Zombie Apocalypse PSA

Stuff Works office. Um, I can't really get home. The highways or are just a complete parking lot of you know, cars are not moving. The Marta tracks have completely shut down. Some people were trying to to walk the tracks through the tunnels, and I believe that is meeting with varying degrees of success. But a lot of people are calling what's going on now as the outbreak, and we're going to use the term zombie, but but really it is

a it's a it's a misleading term, as we'll discuss. Well, the media keeps throwing it around because I mean the effects of this parasite seems very zombie like. But look, guys, we realized that you may not even actually hear this episode. UM, we don't know when you'll hear it. Think if you do hear it, things might have changed since this recording that it's made first, and we're just trying to document

what's going on here in Atlanta. Yeah, so I'm gonna I'm gonna just run through some of the facts, some of the things we know about what's going on right now. There's a lot of misinformation on out there. Hopefully if if you were in the area that's affected, which seems to be largely um uh confined to the Atlanta area and a few other parts of the of the Southeast, then hopefully you're listening to to uh you know, your

local radio, trying to find reliable TV signals. But we do know that a severe zombie outbreak has occurred in the Atlanta area. These these bombie packs are roaming the city UH generally pursued by buzzards UH and coyotes occasionally raccoons. UH. They are attracted by the smell of the king flesh and UM. It was actually it was at first reported as as a flash mob parody of the Walking Dead, because as we are, Walking Dead is filmed here in Atlanta.

But no, it's the real deal, apparently. Yeah, and and certainly that the pop culture idea of the zombie is is something to take into account here, because take The Walking Dead for example. The characters in that show are dealing with zombies or walkers, and they seem to be dealing with it outside of the pop culture idea of the zombie. Like they don't seem to have any preconceived notions about walking dead and walkers and zombies and what have you. But but we have to contend to contend

with that. So again, these infected individuals are roaming the city. They are they they are behaving violently. They are striking out against uh really any kind of of non infected individual that they're encountering. Um. Meanwhile, everyone else is either holding up in their homes if and this is definitely the thing to do, hold up in your homes. The infected individuals are not going to be able to access your home. They're not gonna be able to figure out locks.

So if you're locked up, you're good. If you're going out and trying to engage with them, that is where the danger comes into play. Because again, everyone's been watching all these zombie programs. We have a certain preconceived notion of what this is supposed to be, and then what is allowed. You have individuals that are behaving violently towards the infected. Uh. So the hs W employees are fellow

podcasters have have have taken refuge inside the hs W offices. Yeah, and we're all okay, but I mean there are some signs of strain. Um, Josh Clark keeps ripping strips off his shirt to make Rambo headbands. Yeah, which is fine, just a little weird. And then Tracy Wilson um has used her library bar code software and tagged each of us with a call number. Well, you know, in stressful situations, people handle things differently. They organize, they do some prep work. Um,

it's understandable. I do wish we could find Ben Bolen um, so if anyone out there has seen him, UM, let us know. Um other things that we know. The main CDC centers for Disease Control compound here in Atlanta has uh has fallen. Perhaps we're not sure if their communication system is just out but um, we're not hearing any word from them. But but this was after they did

release some preliminary findings. The research continues elsewhere, but we do know that the quote unquote zombies are not undead but living human specimens whose systems have been hijacked by a parasitic organism. Right, this is very important, This is what's This is really the nut of what's going on right now. Yeah, the parasite seems to reprogram the patient over a period of hours, uh, gradually introducing skin necrosis

and instilling a shambling gage. So the the the appear to be rotting, But what is going on here is the skin itself undergoing necrosis and taking on the appearance and eventually the odor of rotting flesh. Um, they're shambling, they're groaning, severely depleted will, and extreme aggressive behavior toward all other organisms, typified by a desire to claw, bite, and quote unquote eat human flesh, and a lot of

name calling. There are a lot of name calling zombies, which I mean, it is funny, but it's not funny. It's because they want to eat your face. Um, it's like Don Rickles becoming super aggressive and being sort of rabies written. Yes, and we'll get to the rabies question in a bit too, because I know that has been

something that a lot of people have have been bringing up. Um. The other thing is that popular consumption of zombie fiction again has prepared everyone to respond in a violent, merciless nature towards the infected. And this is only escalated the unrest people see this happening and it it creates just anarchy in the streets. Well, that's the question right now, like what is what is the bigger threat here the

unrest or this out? Yes, yeah, that and and certainly they're they're more than enough guns to go around, which also complicates the situation. Uh c DC preliminary findings indicate that the parasite may complete its life cycle within the body of a scavenging organism of some sort, perhaps coyotes, buzzards, or maybe even bears. We're not sure. Certainly you have uh in the situations where bears in other countries are digging, dig up graveyard corpses and consume them. They're attacked attracted

to the smell of rotting flesh. Uh. And the CDC also indicates that the parasite is transferable from human to human via the infected blood and saliva. Now, some of that is maybe not taking hold of your brains right away. Exactly how this is working within the life cycle of the parasite that we're still trying to understand, how it can how it needs to enter another organism such as a buzzard such as the coyote or maybe a bear to complete its life cycle. UM, but then can still

be spread from human to human. Well, in this episode, what we're going to do in an attempt to try and understand this unknown single cell parasite that is that it seems to be causing the situation. We're going to look at known examples, scientifically chronicled examples of parasitic organisms that hijack a victim, hijack a host, and uh and in some cases actually create zombie like behavior in that host. We're gonna look to these examples and an attempt to

understand what's going on now. Yeah, because I mean, really, this is the best information we have so far about how to approach this outbreak in humans. So of course the rabies thing keeps coming up, Yes, and uh, I need I need to distress that this is not rabies. We don't we don't have to worry about this being a raby situation. UM. Human to human transmissions of rabies are almost unheard of. UM. The Centers for Disease Control speculates that it can happen due to sexual contact, kissing,

um organ tissue transplants, etcetera. But for the most part, humans are actually catching rabies from other animals, from rapid animals, and and outside of the United States where we only have one or two, you know, three human rabies cases a year in humans, between thirty thousand and seventy people worldwide contract rabies. The thing is is that there's a correlation with the symptoms of rabies and what we see

outside of our course today. There's the anxiety, confusion, Uh, what seems like hallucinations, yeah, partial or total put paralysis yeah. And Uh. The thing is is that with rabies, we know that this doesn't really take hold of these symptoms anywhere from like ten days to a year as the virus incubates in the body. So the question is is there a way that this rabies virus could have maybe mutated um well and be responsible for what we see UM.

The CDC is saying no. But but theoretically it has been proposed in the past that if rabies we were to to mutate and and and take on flu light symptoms. Essentially, if you had a hybrid of rabies and the flu and influenza, then you could have an airborne rabies that would spread with the would spread faster, and would have

a higher potential to spread from human to human. Now, virologists at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine and Florida, Samita Andriansky, she has said that sure she could imagine a scenario where you could mix rabies with a flu virus to get airborne transmission, a measled virus to get personality changes, and cephalitis virus to cook your brain with a fever, and then increase aggression even more by throwing in ebola, okay, so that you began to

bleed from your guts. She said, if you combine all these things, you could get something like a zombie virus. But she says nature doesn't allow all these things to happen at the same time. Yeah. It. We're of course, we're talking in this about theoretical chimera virus is UH, and this is a big part of bioweaponry UH. The and the idea that we could take existing pathogens and and combine them to make something even more devastating. But again, uh, CDCs told us is not rabies. This is not any

kind of bioterrorism attack or anything of that nature. Um. And and when it comes to rabies in general, it's worth noting that, yes, you can look at a list of symptoms for rabies, and you can you can cherry pick the symptoms that would make a zombie, but that does not mean that every human case of rabies is going to resemble something you saw in a zombie movie, or resemble what's going on in the world right now. True. True, But the paralysis, the extreme aggression, these are all things

that again we're seeing. Um. But as you say, this seems highly unlikely as a cause of the parasite that

has stricken humans right now. On how Stuff Works dot Com, we have an article by Tracy V. Wilson, uh, which I understand she's revising right now, over and over and photos, lots of photos, um, how Zombies Work, where she breaks down some of the issues with rabies we've already discussed, uh, the pop culture aspects of zombies, but then also gets into this, uh, this idea that this the reality of

Haitian zombie powder, which is another thing. We want to special specify that this is not there's nothing going on out here in the streets of Atlanta that is related to Haitian voodoo practices and and sorcery and and uh in neurotoxins. Right, it's more of a question of bioweapons and could this happen on a mass scale. And in order to kind of give you guys an idea of what we're talking about, we should probably travel back to night because in nineteen eighty there was a man who

appeared in a rural Haitian village. He claimed to be Clarvius Narcissa and that he had died in a hospital in Haiti on March second, nineteen sixty two. Okay, so in nineteen eighty he comes waltzing in. He described being conscious but paralyzed during his presumed death. He had even seen the doctor cover his face with a sheet. And he claims that a bacoor or a sorcerer had resurrected

him and made him a zombie. And this was a case that was explored by Dr Wade Davis traveled to Haiti collected eight samples of the quote unquote zombie powder that the sorcerers who are using there, and he identified ingredients uh that contained some of these these common substances, one being a tetrodotoxin from a pupper fish, toxic substances from a marine toad, and some irritating substances from a

highla tree frog. Now, the tetrodotoxin definitely causes paralysis and death, and researchers have documented cases in which people have recovered from near fatal poisonings with this substance, so they have maybe seemed to die and then they have come back. So there's there's the possibility that this substance is the root cause of the zombie idea in Haitian culture. Well in some victims of toxin poisoning often remained conscious until just before death. So that would explain seeing that the

sheet going over your face right, right. But there are a number of problems and potential problems with Davis's work. UH. So you have a number of individuals and the scientific community who have criticized it or even called it fraudulent. Some of questions in Davis's ethics since the observe the desecration of graves while gathering ingredients for the powder. UH, some of questions whether the initial experiments with the powder were scientific or control, and whether other substances have been

added to the powder being tested. Some allege that samples of the powder can name little or no TETRAO toxin UH, and Davis countered by saying that putting the powder into solution for testing may have destroyed the active ingredients. Some have charged that Davis repeated his topical applications of the powder using rats and saw absolutely no effect. And then some individual studied this several of these alleged zombies and

discovered clear cases of mental illness and mistaken identity. So that's a lot of there's several grains of salt there that you have to potentially take into account when you're considering Davis's work. Well, there's also this idea of how much could this can really absorb the powder anyway? And if this were to be used on a mass scale to create you know, quote unquote zombie humans, Um, how

how would that happen in a way that would make sense? Yeah, and then you know, the case that we we were talking about here is an individual wandering into a village and saying, hey, I died a long time ago, and I'm I'm not dead, and I'm a little confused, then I'm a zombie. Um. That's generally not what you see in zombie movies and and certainly not what we're seeing on the street where we have peep individuals who are raising questions about their their status and and and suggesting

that they might be zombies. Sure they might be a bit confused, right, Um, the people who purportedly have been ghost with zombie powder, but are right, they're not marauding. Um. And certainly what we see the examples that we have seen out there, um, people are not giving their autobiographies right right, They're they're not. They're just engaging with other with humans in a very um, a very brutal and aggressive fashion. So all right, so you know it's worth

I think talking about that. But really what we're concentrating on today are parasites because this does seem to be the cause here. So the life of a parasite is is I think a lot of us know, is one of eternal pilgrimage and cyclical return. Uh. They must leave home, which is in a one type of organism, and they must travel along strange roads through other organisms. Uh, and then they must eventually return to the place they began. So you have a primary host, and the primary host

is is where sexual reproduction happens. That is where the creatures are are generally born, or at least the eggs are produced. You know. This is this is the home. And then there is a secondary organism, uh, in which it must travel. And so you end up with this this cycle, this life cycle where just as this as a man leaves his home and he moves to a city, and then he eventually returns home to die or to begin life again. It's kind of that kind of cycle

prodigal parasite, yes exactly. Yeah, all right, well, before we go into another one of nature's examples of this, let's take a quick break because I mean, assuming everything's okay, we still need to take a break and acknowledge, uh, what's going on. Yeah it maybe it may be the zombie apocalypse for all we know, but it doesn't mean that we're not going to do advertisements. So we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're gonna get into the examples of parasitic zombies in action

in the natural world. Alright, we're back, and if you're just joining us. We're in the grips of what many people were calling a zombie outbreak or even a mild zombie apocalypse here in the Atlanta area and in certain pockets of activity throughout the Southeast CDC. Even though they have apparently lost control of their their main facilities here in Atlanta, they are still on the case. They're trying

to get to the heart of this um. Law enforcement is out trying to control both the infected individuals who are roaming aggressively to the street and also the uninfected individuals who have watched too many zombie shows and think they need to take to the street with crude weapons to battle the infected. It's it's there's a lot of unrest. If you're listening to it, stay indoors, do not engage

with the infected individuals. But in this episode, we are talking about cases in nature where a parasite reprograms a host to its bidding and in some cases creates a zombie from the host. So these are real world, natural examples of parasitic zombies in action, which will hopefully help us to better understand what's going on out there in the streets. Yeah, and we're going to talk about Toxoplasma galandhy.

We talked about T. Gandhi before, but I think it bears covering this information again because there's some Again, there's some really interesting correlations with what we see on the streets and what we know about T. Gandhi. Um to Gandhi really illustrates that single fell parasitic organisms are capable of rewiring human behavior an attempt to complete their life cycle. We know this. We have seen this in animals and

we've seen in humans. Yeah, Now, toxoplasi plasmosis um T. Gandhi, as we've discussed before, this is this is something that lives in the lining of an infected cat's and testines, and for two or three weeks following infection, millions of microscopic toxoplasmos so young, which we call osis, ship out aboard the cats feces, they leave the mother ship cat aboard the cat poop, and any creature that encounters the

stowaway laden waste is susceptible to accidental infection. And this means, you know, touching a litter box, infected soil and actuld water, infected garden veggies, or of course more importantly, rats and

rodents digging around in the poop. Okay, because the then the idea is that while the cat is the primary host, then the rat or rodent or squirrel chipment what have you is the intermediate host where the ossu continue to develop and uh, and then once they have developed inside of that rats day, then they want to return to a cat to complete their life cycle. And they do this by reprogramming the rats brain. So normally a rat would say, I smell cat urine. I'm taken off right,

this is a fear signal. They processed this, but it turns out that, uh, the parasite will actually cause the rat to crave urine and be attracted to it. And not only that, the parasite is short circuiting the fear center in the rats brain. Okay, so this is a huge behavioral change. It is essentially saying, hey, rat, why don't you go present yourself to the cat and say here, here, kitty. Exactly? Yeah, it's I mean it is that the parasite is in

the rat. The parasite needs to return to a cat, and so it does it by taking over the rat's brain and saying, hey, don't worry about anything, let's take some risk. Let's go hang out around the places where cats p all the time and see what happens. And what will probably happen is a cat will eat them. Um. There are even some studies that look at how this affects humans when humans are the intermediate host. Yeah, that's the question. How does t gandi play out in humans? Right?

There's a two thousand study from Charles University in Prague made a lot of let me really made the rounds a few years back, cut for sure, and reportedly if you happen to have a recus negative blood which means missing a protein on the surface of your blood cells, a toxoplasmosa infection could make you two point five times

more likely to wind up in an automobile accident. So we're getting into ideas of increased risky behavior to the parasites, tinkering with how you think and how you perceive dangers in the world. Depending where you live in the world, between thirty and six of the population is infected with

us already, so keep this in mind. So if you if you were to have toxoplasmosis infection as a human, as again the intermediate host for this parasite, you also might find yourself hearing voices or worrying over your enemies, plots against you, uh, plots against you and your cats maybe even uh. And the conditions conspiral even into delusional thoughts, hallucinations,

social withdrawal, and even impaired movement and cognitive function. Uh. These are also all symptoms, just so you know, of schizophrenia, debilitating brain disorder that affects one point one percent of US population. But they're still also symptoms of acute toxoplasmosa infection. UH. So again it goes to show just how much influence a parasite, a tiny parasite, single cell organism, can have on the way we perceive realityity and interact with it.

So that's another thing to think about when you look at what should be a healthy, living human behaving like a wild you know, zombie. Yeah. I mean here's the thing too about t GANDHI. Um. You know, in in those certain cases, it does hijack your immune system, particularly if if you're someone who has a family history of schizophrenia mental illness. Right, there's this idea that could tip the scales. But um, so far Biologist Urroslav Flagger, who

he himself actually has t Gandhi. He found that toxoplasmosis, although really widespread among the population, is mostly responsible for behavioral changes like slovenly dress and introverted behavior in men and extraversion and attention to appearance in women. Yes, so in a way, it kind of makes women a little better. It makes the cat ladies a little more pleasant and

makes the men a little more full. Okay, so we think about what's going on with with a parasite that has taken over humans that that are you know, clearly very aggressive and slovenly. That makes sense for the male contingent, right, but not the females. So we have plenty of female zombies are there right now, at least from what we have seen from the news clips and from the photos. And they are not interested in matching their shoes to

their purses, right, we just put it that way. So, so again we're not saying at all that that toxoplasmosis is responsible for the zombies, but we're saying here's an example in nature of how a parasite can rewire a rat or a human to do its bidding and trying to complete its life cycle. That's right, short circuiting the fear system in our brains, right, and hijacking the immune system. Right.

So when we look out in the streets we see these packs of zombies, we see coyotes are buzzards in their midst generally in some cases the buzzards are swooping in and eating on them, or coyotes are dragging the

smaller zombie uh into the alleyways. Uh. The idea here is that that we think CDC thinks that one or more of these species might be the the actual primary host, and that the parasite is making is making these changes in the in the the individual, making them more aggressive, but also a little slow, a little staggery, a little stupid, and also making them smell like rotting flesh, so that creatures who scavenge and consume rotting flesh will go after them, um,

because they have to complete the life cycle. Right now, you're and again you're probably wondering, well, if that's the case that it needs to return to the scavenging creature to sexually reproduce, then what's going on inside um, the intermediate host? How come a zombie can bite a human being and spread this this parasite there? Well, that is because within the intermediate host um, a sexual reproduction is possible,

and we see this in the T. Gandhi um. Although T Kandi ke Gandhi can infect, be transmitted by and a sexually reproduce within humans and my stand any most any other mammals that it's going to inhabit, the parasite can only sexually reproduce within the intestines of a cat,

and we see this. Uh. We've talked about this in regard to other um organisms before, where sexual reproduction is important for diversity and for long term survival, but sometimes you've got to fall back on a sexual reproduction just to get your numbers up, just to survive a particular phase.

So yeah, and again, just to try to make sure that we're not having information UM being misinterpreted here, we are not saying Ti Gandhi is responsible for this, because if if this were the case, then we would see something that looked like pet cemetery outside with cats um just attacking everybody and being super aggressive. And that is

not the case or not. The animals that are wandering out humans seem to be the only intermediate host of this organism and uh, and we don't know what this organism is yet it's something perhaps entirely new or something long forgotten. We don't know, but hopefully the CDC will have answers for us in due time. But we're gonna move on to some more examples of of of parasites hijacking their hosts and actual cases of parasit zombies. Now, this one is is a pretty interesting case, and this

is the case of of court aceps. Uh. What will happen is you'll have a bullet ant, for instance, and it becomes infected by a para parasitical fungus of the court Aceps family, and these are these These infect the ant's brain and UH and reprogram direct the ant to crawl upward, to to disregard its previous instincts and to crawl up a blade of grass and grip the stem with its mandibles. So it's jaws stuck on that at

the very top of that blade of grass. Yeah, it's saying, I know you're you're a program to you know, do your thing, be a part of the the ant colony and do some work. But instead we're going to cancel all that, and you're gonna climb up this blade of grass, up this plant. You're gonna grab hold and you're gonna wait. Now, worker ants who discover this, they will they'll say no, we're not having this. This is bad, and and that they know it's bad. So they will take the infected

ant and they'll remove it. They'll drag it away and dump it far from the colony because if they don't do that, what happens next is pretty uh, pretty horrifying, yeah, because within six hours it will be dead and a few days later a tube will sprout from the ant's head and this is the fruiting body of the fungus that emits the spores which will infect a new generation

of ants. That is why they get them out of the proximity of their area, right, Yeah, so that the ant climbs up, grabs hold with all its might, dies this thing, this little fungoid sprout, splits out of its skull, and then will deposit more these spores that would cause more and more ants to lose their minds, crawl up, grass, die and then produce more spores and on and on. And they're actually thousands of different court a SEPs out there, each aimed at a different insects species. Uh. Their their

videos of it online. We'll try to share some when this episode goes live so that you can see some of these examples in action. I'll try and do a podcast notes uh post for this episode so you can see these things because it's it's beautiful and haunting and uh. And while there's nothing out there that makes us think that any kind of court ACCEP is responsible for the

zombie thing we see in the streets right now. Um, if you but if you do see infected individuals zombies boasting fungoi protrusions from their body or skull, do contact authorities immediately because that is new information that they could use. So far we have not seen that. But but generally, if you see anybody in your daily life with fungoi protrusions uh coming out of their head or body, uh,

do contact an authority because that's weird. I also wanted to bring up the flat worm because the same sort of thing happens with ants, where a flat worm can infect an ant. And again reprogram it. Call all the way up the blade of grass again, chomp down the jaws will not move by the way the ant, and yes to to just sit there and wait until a cow comes munches it along with the flatworm, because again it needs to complete its life cycle, it needs to

leave the ant and enter its primary hosts. Right, so it gets into the cow's room and and then there it begins again. So just another example here of how widespread in nature this act is of going in and tinkering with another organism's brain. Yes, now this next one is also very very visual, and do check out the blog post so you can see an example of this one. I'm talking about luco Corridium paradox um or it's commonly known as the green banded brood sack. And this parasite

goes through a couple of different life cycles. But then it does all of the really interesting stuff inside of a snail. Okay, so, so what happens you have a grazing snail. It eats some bird droppings, because that's what snails do. They're beaters. They eat gross things. Uh and then uh, and then the parasite goes through some life cycles inside of the snail, and then it starts pumping embryos into a fat, throbbing, pulsate, brightly pulsating brood sack

that it builds in the snake's eye. Stalks so it's builds this sack inside the eye stalk and then inflates it with it's young and uh. The parasite also takes control of the snail's brain, making the creature actually crave daylight and making it set out into the open. And you know snails, they tend to keep to the shadows, you know, inside of your compost heat. So when you go to get some to stir it around it, you know, grosses the hell out of you, that kind of thing.

But it reprograms allay and said, actually, we're not going to keep to the shadows. We're gonna head out into the open, uh with our pulsating brood sack eyeball, which is really important because that is uh to a bird's eye at least, it looks a lot like a caterpillar. It looks like a tasty caterpillar. They're just fat and full of protein and ready for for snatching up. So

that's exactly what birds do. They swoop down, they eat the ice talk, and now they have the parasites inside of them, so it can continue bird primary host uh, snail garden sale is the secondary host, and it just continues like that. UM, even if the snail survives all of this, they stay paralyzed, and that means that they can affect other birds, which can affect other snails. And it just continues. Okay, So another example we wanted to

talk about is Dino campus Cottonella. This is a parasitic wasp. Yes, now this is a this is a really cool um this is this is a really cool wasp. But I'm a big fan of wasps. Uh, even when they sting me and or almost killed my sister, or sting my wife and make her leg really itchy for a week that we and we did have an episode about wasps versus bees, yes, and the differences and wasp kind of

came out on top in terms of their might. And they're there, uh the frightening ability to do things like this, Yeah, they're they're more warriors. Uh so implanting your larva inside the belly of of another species, um was We're doing this long before anybody dreamed up, you know, any kind of xenomorph for an alien movie. This is why they

have their stingers, their ovipositors. Uh, the ideas, you know, they plant the young inside this uh, this living creature, and then when the thing develops it's able to have its first meal by consuming the creature that it's growing inside, born in in this case a sweet old ladybug. Yes, Now, if you've ever had an infestation of ladybugs, you know that they're the sweet act gets old really fast. But but in this case um with dino campus coxinella, the

young hatches inside the belly of the host um. But and this is following, of course, the the makeshift catastrophic surgery by its parent to get it in there to begin with. But not only does the ladybug survive the birth, this parasitic birth from it this this chest bursting like an aliens, but there's a little bit of a behavioral modification that goes on as well that causes the ladybug to hang out and guard the parasite baby as it

grows into adulthood beneath its protective bolt bulk. And scientists believe that its secretions left by the larva when it burst out that probably play a role in reprogramming the host. Now of these ladybugs survived this ordeal in sort of resume day to day behaviors, right, normal behaviors. Yeah, they're just Insects are pretty hardy and and so they they eventually shake off the crazy that was caused by the

larval secretions. Uh. And even though they have a hole in their stomach that will larva emerge from there, they're still good to go. So again, this is another example of a parasitic relationship that involves reprogramming reprogram gramming of a host to do something that is advantageous to the organism, in this case, guard the young. I mean, it's it's like a complete case of Oh, um, I really don't want to raise this wasp kid on my own. I'm

gonna put it inside your abdomen. Oh and by the way, when he gets out, he's gonna need a little looking after. I'm gonna have you do that as well. Uh. And then afterward, if you survive all of this, then you can carry on with your normal life. I also want to give another example of a parasitic wasp that takes over um a spider that is indigenous to Costa Rica. The spider is called Analysimus octavious, and what happens is that the wasp has genes that produce proteins that alter

the spider's behavior. Right, and in this case, the proteins contract out with the Spider as though it were an architect. Right, So this is what the Wasp was doing is basically saying, you need to build me a house. Okay, So the Spider abandoned its own home and begins spinning a new shelter for the eventual Wasp larva that will emerge from

it's carcass. Right, okay, because at this point that the Wasp has already deposited its lava into the Spider, the new shelters spun by the Spider is key to the wasps larva's survival. It has a platform topped by a thick sheet that protects it from rain, and the wasp lava crawls to the edge of this platform and spins a cocoon that hangs down through an opening that the Spider has provided when it was creating this home for the wasp lava that emerged from its body. Wow. That

that is an incredible case of parasitic manipulation. In one case, we saw the Wasp saying, Hey, you're gonna raise my young and in this case, hey, you're going to build a house for me. You're going to build a house specific and it's gonna be very different from the types of homes that you normally spin. This one is going to have a ledge, it's going to have some shelter um.

In speaking about parasites in the animal world, particularly cases of toxic plasmosis or these architect zombie spiders of The New York Times, author of the article how to Control an Army of Zombies, rights that whether humans are susceptible to this sort of zombie invasion is less clear. It is challenging enough to figure out how parasites manipulate invertebrates,

which have a few hundred thousand neurons in their nervous systems. Vertebrates, including humans, have millions or billions of neurons, and so scientists have made fewer advances in studying their zombification. Things to think about as as we face, uh, this, this parasite infection in front of us. Yeah, I mean, it's uh, it's it's getting kind of bad. The coffee machine has been out for literally hours here at work. Yeah, I know you your your eye keeps twitching and that I

can't I mean, I'm gonna say this. You have unsettling presence that's beginning to form around you. Well, that's that's no good at all. I'm gonna have to drink more green tea. I know, I'm gonna, you know what, I'm gonna try to find all the caffeine stores I can. Yeah, I promise you that you think some of our coworkers are stockpiling caffeine, because if that is the case, um,

there needs to be reckoning. Well, I think that after this we can probably investigate, maybe round up some people suspects and see see who's holding because because seriously, it's supposed to be a team here, I know, right, Okay, so we we all need to be on the same page here. We don't need to be, you know, taking all the coffee in the caffeine because we need it exactly. Did you did that sound like a body slumping up

against the door. It might be, Um, it might be, Well, we better we better close this out so we can investigate that. I'm just gonna rehash for people that are still listening about the threat that we're facing. Stay indoors. The effected will not be able to manipulate locks. Um. Also pay attention to emergency broadcasts, listen to what's going on. Hopefully the CDC law Enforcement National Guard will have everything sorted out shortly. Do not harm infected individuals. Again, these

are not the living dead. These are individuals whose whose bodies have been taken over by a parasite that we're still trying to understand. It's causing their skin to undergo. The crown appear to be rotting in order to attract um scavenging organisms um. And it also, recovery may be possible for these individuals. We talked about the ladybug. It returns to normal life after the paraside have done with it,

so uh, it may cure itself naturally. CDC may have some sort of a cure that we can start rolling out very shortly, we don't know yet. But do not harm the individuals. Do not harm the zombies. And finally, reports sightings have infected U two authorities as well as any new peculiarities that may be uh showing up, because that might help us to better understand what's happening. Yeah,

we're talking about pulsating brood sex or fungoid procrisions. Indeed, all right, uh, let us know what you guys know out there about what's going on. You can get in touch with this uh, in many different ways. Yes, you can visit our website, which is Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com. You can find us on Facebook and tumbler. We are stuff to Blow your Mind on both of those.

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