October 30, 2009 | 28 comments
Zombie Creatures: What Happens When Animals Are Possessed by a Parasitic Puppet Master? [Slide Show]
From fungi to flies, some parasitic species have figured out how to control their host's behavior to get what they need. See what happens when bugs go really bad
By Katherine Harmon
CLICK TO ENLARGE + WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/BILDSPENDE VON D. ANDREAS SCHMIDT-RHAESA
CRICKET-ICIDE
Crickets can't swim, but the harrowing hairworm (Spinochordodes tellinii) doesn't care about that detail. After growing inside of a cricket's body and feasting on its insides, the hairworm will inexplicably compel the cricket to throw itself into a body of water, where the ruthless body snatcher can emerge and enter the aquatic phase of its life cycle.
"It was amazing to see hundreds of crickets at night totally under the control of the parasite inside and jumping into the water," says Frederic Thomas, a scientist at the Genetics and Evolution of Infectious Diseases research group in Montpellier, France, who described the phenomenon in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.
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