November 1, 2015

Last Night's Zombies Weren't Real, But These Are

If you comforted yourself last night with the knowledge that zombies aren't real, you might want to skip out on this post...

By Kalliopi Monoyios

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

As last night's festivities work their way out of our consciousness (and out of our feeds), I'd like to leave you with this one tidbit: zombies are real. Not human zombies, of course (unless you count me uncaffeinated before 8am), but there are a number of species that get infected or parasitized by another and slowly cede control of their bodies and minds until they are an empty shell of an animal carrying out the invader's actions.

Inspired by one such interaction, I wrote a science zine to tell the story of the Ophiocordyceps fungus and one of its ant victims. I'm breaking up the zine into page spreads for the blog format but if you want to see it as a nifty little 8-page science zine, feel free to print up the pdf and fold it using these instructions from Small Science Collective. Enjoy.

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