Parasites Control the Brains of Zombie Hosts
By KATHERINE SCHULTEN
BiogeoscienceWhen infected by thorny-headed worms (the orange spot), gammarids swim toward light. At the water’s surface they become easy prey for birds, the next creature the worm needs to infect to complete its life cycle."From time to time these spiders abandon their own webs and build radically different ones, a home not for the spider but for a parasitic wasp that has been living inside it. Then the spider dies — a zombie architect, its brain hijacked by its parasitic invader — and out of its body crawls the wasp’s larva, which has been growing inside it all this time.
The current issue of the prestigious Journal of Experimental Biology is entirely dedicated to such examples of zombies in nature. They are far from rare. Viruses, fungi, protozoans, wasps, tapeworms and a vast number of other parasites can control the brains of their hosts and get them to do their bidding. But only recently have scientists started to work out the sophisticated biochemistry that the parasites use."
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