
fungus know how to do this? Well, it doesn't. It has evolved over many many generations by trial and error to get it just right like this. But it's like that's the weirdness of that cycle itself. Through an ant that goes on to infect more in that colony, it's even weirder. So they're finding that not all of these ants that are infected with afio do that some of
them actually wander outside of the colony. They just walk in a straight line as far as they can and then do the same thing where they buy a leaf, but far away from that individual colony. The theory is that the fungus is actually trying to get to other colonies because if it somehow wipes out that whole colony, it doesn't want to because it wants to keep going. If it kills off its host entirely, it's not good.
But it's like the fungus is sending out scouts, right, so like try to infect nearby colonies and to perpetuate its cycle over and over and over again. Yeah, the fucus isn't thinking about this, But this is the majesty of evolution and natural selection. This is just a system that evolved in lockstep with the you know, the severe measures that ants have to keep themselves healthy and to keep the colonies safe. The funcus is like, oh, that's
that's cute. How about this. I'm going to engage your body, muscle, tissues, mind, and then dispatch you in this totally creepy way that will someday be immortalized in a video game.
And and there's no chemosensory clues for twenty one days that an ant is being puppet mastered by a fungus.
So yeah, so here's right. This is where it's extra interesting is that ants inhabit this sensory space that is totally foreign to you and I. Who are you know? We have great eyes, sights, pretty good hearing, but we're largely visual creatures. Ants are using pheromones to communicate. So while that fungus is growing through the ant's body, it
has to somehow make sure that it doesn't smell weird. Right, It's a completely foreign substance, taking up like half of the ant's total body weight, which is a lot of fungus in an ant. It is somehow a baby detection, not only by manipulating the behavior of the ant, but somehow manipulating it's scent so the sisters don't smell something strange and throw that invader into a garbage sheep outside the colony.
Okay, if they throw sick members in a garbage chap outside the colony, do the sick members ever make it back or are they usually so almost far gone there's no way they can make it back from the graveyard.
Yeah, if you I mean, if you're that far gone, you're that sick, it's it's brutal right. I love ants, but that's that's no way to treat your sisters.
She's the least exciting to look at, so.
She can be out.
But it's for the good of the colony, right, So they don't want some sort of virus, bacteria, fungus to run wild throughout the colony. I feel like these sisters are more than happy to make the sacrifice they live to further the colony into for the queen's reign, and they want to make sure that nothing can interrupt that.
Yeah, they're like, take me out if I start being weird, just bye.
Bye, unceremoniously dump me in a graveyard.
Yeah.
I hear that. They even kind of employ the older sisters to take them to the graveyard in case they die on the way.
Yeah. It makes it's just I just I love this stuff. It's so god damn clever. But not intentionally or consciously clever, right, it's just that evolution thinks the stuff up. I'm anthropomorphizing here. It's thinking this stuff up because it is solving problems for these organisms. In the case of the fungus. It needs to solve the problem that it's going to get found out if it's not careful. It wasn't that, you know, five million years ago Afio cortceps showed up like this
all of a sudden. It was a step by step process that got better and better and better at not getting detected, and better and better better at positioning. These ants ten inches off the ground with a mature in humidity are perfect for its development. It was piece by piece, and it has landed on what is in twenty twenty three a super interesting thing for us humans to look at and put into video games in TV shows. What has been happening for a very long time.
Did you ever get to see this in person? Do they grow colonies to test things or how has all of this info gathered?
When I went to the lab at Penn State, they have colonies there, I couldn't see an infection in progress, but he brought out a bunch of ants that had the stocks grown out of their heads. Super fascinating and horrifying. Really, so it's actually done, and this is why the science is kind of just getting started. It's done by field work. You've got to go out and you got to sit in a damn jungle for you know, weeks on it.
If it's a twenty day twenty one day growth cycle for this fungus in an ant you got to go out there and you got to like put flags on the ground, You got to track individual ants, you got to look at trails and things like that. So it is a truly amazing field work on the part of these scientists. And I had also mentioned that they have been finding these sort of fungus in North Carolina, which a face fight doesn't make sense. Afio is in a
tropical setting. It's got the right humidity and temperature ten inches off the ground. It's got leaves all the time that don't fall off those trees that it's able to bite onto. Where the North Carolina variety gets extra clever is that it doesn't order its ants to bite down on the vein of a leaf. It orders them to bite onto twigs in a tree. Because if the winter comes out around and it hasn't completed its life cycle, leaves can fall, and it doesn't fall, it stays there
and comes out the next spring or summer. So it's like it just gets weirder and weird the more that scientists go out in the field and find these sorts of things. But yes, they can somewhat replicate it in the lab, but it's nothing compared to being out in the actual nature.
I mean, how big is an ant's brain like a size of a pinhead.
It's minuscule, but so as a fungus, right, it's grown as this sort of network through the ant's body. These are very very small scales, and it's not like it's an easy thing to take over, right. An ant brain may be small, but it's social behavior and interactions are extraordinarily complex. So just the fact that it's been able to evolve this not only ones, but evolve to target individual species, for each individual species of fungus, it's truly sem okay.
So an ant noggin has a quarter of a million brain cells, but it's still only point one micro leader, which if you're like that number means nothing to me. Same So according to beepop calculations, that is one million times smaller than your brain, give or take several thousand ant brains. Because I don't know what you're working with up there, and you know, I see cord aceps in supplements a lot like brain boosters and energy boosters, completely different cort aceps.
It's probably the caterpillar one that I was talking about that is probably very expensive. I've never used this supplement, but that stuff is very rare. Where it's fake, I don't know. I just go to a doctor, right and have a doctor tell you what's wrong with you. Don't take a fungus as a supplement.
And one reason you might not want to take ohio cordyceps supplements is because it costs more than gold. But scientists have been able to cultivate another species via insect hosts in a lab. They say the fattier, the better, and the compound. Molecular biologists are after something called cordyceptin, which some studies have shown to stimulate the immune system while also being anti inflammatory. However, studies are mixed, opinions
are still out. I'm not a doctor. There's still a lot of research to be done, so dive into the library before you bank on a zombie fungus to save your life. Speaking of research, you know, I know. The bibliography in your book is dazzling. It's so exhaustive. Did you ever talk to any scientists who named their zombie subjects after movies or zombie lore.
I do have a really good species name from the book. This is one of the acanthusphalin worms. This is the genus is Microphallis, which is tiny penis, and their worms, and I guess they look like tiny penis. But all worms in a sense look like penises to one degree or another. I don't know.
I guess, but there's some worms that are like thirty meters long.
That is true, So I don't know.
I guess it's all relative.
It is all that's true. So then within this genus there's a species called Microfallis hoffmanni, named after somebody named Hoffman. So it's tiny Penis Hoffman. I don't know who this person was, if it was a gag that they were in on, but I find that purely hilarious.
Maybe it was an academic feud.
There are a lot of those out there, so very well. I actually I went out of my way to try to tack it down for the book, but I couldn't find any information on who did this to poor Hoffman.
Maybe they scrubbed the internet. Maybe they're like just get rid of it. I searched way too hard for even the tiniest mention of a science feud that could lead to such brutal taxonomic retribution. But I came up with nothing except that microfallis Hoffmaney was once called microfallas ward one out of weer sent true.
I don't know.
I guess it's a relative. Let's move on, okay.
Wasps that sit on top of a cockroach and use its antenna as reins.
This is a thing.
This is a thing. I feel like I'm a broken record at this point. It gets, it gets even weird. Yes, this is a jewel wasp. And I was actually able to see this happen in a lab and it was is full tilt horrifying. So a jewel wasp is much much smaller than a cockroach, which is its host.
I needed to understand the scale, so I enjoyed some photographs of this beautiful metallic green slender killer with its sad, hapless, beefy victim. And I've never wanted to soothe or protect a cockroach more. But the size difference is like if a German shepherd was attacked by a corky who wrote its back, injecting it in the brain with a butt knife.
And when you are much much smaller than your host, you have trouble overwhelming it. So what happens is that it's in like a flash and the blink of an eye, that loss will kind of saunter up to the cockroach, leap on it, and drive its stinger in between its two front legs, and this paralyzes the two front legs
so the cockroach can't bat away. What's coming next, which is the loss pulls out its stinger and jams it through the cockroach neck and feels around in the cockroach's brain with its stinger for two very specific spots where it injects venom. It then pulls out its stinger from the brain surgery and steps back, and the cockroach, instead of freaking out and attacking the wasp as I would try to do, it just kind of stands there and
it obsessively grooms itself. This might have something to do with part of the venom component being dopamine, which is involved in grooming and insects like the cockroach. So while the cockroach is occupied, the wasp runs off and finds a burrow and comes back to the cockroach, bites off its two antennae and drinks its blood and then grabs
onto the nub of the antennae and drags. I guess drags isn't really the right word because it's so much smaller, but kind of guides the cockroach towards the burrow, and the cockroach, instead of flying away freaking out, comes along willingly and just kind of saunters over to the burrow. The wasp jams it in the burrow, comes inside with it and lays a single egg on its belly, gets out of the burrow and covers it up with rocks to imprison the cockroach. So yeah, you can see what's coming.
So what happens is the egg hatches into a larvae begins drinking the juices of the cockroach, eventually gnaws through its excess skeleton and gets inside the cockroaches belly grows bigger and bigger and bigger on its nutrients, and at some point decides to dispatch the cockroach, consume the rest of its body, and then emerge from the burrow as
a fully nourished adult. It is the only thing that makes me feel kind of okay with what's happen to the cockroaches, maybe that it's so out of it from the sting to the brain in two spots, and its brain that it doesn't know what's happening. But I really cannot imagine a more horrific way to go. And so again, like Offiel, corceps involves this super complex interaction between a fungus and and why can't the Joe wash just sting a cockroach to death and lay an egg on it? Well,
by locking it alive in a burrow is tomb. Really it provides a steady source of fresh food for its young that is not The food is not rotting, so it's better nutritionally. It's like a little takeout meal that it always has to kind of nit at. And yeah, it's this. It just almost makes you feel sorry for cockroaches. I'm not quite there, but I could see how some people might.
I'm trying to love cockroaches, I really am. This makes me more sympathetic to them.
What brought the song You're trying to live cockroaches?
I'm trying to because it's it's not fair that I don't. I love almost every other bug out there. I've learned to appreciate wasps, and I have yet to do a cockroach episode. But they're the one bug that I just don't want anywhere near me unless they're straight from a terrarium and they've been eating like organic bananas their whole lives. I think it's because I've seen so many like eating trash.
But I eat.
I mean, we eat the same pizza that was my pizza a second before I dropped it on the sidewalk.
So you know what I mean.
I know I need to give them a place in my heart once I get over the gag reflex.
Yeah, I'm with you, I'm with you. Thanks for listening.
What about tarantula hawk wasps?
So this happens?
Does this tend to happen mostly in arthropods?
Yeah? So the tarantula wasp is the hawk wasps is super fascinating. It's not in the book per se it is is not really a sob Well, I guess kind of maybe this It's got maybe the worst sting on planet Earth, at least as humans feel it. I just toed years ago, right, I interviewed a guy who got stung by one of these wasps, and he said, literally, the only thing you can do is to lie down and scream. That is the only way you're going to get through this, it passes. It's not a very long
lived sting. But just like buckle up, buttercup, this is this is gonna be a rough ride. It is so excruciating.
I know what you're thinking. What about the bullet ants sting your brain? Says as was so colorfully recalled in the Mirmorcology episode with doctor Terry McGlenn, who has been stung by one.
I've had several students intentionally get themselves stung by bullet ants because they wanted to know what it felt like.
And and it really hur What did they do? What kind of reactions happened?
Well, they just they just scream their heads off and then use all kinds of cursing.
You damn.
Drifts. So I've worked with bullet ants, I published a few papers on them, and I've only been stung by them once and that was in the lab when I was being dumb. And so it's possible to work with them and not get stung if you just treat them with respect and understand how they behave.
Well, hello, what happened? What happened? Tell me everything? You were in the lab you got stung with it by a bullet ant?
Where how how so I was in the lab and I needed to weigh this ant because I was putting We're doing experiments with microbes in their guts, and so to weigh the ant, I needed to put it in a container and weigh the ant in the container. They used to track the weight of the container. But I realized that when I weighed the cup, it didn't have a lid on it, and I was like, oh, I
need to weigh a cup with the lid. But I wasn't thinking that that cup that had the lid on it was the one that had the ant that I was weighing in it. I just wasn't thinking. And so the moment I got the lid.
Off, PS, if you haven't already, now would be a good time to cover the years of your children or my mom.
You know.
It just got me right on the tip of my finger, and I was like fuck, fu fu, and I flung the ad like somewhere in the balance room and it was roaming around Meanwhile. So I have like like this, you know, sophomore in college. I'm showing her how to do this experiment for the rest of the summer.
That she sees this.
It was like, oh my god, it was so bad. It was really really bad.
But how does it compare to the blue, black, amber winged beast of the tarantula hawk wasp? Okay, well, there's this bug guy, his name's Justin oh Schmidt, who apparently is cursed and has been stung by just every painful thing. Who better to formulate the Schmidt Pain Index? Literally no one, because no one wants to go through that, so we
all trust Justin's accounts. So Schmidt says that the tarantula hawksting feels like quote, a running hair dryer that has just been dropped into your bubble bath, but that fades after a few minutes. The bullet ansting, however, he describes as pure, intense, brilliant pain that can last up to twelve hours. But the point is, just don't piss off a tarantula hawk wasp.
My bibiz like this was did not evolve to cause us pain. Right. It's not a really beautiful wasp, but it goes after tarantulas. It just it stings the Bejesus out of them, and it's big enough to where it can actually drag away the tarantula and put it in a burrow. So it doesn't have to do this complex behavioral manipulation. The jewel wasp pass too, but I would not go anywhere a new one. It's in the desert in the Southwest. Just if you see wasp walk the other way.
Yeah, I've seen him in real life and they're gorgeous. Yeah, but I get excited because that means there's tarantulas around.
Oh yeah, this is what I'm an indoorsy person.
By the way.
Ps.
Recently, I was on a hike in the Santa Monica Mountains and I saw tarantola in the wild and it was the most thrilling celebsiting I've ever seen. In la And in the late summer, man spiders go lumbering about, just brave and horny, and I got to witness one with my wide eyes. Anyway, back to other scary things like if you can turn into a fungus zombie, which was on the vulnerable mines of patrons Gen Squirrel, Alvarez, Fiberglass, Holly Giorgio, Emily Burns, Kayaki Shimoto, Dave Brewer, and Mitch
can any of these cordyceps? Can it infect humans or is it just mammals or like, no, we're too warm. Don't worry about it.
We are in luckily no danger hair So okay, there have been reports of you can get infected by a fungus, fine, like a foot fungus. Right, it's a nile fungus infection, don and your brain is not manipulating your behavior. These are so specific in their manipulations that there's just no way short of I don't know, ten fifteen million years of very specific evolution where the fungus somehow evolves away
from ants and it too humans. But why would it? Right, Like ants are so abundant on planet Earth, it's this constant, massive food source for these fungui to actually do their thing. So no, do not worry. We of course, as humans do have behaviorally manipulating parasites, but fungus is not one of them. Last of us, I think is a great
rendition of what it might happen. But honestly, I feel like it's so much more fascinating what it's actually doing to ants versus what it theoretically could do to humans.
I want to get to those questions about humans, So let's ask some questions from patrons. Can we may we love it nice?
Okay?
But before we get there a quick detour to donate to a cause chosen by mister Simon, which is the World Wildlife Fund, which works in over one hundred countries to conserve and restore biodiversity, to reduce humanity's environmental footprint, and to ensure the sustainable use of natural resources to support current and future generations. Find out more at Worldwildlife dot org. And that donation was made possible by sponsors.
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Okay, let's see exactly what's on your mind. Okay, Greg Wallach, Leela Laco, Earl of graml Kin, Tiger Gury, and Cynthia B. Want to know about toxoplasmosis. Greg asked, does toxoplasmosis turn a person into a crazy cat lady like it does with rats? Laila Laco wants to know do toxoplasmosis infections really change people's actions and personalities or zephyelin flam any idea great questions.
And this is a very fascinating case of a parasite that is probably in some way, some subtle ways, manipulating human behavior. So Toxoplasma, this is a microbe that does not belong in humans. Life cycle actually goes between rats and cats. So in order to complete its life cycle within a rat or a mouse, it needs to get eaten by a cat. And to do that it actually manipulates the behavior of a rodent to not only not be afraid of cats, but to actually be attracted to
their urine. Bad survival technique on account of that leading to getting eaten very quickly. But this is just like AFIO is mind controlling ants, which is like those a catocephaline worms are kind of piling around the amphipods and in those lakes. The microbe is using those rodents as vehicles to get into cats. So if they're getting into cats,
they're coming out in cat poop. And this is why pregnant women should in no way be anywhere near cat poop because this has the toxo plasma and from that you can get toxoplasmosis, which is actually very dangerous for the developing child.
All Right, the CDC echoes this, and pregnant people, if you must change cat litter, do so with gloves and ppe and wash your hands, and also make someone else do it, because you are growing a child, and that child could develop vision loss, seizures, or cognitive difficulties if
infected in utero. And yeah, millions of people have toxo actually billions, about ten percent of the American population, but yeah, they think fifty percent worldwide, and outdoor cats and stray kitties are more likely to have it from hunting infected animals. So this is another vote for keeping your cats inside. You can see the Pelinology episode for more on that
and yeh taso. It's not just for litterboxes. According to the CDC, it can live in the environment for many months and can contaminate soil and water, fruits and veggies, sandboxes, grass where animals graze, or any place where an infected cat may have left you a turd. Gardening, wash your myths, wash your veggies. So mind controlling parasites. They're scarier than ghosts who are just sticking around in the attic with some chains.
There's a growing body of research showing some behavioral issues around people who are infact with toxic plasmosis. This is I think about a third of the population and it's been linked to aggression. There was a study that found that people tend to be in more car crashes with toxic plasmosis, which also might be a link to aggression.
It really comes down to this, I think, really this fallacy that we as humans are fully in control of what we are doing, where there is all sorts of things happening in our brain that we have no control over. I'm the specific believer in free will, if you can believe it, but there's also these outside influences, so it's like you can get toxicoplasma in your brain and it's not like it intentionally doing it, but because were mammals were related to mice and rats in the way past,
but still related, it's just kind of a byproduct. It does some strange things to our brain as well, and then it makes you think like, well, what other kinds of microbes have gotten in our brain and are subtly affecting our behavior. It's a good question and maybe one that not many people want to think about.
Earl A.
Grammaken and Kristin Rosenblaum want to know about rabies. Kristin asks what are different methods used to take over the nervous system. I'm thinking about rabies.
When you think about what rabies does to people, which is truly terrible, and the myth of the zombie, they align very well. So rabies is not meant to be in humans. You get it in raccoons, coyotes, these sorts of things that undergo these really diabolical manipulations. So the virus makes the animal hyper aggressive, It proliferates in the saliva, so when it orders, basically that that creature to bite on to another animal. That's the way that it transmits
itself between different hosts. And of course we are not meant as humans to be part of that life cycle for the rabies virus, but we just happen to be also manipulated by its. Again, this is truly diabolical stuff. So people with rabies, it's essentially a death sentence. Almost nobody who has contracted rabies has survived it unless you get the vaccine. I want to say this, and I truly mean that. This is not like, oh, I should go watch this sort of thing. There are videos of this.
I would not if you come across and don't ever watch it. It's really really difficult stuff to watch because you can see the person struggling. They can be hyper aggressive, like a raccoon or a coyote could, but they're also afraid of water. So this is a manipulation on the part of the parasite for its other hosts to keep those animals from drinking and washing the virus out of its mouth. So there's more that virus where when it
bites on, it's better able to transmit. It's a truly horrific thing to happen to humans, and it's probably the basis of the zombie myth, which is like this person that is locked up, kind of mumbling and really struggling.
I know he said not to and of course I did. And yeah, grainy footage of blurred children's faces, one agitated in a hospital bed, recoiling at water offered by his really despondent mom. It was really gutting and to know
how grim the prognosis is, it's just awful. And while most infections happen with a bite, you can contract rabies from saliva on an open wound, and once it's contracted, Raby's is so deadly that even if you wake up with a bat in your room, the medical protocol is post exposure prophylactics, which is a series of shots just in case you were scratched or bitten in your sleep. Obviously, with larger infected animals, it's easier to discern if you've
had a bite. So while Raby's deaths are rare in the US, be careful make sure your pets have their shots. Rabies is a real zero out of ten. Would not recommend no stars on Yelp, double thumbs down. A couple of people wanted to know. Uh otter k Hosts aka Chris p wanted to know. According to the Worldwide Web, there's a powder that could be inhaled generally unwillingly, which makes the inhaler easily manipulated. How about the veracity of
Haitian zombies with textro dotoxins from pofferfish? Anything else in human beings that would count as zombification? Or does one have to be alive to do behavioral manipulation? Or can a plant do behavioral manipulation?
Yeah, you got to be a less So like the proper zombie in popular culture comes back from the dead, right as far as we know, that's not possible for people. Luckily, that would be very problematic if people started popping up from the dead.
Really would legally having to go to the courthouse and reverse record.
That would be such a nightmare, a lot of paperwork, so much paperwork.
We don't need that.
Petrodoxin PSS the magic pixie dust derived from puffer fish or newts, and it can cause very unfun reactions like numbness and barfing and motor paralysis, respiratory arrest, and the big D that sends you up to heaven. Cooking doesn't even neutralize it, and it can get you via ingestion, injection, inhalation, or break in your skin. It's an opportunist and it apparently blocks fast voltage gated sodium channels in the nervous system.
But more importantly, there's no antidote. So if you're on vacation and your drunk brother in law challenges you to try the pufferfish, just say no, man, or say I hate you, Derek.
Everybody hates you.
Do you think that.
Human beings can be zombies to other human beings by engaging your behavioral manipulation?
Oh my god, I think that's that's the main route of our manipulation. I'd almost rather be taken over by a fungus manipulated by people for the rest of my life. But yeah, it's like it gets at these really sticky questions about free will, right, Like, if we are able to fully parts the way that consciousness works, then would realize that, oh man, we're just kind of chemicals and
electricity and gobs of fat in our brains. Right if parasites are so just proficient at hijacking these systems, reaching across the tree of life like a fungus is an entirely different animal, not even entirely different organism than an ant. Right, there's fully assuming the body of another organism. It's kind of a profound question. It's not my profound question. I
didn't think this up. But when does an ant that's infected by afia corceps stop being an ant and start being something new, something like a zombie?
Like?
What is the dividing line there? It's weird to think about, but it's again not just having an ants happening all across the animal kingdom.
So we've done quantum montology about the universe and if it's real, But one's up for a metaphysical ontology episode on the philosophical study of being. That one might be the scariest of all, because it's much easier to just play video games or scroll on TikTok instead of feeling our feelings and confronting our own existence. Anyway, a bunch
of people had good questions about applications in humans. Emily Straffer, Dave Cannon, Isabelle Leclerc, Mark Phillips, Anne Marie Vertzpicki wanted to know, well, in Anne Marie's words, what are neurologists saying about parasitic mind control, and Emily asked, is it possible to target only certain parts of our brain for mind control? Could we use something like this to treat depression or other mental illness?
Yeah? Great questions. So in the book, I visited a scientist that Nyu, who is working with rodents with this fascinating system actually injecting materials that kind of break into individual cells in the brain and respond then to light. So she's able to shine light into the brain and activate parts of that brain, one of which being for ASI. It can actually make these rodents much more aggressive. So it's like learning more about how the brain operates in
these ways. And I don't think she's looking to do the same thing to humans, like some sort of diabolical lab where she's shining light in people's brains and making them angry. But it's I think of this really fascinating notion that as we learn more about the human brain,
what makes it tick. Hopefully that does not go in the direction of somebody saying, well, if I know what makes it tick, these are the ways I can behaviorally manipulate those brains, like coffeo cordys EPs might in a South American jungle.
So in Plight a Living Dead, you can see the chapter titled the brain Hacked Rat that wore a funny hat and destroyed the notion of free Will, which details a work of neuroscientist doctor Anagret Faulkner now at Princeton, who uses optogenetics to stimulate rodent aggression through fiber optic cables in the hypothalmus a very specifically infected subject. Involves a bit of neurosurgery virology technology to accomplish this mind control,
and very complicated. It seems a lot easier just to give the mice tiny little phones and show them pictures of richer, prettier mice with better lives. That's probably a faster process too. On that note, Buddy Freaking Gyerson and Andrew McAdams both had questions Buddy's words, what are your
thoughts on fast versus slow zombies? And Andrew asked, when humans become zombies, do you think they're going to be slow moving like Donna the Dead or will they have dramatically increased physical abilities?
Love the question. I think that this looking at these parasites and then natural world gives us some actually very fascinating windows into this. So if you are off your cortyceps infecting an ant, you don't really necessarily need to worry about the speed with which you're controlling that ant, right, You just don't want it to look weird enough that it gets discovered by its sisters and dumped in the graveyard.
But there are other parasites out there, so like the camp the cephalens that I was talking about that in fact, the little crustaceans and the lakes, they need to make sure that their hosts are not only full control of their bodies, but able to get to those specific parts of the lake, either to the surface to be eaten by a bird or farther down the water column to be eaten by a fish. So when we're thinking about parasites turning their hosts into vehicles, into these sorts of zombies,
do you want a fast zombie? Sometimes yeah, for sure, Like if you need it to complete your life cycle. Does the horsehair worm in the cricket need it to be well enough to get into that body of water. Absolutely, But there are others like the jewel wasp and the cockroach. There's no speed considerations here. It just stupefies the host. So what would be the case in humans, I would
argue that it would be a speed thing. Like, if it's about the virus ordering around the human host to bite more humans, you don't want a slow, bumbling zombie host. You want like a twenty eight days later, super speedy zombie that can bite more and more people. Because it's like from an evolutionary sense, if the virus can pass itself on to more and more hosts, it's able to further more generations of speedy zombies that sort of thing. So yeah, looking to the natural world, I would vote
on us becoming fast ones. I feel like that's a controversial topic and I'm probably going to get dragged for it on the internet.
Thought, what a drag.
Sarah RL wants to know. Have you ever dressed as a zomb b for Halloween? Such as the insect or an Apopephalus borealis. I don't know what that is, but maybe you do.
Oh, yes, the decapitating flies. I have not dressed up as any of these animals. Unfortunately. I feel like like at a Halloween party, it would take a very long time for me to disc what it is I'm doing here, and then the people would just go mad. Eyes would blaze over, and they would they would walk away, which is fine. I don't like talking to people with parties anyway, so forget about it.
Our eyes wouldn't glaze over because ant decapitating flies are thrilling. But the short version, according to math writing, is that a ford fly pierces a host ant between the legs, launches an egg torpedo into its body, and then it
gets out of dodge. It's like, thanks man. It lets the ant do the whole pregnancy part, and the larvae migrates to the ant's head, living off of its sweet sweet juices before mind controlling it to leave the colony to more humid leaf litter, and then put ah off pops its head and like Marilyn out of birthday cake, now you have another homicidal fly. Oh the circle of life is so beautiful and brutal and disgusting. Michael max Joran wants to know massapora and cicadas going bananas?
What's up with that?
Flies? Salt shakers of death? I think is what what they're referring to. Cicadas get infected with this fungus, So what this fungus does? It's not an intricate manipulator like Opfield cordyceps is, but it just rots away the abdomen of the cicada to the point where you can have like you find cicada's kind of dragging themselves around, missing basically the entirety of their abdomen that it's just been
eaten away. So this one's fascinating because this was not me who thought of the name flying salt shaker of death. But when it's flying through the air, it's actually shedding those scores, which then fall onto more cicadas, not unlike the way that Opfiod corda steps is operating. It's just not manipulating the behavior of the cicada as much.
Yes, we have a whole episode on cicadas. It's linked in the show notes. And a highlight of my life was catching the emergence of brood ten in the Midwest a few years back, and cicadas, you can sing in my ear as loudly as you want, even though I'm
never going to mate with you. Potato Popper wants to know what about the caterpillar that gets ants to be at zombie bodyguards by having them consume its secretions of dopamine that make them less likely to move away from the caterpillar and more likely to be aggressive.
Yeah, it's a super cool one. There's a wasp that injects its eggs into caterpillars as well, and they grow throughout its body and then erupt through the caterpillar skin. And the caterpillar doesn't die because as they're erupting, they're shedding parts of their skin that plug up the wounds, and it keeps the caterpillar alive to act as a bodyguard as those little babies are developing. So that's fun. But yeah, so caterpillars actually have all these really cool
interactions with ants and kind of terrifying ways. Do I have time for like a like a really interesting one? Okay, So yeah, there's this really lazily named species called the large blue butterfly. It is what it says on the tin.
It's caterpillar does something even crazier. It lets itself get captured by ants that take it back into the colony, which would like presumably turned into food, right, but no, it also releases pheromones that trick those worker ants into thinking that it is not only part of the colony but actually the queen, so they dote on it, they
take care of it. They feed the colony's actual larvae to this caterpillar that just goes to town on these things, tricking the ants into thinking that just one of their own. Gets even crazier because there's a hyperparasitoid wasp that comes into all of this, releases its own pheromones as it's entering the colony, and this freaks out the workers. They
run around going absolutely bonkers. In the confusion. The wasp comes up to that caterpillar, which had itself zombified the ants, injects it with its eggs and leaves the nest like it's zombies all the way down, right, it went after the other. But caterpillars, I love that question because they're so cute and cuddly and lovely, but it can be a little bit diabolical. Rough, Yeah, about grasping opportunities, right, You got.
To get your bag, you know.
Yeah.
Last listener question, let's end on a bummer. Robert g Auditt and Caitlin Kalinowski wanted to know about global warming. Robert's words. With a global temperature increase, there are signs fungi might be adapting to live at our slowly dropping body temperatures now at ninety seven point five, down from ninety eight point six. I didn't know that. Are we at risk for pathogenic brain killing fungi like cortysceps as time goes on? Shiesh.
They say, yeah, A great question, and it's a heavy field within climate science, which is determining which pathogens we have to worry about more on a warming planet. So where, for instance, will the conditions warmer, perhaps wetter conditions become better for fungi. Where are we going to get like the expansion of malaria because mosquitoes are moving into new areas. It's a great question and not a bright topic, but it's going to be super important for public health going forward.
That's much worrying about, like behaviorally manipulating parasites like these songi that we've been talking about, but certainly all manner of others that are going to expand their ranges due to climate change. That's a I'm sorry, that's a bummer. I don't know how to phrase that.
Listen, there's no good way to phrase that large of bad news. And if that doesn't get you might be the microplastics again. His latest book about microplastics is called a Poison Like no Other, and it's linked in the show Not. It's just in case you'd like more info and terror in your life. I'm just asking two bummer questions in a row, but last questions that I always ask. Usually I say, what's the worst thing about your job?
But I want to know what the SUCKI ist zombie movie or something that bums you out about zombies, or something that sucks about zombies, or the worst artistic interpretation you've seen.
I think what bothers me most is just how they keep coming, like not unlike zombies. It's run its course. Let's move on from zombies. Let's maybe think of something.
And this is coming from a person wrote a book about something like I'm sick of hearing about them because I also I ruined it for myself, because I feel like what has happened in nature, what has evolved many, many, many times independently across the tree of life, is so much more interesting than what some hackey screenwriter cobbled together in a coke fueled afternoon. But that's just me being grumpy.
Favorite thing about writing the book, favorite story, or favorite experience traveling.
I think the walking through New Mexico looking for the horsehair worms. There was the guy that side just walk me around. There was a sign that said like beware of bears and mountain lions or something along those lines, and he's like, don't worry about I've never seen a bear or amountain lime out here. It's like, well, they put the sign up for some sort of reason. He was a good guy. I loved him, and I guess about him in the book, but I don't. I'm not
a hiker. I actually despise hiker. I'm sorry, what but that was the best hike that I've ever been on because I got to hold a handful of horsehair worms. And it's it's just like I feel, this is a stupid word. I didn't use the word blessed ever, but it's the best way I can think of, Like I'm blessed to have a job that allows me to not only go do things like that, but to go to work every day and like learn from very smart people as you do, like people that are maybe two or
three times smarter than me. It's a humbling experience, but it's also I get to learn every day, and it's I love it, every every minute of it.
Is there a reason you're hate hiking? Just curious?
I don't so it's I understand it's stupid, and I'm going to get dried for this as well, but I I just don't like that there's nothing at the end right Like I am. Okay, I could walk fifty miles through a city if there's some cool destination like a bookstore, and then I'm totally fine walking all the way back. I don't understand walking up a mountain to see like a rock or a tree. How do you like if you've seen one tree, you've seen all of them. I'm
not saying the outdoors are bad. I'm just saying that the method of experiencing the outdoors by way of a hike is my less than favorite thing to do. In addition to the predators out there, don't forget about the bears and mountain lions. What if they eat you.
I'm fueled by snacks and knowing that when you get to where you're going, you stop and you have a snack and then you go back. So a lot of the time I'm thinking about whatever kind of trail mix with m and ms and stuff we got.
I've never thought about it in the snack perspective, but that makes sense. Maybe I should just let up a backpack with good snacks.
Well, I wish you many years of indoor activities.
Thank you.
Please keep writing books because they're some of my favorite. You and Mary Roach are just killing the game out there. Thank you just writing such good stuff. So I hope people pick up this one and then if they're too happy about it, get your Microplastics book.
Yeah, want a sweet dose of reality, buckle up.
This has been a joy. Thank you so much.
Likewise, I really appreciate it. Good talking on so.
Ask smart authors, unsmart questions and you're bound to stagger away with just a brainload of goodies. Thank you so much to mapal Matt Simon for obliging and telling me all about these critters. His book Plight of the Living Dead details even more and it's just such a fun read. And his new book, A Poison Like No Other, is linked in the show notes for you. There's also a link to the World Wildlife Fund. We are at ologies
on Instagram and Twitter. I'm at Ali Ward with one l on both smologies or kid friendly versions of classic episodes, and they're linked in the show notes or up at aliwar dot com, slash smologies. Thank you Zigredriguez, Thomas and Jared Sleeper of mind gem Media for editing those, as well as Mercedes Maitland to Aaron Talbert for adminting theologies podcast Facebook group. Emily White of the Wordery makes our professional transcripts. Susan Hale is our lord and managing director.
Noel Dilworth's scheduling producer, Kelly ar Dwyer makes the website, and the puppeteer of our editing process is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn made the theme music and if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And last week, okay, okay, buckle up, I was coming back in the East Coast on the plane with Sharrett and it had been like a weirdly hellish travel day with this layover and a storm,
the worst turbulence I've ever been in. And we were sitting in the back row of the plane right next to the toilet, and we had our ten year old daughter, Gremy, who is a delight and also a dog, and we were landing after this really long twelve hour airport day and I went to wake Gremmy up under the seat and her ear felt cold, so I shook her and she didn't move or wake up, and she hates her pause being touched, so I was hunched overkind of touching her paws.
Nothing.
And I told Jarret kind of in a panic, and he tried to wake her. Nothing, and he pulled her travel carrier out of the seat, and we were both on this plane screaming Grammy, Grammy, and my whole life just changed because Gmy had died on a plane while we were sitting two feet away, totally unaware that she passed under our feet. And I almost threw up. Jarret was about to start crying, and then her head popped up. She's like, hey, guys, you get any cheese. I don't
know how she was sleeping so soundly. We thought for a good minute she was dead. So hug your loved ones, because it's not often that they spontaneously resurrect from the seeming dead a week before Halloween.
Anyway, Very lucky.
Or bye pacadermatology, mombiology, ydo zoology, lithology and technology, meteorology, paratology, anthology.
You are going to feel like a zombie after this.
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