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Speaker 4: Oh hey, it's your friend's nice dad who always pronounces
Speaker 4: your name wrong. Oops, Ali Ward and welcome to the
Speaker 4: thrilling conclusion of spooktober here it is let's turn our
Speaker 4: brains right over to zombies, shall we? But actual natural zombies.
Speaker 4: So this guest who someone I met interviewing for a
Speaker 4: panel at the beloved Natural History Museum of Allie County.
Speaker 4: I was immediately thrilled to meet another high caliber dork,
Speaker 4: big dork who spent his spare time researching our weird world.
Speaker 4: You're gonna love him. He's a longtime science writer. You've
Speaker 4: likely already read his work in Wired magazines Absurd Creature
Speaker 4: of the Weak column. Perhaps you've enjoyed one of his
Speaker 4: many books, such as The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar,
Speaker 4: or Plight of the Living Dead, What real life Zombies
Speaker 4: reveal about our world and ourselves? Or a Poison Like
Speaker 4: no Other, which is his latest book. His books are
Speaker 4: really deeply researched. They're also hilarious. They're such a joy
Speaker 4: to read. I'm a really big fan of his, and
Speaker 4: his Plight of a Living Dead came out a few
Speaker 4: years ago, so he was not expecting me in his inbox.
Speaker 4: But I reached out to him and was like, hey,
Speaker 4: oh buddy, Hi, Hi remember me? And I was like,
Speaker 4: since you spent years writing a book about zombie creatures
Speaker 4: and traveling all over the world to interview the best
Speaker 4: scientists across this wide range of species, may I beg
Speaker 4: you to talk about it onologies, since an ologist is
Speaker 4: anyone studying something. And he was like, sure, dude, so my.
Speaker 5: Dream has come alive.
Speaker 4: And he joined me from his recording studio slash closet
Speaker 4: in San Francisco, and it was just a joy to
Speaker 4: delight in his encyclopedic brain and his very dry wit.
Speaker 4: We're going to get right to the episode, but first,
Speaker 4: thank you to everyone who submitted questions ahead of time
Speaker 4: via patroon dot com slash ologies it costs a book
Speaker 4: a month to join. Thank you to everyone posting pictures
Speaker 4: of yourself in ology smirch that you got from ologiesmirch
Speaker 4: dot com. And thanks to the folks who leave reviews
Speaker 4: that you know I read on purpose, such as this
Speaker 4: one from Ked ninety eight, who wrote five stars. Hi, Ali,
Speaker 4: I know you're reading this. I love every episode more
Speaker 4: than I expect to. Every time I hit play. Your
Speaker 4: asides remind me of how my brain likes to be too.
Speaker 4: kN ninety eight we probably have the same fungus. And
Speaker 4: with that, let's get into the business of neuroparasitology, the
Speaker 4: science and study of organisms who have been fiddled with
Speaker 4: in their domes. Again, this author studied this study with
Speaker 4: various people who study it from different angles and species,
Speaker 4: and thus, in the totally legit sense of the terminology
Speaker 4: ologists belongs on ologies. So hunker down and get ready
Speaker 4: for snake headed club fungus, bellies of worms, brains of zombies,
Speaker 4: wasp stings, hapless cockroaches, the attraction of light, moonlit skinny dipping,
Speaker 4: the philosophy of where I stop and you begin, decapitated ants,
Speaker 4: and the two of us discussing the last of us
Speaker 4: with author and gatherer of all facts neuroparasitology, Matt Simon.
Speaker 6: These are bad, uh, at least terrible.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but we can at least talk about ants.
Speaker 7: It's not as terrible as it is for ants.
Speaker 4: Fuck. Bugs are fucked, Yeah, so fucked. First thing I'll
Speaker 4: have you do if you could say your first and
Speaker 4: last name in the pronouns use absolutely.
Speaker 7: My name is Matt Simon. I go by he him.
Speaker 4: So you are a science writer. You're very, very accomplished
Speaker 4: in this field. Several books under your belt when you
Speaker 4: wrote your first book, did that spark the idea for
Speaker 4: your next book?
Speaker 7: Sure? Yeah, it certainly did. The first book was kind
Speaker 7: of a roundup of weird stuff happening in the animal kingdom,
Speaker 7: and in that reporting and kind of gathering up those
Speaker 7: different creatures, I had come across several instances of parasites
Speaker 7: that have evolved to mind control their hosts, and I
Speaker 7: decide it deserves a full length book treatment, which is
Speaker 7: what this is. It is a kind of a deep
Speaker 7: dive into the science as to this weirdly pervasive phenomenon
Speaker 7: that has evolved many, many separate times across the tree
Speaker 7: of life. Parasites are more often than we think, actually
Speaker 7: mind controlling the hosts that they.
Speaker 2: Inhabit, coming from inside the house the.
Speaker 4: Min So more parasites than we realize. It's more than
Speaker 4: just Courtyceps fung guess.
Speaker 7: Much more than cordyceps. There are worms that do this,
Speaker 7: there are wasps that do this, bacteria. So this is
Speaker 7: when I say that it's more common than we realize.
Speaker 7: This is more common than scientists realize. So this science
Speaker 7: of zombification isn't all that old. It's really the past
Speaker 7: couple of decades, it's really gotten going. So they're finding
Speaker 7: more and more of these interactions between pairs site and host,
Speaker 7: and there's actually a lot of these that we are
Speaker 7: just totally unaware of.
Speaker 4: Matt says that these universes are called umwaltz.
Speaker 5: What It's a German.
Speaker 4: Word that means environment or surroundings as experienced by an organism. Now,
Speaker 4: umwaltz is a fun word, but not as fun as
Speaker 4: the companion term ungebung, which is an umwaldt as seen
Speaker 4: or experienced by a different observer. So socially, your neighbor Tim,
Speaker 4: who works at an insurance firm, might exist in a
Speaker 4: different umwalt than Cardi b, but her Instagram stories provide
Speaker 4: an entertaining umgebung.
Speaker 7: The parasites are playing with senses of taste and with
Speaker 7: sight and with hearing and smell. We don't inhabit the
Speaker 7: same universe that an aunt does, right, so there might
Speaker 7: be much more subtle and complex manipulations by these parasites
Speaker 7: that we just don't even know.
Speaker 4: Is that in terms of like chemosensory cues that we
Speaker 4: just can't even detect.
Speaker 7: Can't even wrap our heads around. And it wasn't that
Speaker 7: long ago that, like, people didn't understand how bats moved
Speaker 7: the world until fairly recently in human history. There was
Speaker 7: a theory for a while, think it was like one
Speaker 7: hundred and fifty years that bats were actually feeling through
Speaker 7: the air with their wings or feeling by touch, and
Speaker 7: that was the wisdom for one hundred and fifty years,
Speaker 7: And then they finally did good experiments to show that
Speaker 7: there's this thing called sonar, these bats sensing the world,
Speaker 7: moving through their world in this completely alien way to
Speaker 7: humans at least. So it's like we are naturally self
Speaker 7: centered as people, some of us more than others. But
Speaker 7: I think as a species, we just don't fully comprehend
Speaker 7: these sensory worlds, these umvelts that these other creatures have.
Speaker 4: I feel like as soon as science does figure out
Speaker 4: how something works in the animal kingdom, they're like, how
Speaker 4: can we weaponize this?
Speaker 7: Yes, turn it against somebody?
Speaker 4: Yeah, how can we figure out to duplicate this in
Speaker 4: some sort of militarized fashion.
Speaker 1: Gee, I wish we had one of the boomsday machines.
Speaker 4: Let's go back to you a little bit. Had you
Speaker 4: been taking notes in a nature journal since you were
Speaker 4: a child, did you want to be a field biologist?
Speaker 4: And then there were too many shots you had to
Speaker 4: get what's your origin story?
Speaker 7: It was mostly too much school, you know, kind of
Speaker 7: go get your bachelor's and on and on and on
Speaker 7: to eventually get a PhD. Now, I've always been totally
Speaker 7: fascinated by the natural world. I spent a good amount
Speaker 7: of time of it as a kid, rambling through forrest.
Speaker 7: My grandparents lived in the country, rattlesnakes and such. I
Speaker 7: was not bitten by arald snakes, but fascinated by them.
Speaker 7: So those sorts of things kind of set the stage
Speaker 7: for me. And I kind of spent my twenties just
Speaker 7: wandering around aimlessly as a freelance writer, not really having
Speaker 7: much direction, because a lot of people do in their twenties.
Speaker 4: But Matt loved science and is excellent at studying and
Speaker 4: communicating it.
Speaker 7: I got to wired in my late twenties and I
Speaker 7: just started writing more about science and focused in on
Speaker 7: animals and did this column called Absurd Creature of the
Speaker 7: Week that ran for a couple of years where I
Speaker 7: profiled these weird evolutionary tricks in the natural world. That
Speaker 7: turned into the first book. The second book and then
Speaker 7: I just wrote a third book about microplastics, which is
Speaker 7: entirely different and entirely more depressing, and we don't even
Speaker 7: talk about it here. I just forget I mentioned it, so.
Speaker 4: Ignore, completely ignorish his new and lauded book, A Poison
Speaker 4: Like no Other, How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our bodies.
Speaker 4: Forget we even linked in the show notes along with
Speaker 4: his other books about weird animal stuff. I feel like
Speaker 4: zombification of cockroaches is somehow going to be more uplifting
Speaker 4: than that book about microplastics, right.
Speaker 7: Weirdly, Yes, yeah, I can guarantee you I'd rather think
Speaker 7: about you know, an's getting zombified.
Speaker 4: Well, then we'll move away from the true horrors microplastics
Speaker 4: for spooptober and go into lighter horrors, such as zombies
Speaker 4: in the real world. Okay, so when you started to
Speaker 4: tackle this subject, you already had some notes and some
Speaker 4: ideas from writing your first book. So did you have
Speaker 4: to figure out a list of how many neuroparasites or perisitoids?
Speaker 4: I guess let's start there. The difference between something being
Speaker 4: a parasite and being peristaitoid.
Speaker 5: Is there a difference?
Speaker 7: So a parasite is an organism some sort that can
Speaker 7: be like a virus or we're talking about ants getting
Speaker 7: zomba fid, we're talking about a fungus that invades their
Speaker 7: body and feeds on their energy and eventually kills them
Speaker 7: in these really really elaborate ways. Then a parasitoid is
Speaker 7: one of these parasites that ends up killing its posts
Speaker 7: in the end. So in the case of the ant,
Speaker 7: obviously the most famous example, but we have lots of
Speaker 7: examples of wasps that do this in really horrific ways,
Speaker 7: to cockroaches and caterpillars. Vis parasite a general kind of
Speaker 7: energy exploiter, parasitoid, one that actually ends up killing its Oh.
Speaker 4: So one is lethal and one just keeps you alive
Speaker 4: for as long as it can to drain off of you.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so I think of a tick as a parasite,
Speaker 7: right feeds off of your blood. Hopefully it doesn't give
Speaker 7: you limes disease, but drops off and goes about it's
Speaker 7: mery way without killing you.
Speaker 5: M M, it's merry way.
Speaker 4: It's like, yeah, but it was so good, it was
Speaker 4: so nice.
Speaker 7: Great meeting, exchanging fluids. See you later.
Speaker 4: And if you're thirsty for more on ticks, lime disease,
Speaker 4: and other achroologically born illnesses. We have this great mega
Speaker 4: episode linked in the show notes below about ticks that
Speaker 4: will just have you check in your crevices forever. But
Speaker 4: back to Matt. So he had been researching and writing
Speaker 4: a column for Wired called the Absurd Creature of the Week,
Speaker 4: but had this giant spreadsheet of horrifying critters that many
Speaker 4: people would call assholes but others would say are just
Speaker 4: behavioral manipulators.
Speaker 7: You get into conversations with scientists and just reading through
Speaker 7: the literature, and you find really like classes of these
Speaker 7: behavioral manipulators different kinds of worms, but there might be
Speaker 7: hundreds of different species of a particular worm that manipulate
Speaker 7: different hosts in you know, subtly different ways, these extremely
Speaker 7: interestingly evolved behaviors and manipulations. So yes, it was a
Speaker 7: matter of finding a list of scientists who would bother
Speaker 7: talking to me, and some of which I actually was
Speaker 7: able to visit in the field, but a whole lot
Speaker 7: of reading literature. So much literature like this is fun
Speaker 7: to read, though it's not like organic chemistry. Sorry to
Speaker 7: organic chemistry.
Speaker 4: All right, don't tell Matt but the debut novel of
Speaker 4: Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry, has been a New York
Speaker 4: Times bestseller since it's released in twenty twenty two, and
Speaker 4: it's about a woman who studies abiogenesis, the origins of
Speaker 4: life via carbon containing compounds, which is organic chemistry, and
Speaker 4: it was instantly snapped up into a TV show for Apple,
Speaker 4: for which doctor Tiagen Wall of the WGA Strike episode
Speaker 4: was a supervising producer if you remember that. And I
Speaker 4: think organic chemistry are doing fine at the library. But
Speaker 4: from the stacks and the journals and the notebooks and
Speaker 4: the interviews to tucking his pants in his socks and
Speaker 4: hopefully crimes checking, at some point Matt got sunburnt and
Speaker 4: dusty alongside the researchers.
Speaker 7: So we all know about the Afio Cortceps fungus that manipulates,
Speaker 7: and that's what The Last of Us is based on.
Speaker 7: But there are all sorts of scientists all over the
Speaker 7: world working on these less well known interactions between parasite
Speaker 7: and hosts. So I was able to visit a scientist
Speaker 7: who took Man a hike through New Mexico looking for
Speaker 7: horsehair worms that do crazy things to crickets. I was
Speaker 7: able to bother these people for their time and energy,
Speaker 7: not unlike a parasite, actually inaction.
Speaker 4: Can you talk to me about horsehair worms as long
Speaker 4: as were there? Wow, you've never seen anything come out
Speaker 4: of a butt like a horse hair worm, have you?
Speaker 7: It's an experience. And I was lucky enough to see
Speaker 7: them both in the wild on that hike in New
Speaker 7: Mexico and in the lab that I went back to
Speaker 7: with this researcher. So this guy was nice enough to
Speaker 7: take me out into the wild and we were looking
Speaker 7: for bodies of water, which is not a place that
Speaker 7: you typically find crickets, right, But we eventually came upon
Speaker 7: this cattle bucket trough. Wasn't only trout, was more circular.
Speaker 7: I don't know anything about farming. It was where cows drink.
Speaker 4: I think it's a stock tank, just in case you're
Speaker 4: listening while operating a tractor and screaming as a stock tank.
Speaker 7: And we looked into here and we through the water,
Speaker 7: and we found these wiggling, pale colored worms horse hair worms.
Speaker 7: They're like I think I'm described in the book, is
Speaker 7: like Ali Dente angel hair pasta. So where did these
Speaker 7: worms come from? It is a very interest and horrifying story,
Speaker 7: especially if you are the cricket. So what happens is
Speaker 7: a cricket's doing its thing. It's hopping along eating basically
Speaker 7: whatever it can on the ground. They are not picky eaters,
Speaker 7: so they will typically eat something like a mosquito, and
Speaker 7: the mosquito has these larvae, these eggs of this parasite
Speaker 7: called the horsehair worm in that body.
Speaker 4: So the cricket snacks on this mosquito, not knowing that
Speaker 4: it is stuffed with parasite eggs like cheese in a
Speaker 4: crab rangoon. Yum, yum, Yummy'm worth it.
Speaker 7: And then once the cricket consumes that those eggs hatched
Speaker 7: into larvae work their way through the tissues of the cricket,
Speaker 7: which I can't imagine it feels particularly good, and grow.
Speaker 7: Sometimes many of these can actually grow in the abdomen
Speaker 7: of a single cricket. One of them is actually quite interesting.
Speaker 7: One of them will actually snake its tail through the
Speaker 7: cricket's body and around its brain. And the thinking there
Speaker 7: is that it is releasing some sort of chemical to
Speaker 7: then mind control the cricket. That my control entails jumping
Speaker 7: into a body of water, where again, a cricket is
Speaker 7: not meant to be on a kind of drown So
Speaker 7: once that cricket hits the water, the worm knows to
Speaker 7: escape because it's actually poking part of its body out
Speaker 7: of the exoskeleton of the cricket. It can taste that water,
Speaker 7: and once it is in that water, that's when it
Speaker 7: makes its break and it wiggles out of the cricket,
Speaker 7: this very very long worm. And we were actually able
Speaker 7: in the lab to he just like you do. He
Speaker 7: just went and grabbed a couple crickets that had a
Speaker 7: bunch of horsehair worms in their bodies, toss them in
Speaker 7: a little pan of water, and very quickly these worms,
Speaker 7: several of them, would just squirm out and the cricket.
Speaker 7: You would think, well, that's it for the cricket, right, like,
Speaker 7: what's what's the point of living anymore?
Speaker 4: Embarrassing too, You don't need to see this.
Speaker 7: You think that would be the death of the cricket.
Speaker 5: It is not.
Speaker 7: Actually, the vast majority of them survive. Sometimes again several
Speaker 7: of these worms coming out of their bodies in this
Speaker 7: really horrific fashion. So where this gets extra interesting is
Speaker 7: around this idea that the scientist was telling me about
Speaker 7: called the mafia hypothesis. So we know, like the old shakedown,
Speaker 7: like if you don't pay us money, something bad could
Speaker 7: happen to your shop. We would hate for that sort
Speaker 7: of thing to happen by our hand or otherwise. So
Speaker 7: there's this theory actually that the cricket wants to get
Speaker 7: rid of those worms. So as the parasite is in
Speaker 7: its body, it is sucking up energy and nutrients from
Speaker 7: that cricket. It's quite a burden. There might be a
Speaker 7: component here that the cricket actually is maybe partly behaviorally
Speaker 7: modified into jumping into water, but also to a certain degree,
Speaker 7: would want to to relieve itself of the burden of
Speaker 7: these worms, especially given that it can go on to
Speaker 7: survive perfectly fine. It is not I can imagine a
Speaker 7: fun experience for the cricket to go through.
Speaker 8: Please just sleep, okay, bye bye.
Speaker 7: But it hops along only to probably eat another mosquito,
Speaker 7: ingest more worms and then do it all over again.
Speaker 4: And well, I know that you want all the answers
Speaker 4: buttoned up tidally. A twenty twenty one article titled new
Speaker 4: definitive host record for Nomtamorpha in Nebraska shrugs. The life
Speaker 4: cycle and ecology of the horsehair worm in Nebraska remain unknown,
Speaker 4: but don't let that deter you from finishing the article,
Speaker 4: which includes tasty tidbits such as the male chloacle opening
Speaker 4: is surrounded inside and outside by bristles that buy for
Speaker 4: kate deeply, and adhesive worts are lacking. Do scientists know
Speaker 4: what part of the brain the worm is wrapping around
Speaker 4: to poke at to make it say water or I mean,
Speaker 4: obviously if it's like, you know, what might help get
Speaker 4: these things out of my butt?
Speaker 5: Of some water?
Speaker 4: But any idea what's happening in the brain with the worms.
Speaker 7: It's not necessarily like poking into the brain. I think
Speaker 7: it's getting in the proximity of the brain. They're still
Speaker 7: trying to work out what the chemicals are involved here,
Speaker 7: But generally speaking, across these parasites, we're looking at things
Speaker 7: like very reasonable, well known steps like dopamine, GABA, serotonin,
Speaker 7: and these sorts of things that serve very different functions
Speaker 7: and these different creatures across the tree of life, and
Speaker 7: they do of course in the human brain.
Speaker 4: And in the case of the crickets and the horse
Speaker 4: hair worms. Studies like the twenty eleven Behavioral Ecology Journal
Speaker 4: article water seeking behavior in worm infected crickets and Reversibility
Speaker 4: of parasitic manipulation found that it wasn't necessarily a great
Speaker 4: thirst for water that got the crickets to soak their butts,
Speaker 4: but rather a modification of phototaxis or an attraction to light.
Speaker 4: And given that these horse hair worms tend to taste
Speaker 4: water and unfurl out of their hosts nocturnally, they think
Speaker 4: the glimmering light of the moon on water maybe what
Speaker 4: gets the poor souls to just finally rid themselves of
Speaker 4: their squirmy burdens via a moonlit skinny dip.
Speaker 7: But it is a wildly complex manipulation that has evolved
Speaker 7: again so many times independently. That's what's so fascinating to
Speaker 7: me about this is that, like it seems that this
Speaker 7: is just a tendency for biology to mind control, and
Speaker 7: it actually makes a lot of sense because it's actually
Speaker 7: an excellent strategy if you're trying to reproduce and pastor
Speaker 7: genes along to the next generation.
Speaker 4: Do they find that it occurs in all kinds of
Speaker 4: biomes and environments, Like you talk to me about new Mexico,
Speaker 4: and I think of a very arid place and looking
Speaker 4: for water must be difficult for horsehair worms. But does
Speaker 4: it happen more in extreme environments where resources are certain,
Speaker 4: habitats are scarce, or is this everywhere?
Speaker 7: As far as I can tell, it's mostly everywhere. It's
Speaker 7: so again because the science is so new, and because
Speaker 7: these interactions are so complex, so I justn't really just
Speaker 7: beginning to work their way through how much of this
Speaker 7: is out there? Where it is, but so you know
Speaker 7: it's in New Mexico. There are actually species of Affio
Speaker 7: Cordyceps that do this sort of manipulation in North Carolina,
Speaker 7: in addition to the famous ones that we know of
Speaker 7: around the tropics. This is very common among worms that
Speaker 7: infect crustaceans in lakes around the world. Doesn't matter where
Speaker 7: those lakes are, it is so so pervasive. And again,
Speaker 7: we're just the tip of the iceberg because we're stuck
Speaker 7: in our own oom veldt here. We're kind of flailing
Speaker 7: in a sense that we only really know our spectrum
Speaker 7: of visible light right or the sounds that we can hear,
Speaker 7: tastes that we can taste, and smells that we can smell.
Speaker 7: There's a much more out there, I can guarantee you well.
Speaker 4: Speaking of light, what other ways are the brains controlled?
Speaker 4: Is it through electrical impulses, Is it through the amount
Speaker 4: of light they're getting, Is it neurochemicals, any idea other
Speaker 4: ways that they're telling the brain to do different things.
Speaker 7: I think a really good example here is these worms
Speaker 7: called canthocephalins. These go after crustaceans known as amphipods in
Speaker 7: freshwater lakes.
Speaker 6: Amphipods.
Speaker 4: There are over nine thousand species on the books, and
Speaker 4: I did not know they existed until now rude, but
Speaker 4: they live in water mostly and their name means that
Speaker 4: they got feet on all sides of their body, and
Speaker 4: they look like stumpy shrimp, but tiny. And sometimes they
Speaker 4: answer to the name scud when they're feeling up to
Speaker 4: it and aren't being turned into aquatic zombies.
Speaker 7: So this is a super fascinating behavior change because it
Speaker 7: depends on the life cycle of a particular a canthocephalin.
Speaker 7: So they will either want to get into a fish
Speaker 7: or a bird to complete their life cycle. So they
Speaker 7: get into the body this little tiny crustacean. It's got little,
Speaker 7: tiny hooks. It's actually kind of cute in a sickle
Speaker 7: kind of way. It like sickles in front of its face.
Speaker 7: It's harmless, but it ingests these worms, and the worm
Speaker 7: then needs to somehow steer it into a bird or
Speaker 7: a fish, which live obviously in different parts of a lake.
Speaker 7: So depending on the species, if it wants to guide
Speaker 7: the amphipod into a bird, it'll actually guide it toward
Speaker 7: the light, right up toward the surface where it's more
Speaker 7: likely to get eaten by bird and complete its life cycle.
Speaker 7: But the ones that manipulate these crustaceans into fishes, they'll
Speaker 7: actually keep them away from the surface. They don't want
Speaker 7: to get eaten by birds because that's a dead end.
Speaker 7: They're not going to be able to reproduce in that organism,
Speaker 7: so they'll keep them in kind of shallower depths, but
Speaker 7: out in the open where fish are more likely to
Speaker 7: consume them. So when we're talking about behavioral manipulation, I
Speaker 7: think it's really important to consider these as vehicles. So
Speaker 7: these parasites have in a sense extended their own bodies
Speaker 7: into the body of a new organism. So it's not
Speaker 7: only controlled the behavior of this poor little crustacean to
Speaker 7: move either toward the surface or into the open to
Speaker 7: get eaten by a fish. It's assuming it's oomvelt in
Speaker 7: a certain way, right, Like it kind of has eyes
Speaker 7: that it's using by way of the poor little amphipod.
Speaker 4: Just a side note, Matt writes in his book that
Speaker 4: this behavioral manipulation was discovered in nineteen sixty nine when
Speaker 4: two scientists were trying to get amphipod samples in a
Speaker 4: lake and some of the creatures clung desperately to their
Speaker 4: leg hares, and the researchers were like, these ones are weird.
Speaker 5: Let's take them out of the lab.
Speaker 1: Let's get to know.
Speaker 4: And according to the twenty six study, altered host behavior
Speaker 4: and brain serotonergic activity caused by acanthosephalins evidence for specificity.
Speaker 4: Amphipods injected with serotonin displayed the same traction to light
Speaker 4: as infected subjects. So serotonin did it, and maybe maybe
Speaker 4: psychments can lift the darkness thanks serotonin.
Speaker 7: These neurotransmitters that we know full well how they work
Speaker 7: in humans, but they have u tell the different functions
Speaker 7: and other animals. And I think the science now is
Speaker 7: progressing into learning more exactly how these wasps or worms,
Speaker 7: or fungi or fung guy, however you want to pronounce it,
Speaker 7: are actually fully manipulating these creatures because it is such
Speaker 7: an intricate and elaborate process.
Speaker 4: What about those little critters that eat a fish's.
Speaker 7: Tongue, Oh yeah, tongue an the isopods those, oh my god,
Speaker 7: those aren't behavioral manipulators. But I think maybe in certain
Speaker 7: ways more horri find These are little, not always a little,
Speaker 7: kind of big, but they'll get into a fish's mouth
Speaker 7: in the ocean, eat its tongue, and then replace the
Speaker 7: tongue with itself so the fish can keep eating and
Speaker 7: the paris I can keep feeding on its energy. Nobody's
Speaker 7: gonna know, They're gonna know. Yeah, Happy Halloween.
Speaker 4: First off, how do scientists feel about the term zombie
Speaker 4: when you approach them about this book, which has the
Speaker 4: best title ever apply to the living dead? Were they
Speaker 4: like enough of the zombie stuff or they like whatever
Speaker 4: gets people to care about our research.
Speaker 7: It depends on the crankiness of the scientist, right, like anything. Informally,
Speaker 7: it is totally fine to call these things zombie. Zombie
Speaker 7: is a difficult term to define in popular culture because
Speaker 7: there's so many different kinds of zombies. Now they'll say
Speaker 7: it is behavioral manipulation on part of the parasite influencing
Speaker 7: its host, which is a it's a mouthful. Let's just
Speaker 7: call them zombies. But is it a brain eating human
Speaker 7: that rose from the dead. No, but it is zombieesque.
Speaker 4: Just a wee background on this from the twenty eighteen
Speaker 4: paper The Undead in Culture and Science. So the English
Speaker 4: word zombie emerged, oh two hundred years ago, but it
Speaker 4: comes from the older Haitian French zombie, most likely originating
Speaker 4: in West Africa. But zombie persons are part of Haitian folklore.
Speaker 4: They're usually someone who's had a short illness and then dies,
Speaker 4: is entombed, and then is brought back to life via
Speaker 4: witchcraft to serve the person who resurrected them, kind of
Speaker 4: like a finder's fee, I guess, And as you can
Speaker 4: imagine from dying and reanimating as a corpse, usually zombies
Speaker 4: are pretty wiped out. They have a loss of coordination
Speaker 4: or a taxia. They're not very chatty and while a
Speaker 4: lot of horror movies took their cue from Haitian folklore,
Speaker 4: a BBC episode of Planet Earth inspired the video game
Speaker 4: and subsequent hit TV series, The Last of Us, starring
Speaker 4: my future best friend Pedro Prescal, and this game and
Speaker 4: series kind of launched the spores of zombie animals into
Speaker 4: all of our brains. Speaking of, let's talk about Cortes EPs.
Speaker 4: First off, did you watch The Last of Us? Did
Speaker 4: you play the game? How did you feel about it?
Speaker 4: Having written this.
Speaker 7: I have not played the game, but I watched this
Speaker 7: seia that thought it was fantastic. Even though there weren't
Speaker 7: that many zombies. It was more of a people story,
Speaker 7: which is fine. People are great, But I thought they
Speaker 7: did really interesting things with the Affio cordyce EPs that
Speaker 7: I'm not sure if this was true in the game
Speaker 7: as well, but like, I don't know if you remember
Speaker 7: if there was a point where they're looking out on
Speaker 7: this vista and there's this mob of zombies that have
Speaker 7: been parasitized by this fungus and they're kind of rippling
Speaker 7: like the way that they're moving, and they're saying like, oh,
Speaker 7: they're somehow connected because the fungus is growing throughout everything
Speaker 7: and everybody. That's reallyter That doesn't happen with Affio in
Speaker 7: real life, but it is like if you heard of
Speaker 7: like micro Reizel networks in the forest. So these fungi
Speaker 7: actually connect trees and exchange nutrients and things like that.
Speaker 7: There's this constant communication underground.
Speaker 4: We cover some of this in both the Mycology and
Speaker 4: the Dendrology episodes. But yes, tree fungus friendship is real
Speaker 4: and it's beautiful.
Speaker 7: It's interesting thing that they just threw in there. I
Speaker 7: thought it was fascinating, but not actually what alfio does
Speaker 7: in real life.
Speaker 4: Do you know if they had any fungus consultants? I
Speaker 4: mean they must have, right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the guy David Hughes that I interview in the book,
Speaker 7: and I went and visited him at Penn State for
Speaker 7: the book. But he's the guy Matt, He's he's If
Speaker 7: you want to know about afio, go to David Hughes.
Speaker 4: If you ever sit next to a doctor David Hughes
Speaker 4: at a dinner party and he says he studies fungus.
Speaker 4: Do not let him change a subject. Rather tell him
Speaker 4: you love his twenty ten paper Ancient death Grip leaf
Speaker 4: scars reveal ant fungal paristitism or let's also not sleep
Speaker 4: on the twenty twenty one hit, an agent based model
Speaker 4: shows zombie ant's exhibit search behavior and this episode, here
Speaker 4: is an overview of a lot of different zombie animals.
Speaker 4: But maybe next year I'll camp out on doctor hughes
Speaker 4: loan and I'll ask him to talk to me specifically
Speaker 4: about this genus which means snake club headed for now Matt,
Speaker 4: who has spent much time asking Doctor Hughes and his
Speaker 4: colleagues lots of questions for his book, will fill us in.
Speaker 4: I do I want to know about Affio, But because
Speaker 4: you've studied so many zombies, I'm coming to you. But
Speaker 4: let's get into it, because I feel like that's one
Speaker 4: that really has captured people's attention. Can you give me
Speaker 4: a rundown of what Affeo the fungus does and which
Speaker 4: is it just ants or does it get anyone else
Speaker 4: like bees or hornets?
Speaker 7: So Affio cor accepts this genus that again has hundreds
Speaker 7: of different species that each specialize in a single species
Speaker 7: of ant. Because these manipulations are so complex, you'll hear
Speaker 7: about it infecting caterpillars, and in fact, this is used
Speaker 7: in traditional Chinese medicine. So it infects the caterpillar in
Speaker 7: the ground, manipulates the caterpillar to point its body upwards
Speaker 7: vertically in the dirt, the fungus kills the caterpillar grows
Speaker 7: out of its body as a stalk that comes out
Speaker 7: of the ground. It's pretty cool. That's not a particularly
Speaker 7: complicated manipulation because caterpillars, I love them. They're not particularly
Speaker 7: complicated creatures for all their charms. But so what Alfio
Speaker 7: does with ants is by necessity, wildly complicated. So think
Speaker 7: about what an ant colony is. It is a bunch
Speaker 7: of sisters working really hard to further a colony. Ants
Speaker 7: do not like intruders, as you might have known from
Speaker 7: stepping on a colony. They have certain ways to detect
Speaker 7: smaller intruders, so smaller insects, that sort of things. So
Speaker 7: they have this thing called social immunity, which is each
Speaker 7: ant is a worker but also a century that is
Speaker 7: sniffing out trouble coming into the colony. So if you
Speaker 7: have a sister that is acting weird, maybe stumbling around,
Speaker 7: they're not sentimental about this. They will pick up that worker,
Speaker 7: drag her to a graveyard, and dump her because there
Speaker 7: could be something wrong for her, disease that she has
Speaker 7: that she could very easily spread through the whole colony.
Speaker 7: Because the ants in very close contact with one another,
Speaker 7: and that is a major problem for a parasite like
Speaker 7: Coffield Cordi steps. So what it has evolved over many,
Speaker 7: many generations is this intricate manipulation of an individual ant.
Speaker 7: So it begins as a spore that sticks to the
Speaker 7: cuticle of an ant, the exoskeleton. At the same time
Speaker 7: that it's building up these enzymes that are kind of
Speaker 7: rotting away that exoskeleton, it's also building up pressure, so
Speaker 7: it's the pressure equivalent to what's in a seven forty
Speaker 7: seven jet tire. So what happens is the enzyme weakens
Speaker 7: the cuticle, it explodes through it because of that pressure,
Speaker 7: and then injects that fungus into the ant's body. The
Speaker 7: ant is pretty much done for at this point. But
Speaker 7: the issue here is that if the fungus were to
Speaker 7: grow thoroughly throughout its body, you would assume that there
Speaker 7: would be some sort of behavioral problem with the ant.
Speaker 7: I don't know, I would feel a little weak if
Speaker 7: this was happening to my body and start acting strange.
Speaker 7: Going to convulsions would probably be the least of your worries. Yeah,
Speaker 7: So if that were the case, some other sister would
Speaker 7: see that pick up that ant dumper in the colony,
Speaker 7: and that would be the end of that fungus is
Speaker 7: life cycle. Right, So what it has evolved is all right, well,
Speaker 7: don't want that to happen. It is somehow growing not
Speaker 7: only through the ant's body, but growing through its muscles
Speaker 7: and actually ripping apart muscle fibers and growing in between it.
Speaker 7: The scientists that I talked to, David Hues for the book,
Speaker 7: I have a quote in the book of him saying
Speaker 7: that it might be that we're actually seeing a sort
Speaker 7: of puppet master at work, that if the fungus is
Speaker 7: growing through the actual muscles, it might actually be controlling
Speaker 7: individual muscles. Also growing around the brain, like the worm
Speaker 7: is kind of getting in proximity to the brain of
Speaker 7: a cricket, but never infiltrates the brain itself, and it
Speaker 7: is dosing that brain with chemicals. So all the while
Speaker 7: this is happening again growing through individual muscle fibers, the
Speaker 7: ant is not acting strange, because that is the end
Speaker 7: of the life cycle if it is found out. So
Speaker 7: it does this for twenty twenty one days, growing, growing
Speaker 7: through the body of the ant until the time comes
Speaker 7: where it wants to finish that ant off its vehicle
Speaker 7: is no longer useful to it, So it orders the
Speaker 7: ant to walk about ten inches off the ground and
Speaker 7: bite down on the underside of a leaf, so it's
Speaker 7: hanging upside down, biting into the vein of that leaf.
Speaker 7: It then kills the ant, dispatches it, and then grows
Speaker 7: out of its mouth, and then further attaches the mandibles
Speaker 7: to the leaf vein and then grows as that kind
Speaker 7: of characteristic stock out the back of the ant's head,
Speaker 7: releases more spores, hits more of the colony soldiers and
Speaker 7: workers below, and then that's how it keeps perpetuating, over
Speaker 7: and over and over. It is like consistently ten inches
Speaker 7: off the ground where the humidity and temperature is just
Speaker 7: right for the growth of the fungus. How does the
Speaker 7: fungus know how to do this? Well, it doesn't. It
Speaker 7: has evolved over many many generations by trial and error
Speaker 7: to get it just right like this. But it's like
Speaker 7: that's the weirdness of that cycle itself. Through an ant
Speaker 7: that goes on to infect more in that colony, it's
Speaker 7: even weirder. So they're finding that not all of these
Speaker 7: ants that are infected with afio do that some of
Speaker 7: them actually wander outside of the colony. They just walk
Speaker 7: in a straight line as far as they can and
Speaker 7: then do the same thing where they buy a leaf,
Speaker 7: but far away from that individual colony. The theory is
Speaker 7: that the fungus is actually trying to get to other
Speaker 7: colonies because if it somehow wipes out that whole colony,
Speaker 7: it doesn't want to because it wants to keep going.
Speaker 7: If it kills off its host entirely, it's not good.
Speaker 7: But it's like the fungus is sending out scouts, right,
Speaker 7: so like try to infect nearby colonies and to perpetuate
Speaker 7: its cycle over and over and over again. Yeah, the
Speaker 7: fucus isn't thinking about this, But this is the majesty
Speaker 7: of evolution and natural selection. This is just a system
Speaker 7: that evolved in lockstep with the you know, the severe
Speaker 7: measures that ants have to keep themselves healthy and to
Speaker 7: keep the colonies safe. The funcus is like, oh, that's
Speaker 7: that's cute. How about this. I'm going to engage your body, muscle, tissues, mind,
Speaker 7: and then dispatch you in this totally creepy way that
Speaker 7: will someday be immortalized in a video game.
Speaker 4: And and there's no chemosensory clues for twenty one days
Speaker 4: that an ant is being puppet mastered by a fungus.
Speaker 7: So yeah, so here's right. This is where it's extra
Speaker 7: interesting is that ants inhabit this sensory space that is
Speaker 7: totally foreign to you and I. Who are you know?
Speaker 7: We have great eyes, sights, pretty good hearing, but we're
Speaker 7: largely visual creatures. Ants are using pheromones to communicate. So
Speaker 7: while that fungus is growing through the ant's body, it
Speaker 7: has to somehow make sure that it doesn't smell weird. Right,
Speaker 7: It's a completely foreign substance, taking up like half of
Speaker 7: the ant's total body weight, which is a lot of
Speaker 7: fungus in an ant. It is somehow a baby detection,
Speaker 7: not only by manipulating the behavior of the ant, but
Speaker 7: somehow manipulating it's scent so the sisters don't smell something
Speaker 7: strange and throw that invader into a garbage sheep outside
Speaker 7: the colony.
Speaker 4: Okay, if they throw sick members in a garbage chap
Speaker 4: outside the colony, do the sick members ever make it
Speaker 4: back or are they usually so almost far gone there's
Speaker 4: no way they can make it back from the graveyard.
Speaker 7: Yeah, if you I mean, if you're that far gone,
Speaker 7: you're that sick, it's it's brutal right. I love ants,
Speaker 7: but that's that's no way to treat your sisters.
Speaker 4: She's the least exciting to look at, so.
Speaker 6: She can be out.
Speaker 7: But it's for the good of the colony, right, So
Speaker 7: they don't want some sort of virus, bacteria, fungus to
Speaker 7: run wild throughout the colony. I feel like these sisters
Speaker 7: are more than happy to make the sacrifice they live
Speaker 7: to further the colony into for the queen's reign, and
Speaker 7: they want to make sure that nothing can interrupt that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're like, take me out if I start being weird,
Speaker 4: just bye.
Speaker 7: Bye, unceremoniously dump me in a graveyard.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I hear that. They even kind of employ the older
Speaker 4: sisters to take them to the graveyard in case they
Speaker 4: die on the way.
Speaker 7: Yeah. It makes it's just I just I love this stuff.
Speaker 7: It's so god damn clever. But not intentionally or consciously clever, right,
Speaker 7: it's just that evolution thinks the stuff up. I'm anthropomorphizing here.
Speaker 7: It's thinking this stuff up because it is solving problems
Speaker 7: for these organisms. In the case of the fungus. It
Speaker 7: needs to solve the problem that it's going to get
Speaker 7: found out if it's not careful. It wasn't that, you know,
Speaker 7: five million years ago Afio cortceps showed up like this
Speaker 7: all of a sudden. It was a step by step
Speaker 7: process that got better and better and better at not
Speaker 7: getting detected, and better and better better at positioning. These
Speaker 7: ants ten inches off the ground with a mature in
Speaker 7: humidity are perfect for its development. It was piece by piece,
Speaker 7: and it has landed on what is in twenty twenty
Speaker 7: three a super interesting thing for us humans to look
Speaker 7: at and put into video games in TV shows. What
Speaker 7: has been happening for a very long time.
Speaker 4: Did you ever get to see this in person? Do
Speaker 4: they grow colonies to test things or how has all
Speaker 4: of this info gathered?
Speaker 7: When I went to the lab at Penn State, they
Speaker 7: have colonies there, I couldn't see an infection in progress,
Speaker 7: but he brought out a bunch of ants that had
Speaker 7: the stocks grown out of their heads. Super fascinating and horrifying. Really,
Speaker 7: so it's actually done, and this is why the science
Speaker 7: is kind of just getting started. It's done by field work.
Speaker 7: You've got to go out and you got to sit
Speaker 7: in a damn jungle for you know, weeks on it.
Speaker 7: If it's a twenty day twenty one day growth cycle
Speaker 7: for this fungus in an ant you got to go
Speaker 7: out there and you got to like put flags on
Speaker 7: the ground, You got to track individual ants, you got
Speaker 7: to look at trails and things like that. So it
Speaker 7: is a truly amazing field work on the part of
Speaker 7: these scientists. And I had also mentioned that they have
Speaker 7: been finding these sort of fungus in North Carolina, which
Speaker 7: a face fight doesn't make sense. Afio is in a
Speaker 7: tropical setting. It's got the right humidity and temperature ten
Speaker 7: inches off the ground. It's got leaves all the time
Speaker 7: that don't fall off those trees that it's able to
Speaker 7: bite onto. Where the North Carolina variety gets extra clever
Speaker 7: is that it doesn't order its ants to bite down
Speaker 7: on the vein of a leaf. It orders them to
Speaker 7: bite onto twigs in a tree. Because if the winter
Speaker 7: comes out around and it hasn't completed its life cycle,
Speaker 7: leaves can fall, and it doesn't fall, it stays there
Speaker 7: and comes out the next spring or summer. So it's
Speaker 7: like it just gets weirder and weird the more that
Speaker 7: scientists go out in the field and find these sorts
Speaker 7: of things. But yes, they can somewhat replicate it in
Speaker 7: the lab, but it's nothing compared to being out in
Speaker 7: the actual nature.
Speaker 4: I mean, how big is an ant's brain like a
Speaker 4: size of a pinhead.
Speaker 7: It's minuscule, but so as a fungus, right, it's grown
Speaker 7: as this sort of network through the ant's body. These
Speaker 7: are very very small scales, and it's not like it's
Speaker 7: an easy thing to take over, right. An ant brain
Speaker 7: may be small, but it's social behavior and interactions are
Speaker 7: extraordinarily complex. So just the fact that it's been able
Speaker 7: to evolve this not only ones, but evolve to target
Speaker 7: individual species, for each individual species of fungus, it's truly
Speaker 7: sem okay.
Speaker 4: So an ant noggin has a quarter of a million
Speaker 4: brain cells, but it's still only point one micro leader,
Speaker 4: which if you're like that number means nothing to me.
Speaker 4: Same So according to beepop calculations, that is one million
Speaker 4: times smaller than your brain, give or take several thousand
Speaker 4: ant brains. Because I don't know what you're working with
Speaker 4: up there, and you know, I see cord aceps in
Speaker 4: supplements a lot like brain boosters and energy boosters, completely
Speaker 4: different cort aceps.
Speaker 7: It's probably the caterpillar one that I was talking about
Speaker 7: that is probably very expensive. I've never used this supplement,
Speaker 7: but that stuff is very rare. Where it's fake, I
Speaker 7: don't know. I just go to a doctor, right and
Speaker 7: have a doctor tell you what's wrong with you. Don't
Speaker 7: take a fungus as a supplement.
Speaker 4: And one reason you might not want to take ohio
Speaker 4: cordyceps supplements is because it costs more than gold. But
Speaker 4: scientists have been able to cultivate another species via insect
Speaker 4: hosts in a lab. They say the fattier, the better,
Speaker 4: and the compound. Molecular biologists are after something called cordyceptin,
Speaker 4: which some studies have shown to stimulate the immune system
Speaker 4: while also being anti inflammatory. However, studies are mixed, opinions
Speaker 4: are still out. I'm not a doctor. There's still a
Speaker 4: lot of research to be done, so dive into the
Speaker 4: library before you bank on a zombie fungus to save
Speaker 4: your life. Speaking of research, you know, I know. The
Speaker 4: bibliography in your book is dazzling. It's so exhaustive. Did
Speaker 4: you ever talk to any scientists who named their zombie
Speaker 4: subjects after movies or zombie lore.
Speaker 7: I do have a really good species name from the book.
Speaker 7: This is one of the acanthusphalin worms. This is the
Speaker 7: genus is Microphallis, which is tiny penis, and their worms,
Speaker 7: and I guess they look like tiny penis. But all
Speaker 7: worms in a sense look like penises to one degree
Speaker 7: or another. I don't know.
Speaker 4: I guess, but there's some worms that are like thirty
Speaker 4: meters long.
Speaker 6: That is true, So I don't know.
Speaker 4: I guess it's all relative.
Speaker 7: It is all that's true. So then within this genus
Speaker 7: there's a species called Microfallis hoffmanni, named after somebody named Hoffman.
Speaker 7: So it's tiny Penis Hoffman. I don't know who this
Speaker 7: person was, if it was a gag that they were
Speaker 7: in on, but I find that purely hilarious.
Speaker 5: Maybe it was an academic feud.
Speaker 7: There are a lot of those out there, so very well.
Speaker 7: I actually I went out of my way to try
Speaker 7: to tack it down for the book, but I couldn't
Speaker 7: find any information on who did this to poor Hoffman.
Speaker 4: Maybe they scrubbed the internet. Maybe they're like just get
Speaker 4: rid of it. I searched way too hard for even
Speaker 4: the tiniest mention of a science feud that could lead
Speaker 4: to such brutal taxonomic retribution. But I came up with
Speaker 4: nothing except that microfallis Hoffmaney was once called microfallas ward
Speaker 4: one out of weer sent true.
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 5: I guess it's a relative. Let's move on, okay.
Speaker 4: Wasps that sit on top of a cockroach and use
Speaker 4: its antenna as reins.
Speaker 5: This is a thing.
Speaker 7: This is a thing. I feel like I'm a broken
Speaker 7: record at this point. It gets, it gets even weird. Yes,
Speaker 7: this is a jewel wasp. And I was actually able
Speaker 7: to see this happen in a lab and it was
Speaker 7: is full tilt horrifying. So a jewel wasp is much
Speaker 7: much smaller than a cockroach, which is its host.
Speaker 4: I needed to understand the scale, so I enjoyed some
Speaker 4: photographs of this beautiful metallic green slender killer with its sad, hapless,
Speaker 4: beefy victim. And I've never wanted to soothe or protect
Speaker 4: a cockroach more. But the size difference is like if
Speaker 4: a German shepherd was attacked by a corky who wrote
Speaker 4: its back, injecting it in the brain with a butt knife.
Speaker 7: And when you are much much smaller than your host,
Speaker 7: you have trouble overwhelming it. So what happens is that
Speaker 7: it's in like a flash and the blink of an eye,
Speaker 7: that loss will kind of saunter up to the cockroach,
Speaker 7: leap on it, and drive its stinger in between its
Speaker 7: two front legs, and this paralyzes the two front legs
Speaker 7: so the cockroach can't bat away. What's coming next, which
Speaker 7: is the loss pulls out its stinger and jams it
Speaker 7: through the cockroach neck and feels around in the cockroach's
Speaker 7: brain with its stinger for two very specific spots where
Speaker 7: it injects venom. It then pulls out its stinger from
Speaker 7: the brain surgery and steps back, and the cockroach, instead
Speaker 7: of freaking out and attacking the wasp as I would
Speaker 7: try to do, it just kind of stands there and
Speaker 7: it obsessively grooms itself. This might have something to do
Speaker 7: with part of the venom component being dopamine, which is
Speaker 7: involved in grooming and insects like the cockroach. So while
Speaker 7: the cockroach is occupied, the wasp runs off and finds
Speaker 7: a burrow and comes back to the cockroach, bites off
Speaker 7: its two antennae and drinks its blood and then grabs
Speaker 7: onto the nub of the antennae and drags. I guess
Speaker 7: drags isn't really the right word because it's so much smaller,
Speaker 7: but kind of guides the cockroach towards the burrow, and
Speaker 7: the cockroach, instead of flying away freaking out, comes along
Speaker 7: willingly and just kind of saunters over to the burrow.
Speaker 7: The wasp jams it in the burrow, comes inside with
Speaker 7: it and lays a single egg on its belly, gets
Speaker 7: out of the burrow and covers it up with rocks
Speaker 7: to imprison the cockroach. So yeah, you can see what's coming.
Speaker 7: So what happens is the egg hatches into a larvae
Speaker 7: begins drinking the juices of the cockroach, eventually gnaws through
Speaker 7: its excess skeleton and gets inside the cockroaches belly grows
Speaker 7: bigger and bigger and bigger on its nutrients, and at
Speaker 7: some point decides to dispatch the cockroach, consume the rest
Speaker 7: of its body, and then emerge from the burrow as
Speaker 7: a fully nourished adult. It is the only thing that
Speaker 7: makes me feel kind of okay with what's happen to
Speaker 7: the cockroaches, maybe that it's so out of it from
Speaker 7: the sting to the brain in two spots, and its
Speaker 7: brain that it doesn't know what's happening. But I really
Speaker 7: cannot imagine a more horrific way to go. And so again,
Speaker 7: like Offiel, corceps involves this super complex interaction between a
Speaker 7: fungus and and why can't the Joe wash just sting
Speaker 7: a cockroach to death and lay an egg on it? Well,
Speaker 7: by locking it alive in a burrow is tomb. Really
Speaker 7: it provides a steady source of fresh food for its
Speaker 7: young that is not The food is not rotting, so
Speaker 7: it's better nutritionally. It's like a little takeout meal that
Speaker 7: it always has to kind of nit at. And yeah,
Speaker 7: it's this. It just almost makes you feel sorry for cockroaches.
Speaker 7: I'm not quite there, but I could see how some
Speaker 7: people might.
Speaker 4: I'm trying to love cockroaches, I really am. This makes
Speaker 4: me more sympathetic to them.
Speaker 7: What brought the song You're trying to live cockroaches?
Speaker 4: I'm trying to because it's it's not fair that I don't.
Speaker 4: I love almost every other bug out there. I've learned
Speaker 4: to appreciate wasps, and I have yet to do a
Speaker 4: cockroach episode. But they're the one bug that I just
Speaker 4: don't want anywhere near me unless they're straight from a
Speaker 4: terrarium and they've been eating like organic bananas their whole lives.
Speaker 4: I think it's because I've seen so many like eating trash.
Speaker 2: But I eat.
Speaker 4: I mean, we eat the same pizza that was my
Speaker 4: pizza a second before I dropped it on the sidewalk.
Speaker 6: So you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: I know I need to give them a place in
Speaker 4: my heart once I get over the gag reflex.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm with you, I'm with you. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 4: What about tarantula hawk wasps?
Speaker 6: So this happens?
Speaker 4: Does this tend to happen mostly in arthropods?
Speaker 7: Yeah? So the tarantula wasp is the hawk wasps is
Speaker 7: super fascinating. It's not in the book per se it
Speaker 7: is is not really a sob Well, I guess kind
Speaker 7: of maybe this It's got maybe the worst sting on
Speaker 7: planet Earth, at least as humans feel it. I just
Speaker 7: toed years ago, right, I interviewed a guy who got
Speaker 7: stung by one of these wasps, and he said, literally,
Speaker 7: the only thing you can do is to lie down
Speaker 7: and scream. That is the only way you're going to
Speaker 7: get through this, it passes. It's not a very long
Speaker 7: lived sting. But just like buckle up, buttercup, this is
Speaker 7: this is gonna be a rough ride. It is so excruciating.
Speaker 4: I know what you're thinking. What about the bullet ants
Speaker 4: sting your brain? Says as was so colorfully recalled in
Speaker 4: the Mirmorcology episode with doctor Terry McGlenn, who has been
Speaker 4: stung by one.
Speaker 8: I've had several students intentionally get themselves stung by bullet
Speaker 8: ants because they wanted to know what it felt like.
Speaker 6: And and it really hur What did they do? What
Speaker 6: kind of reactions happened?
Speaker 8: Well, they just they just scream their heads off and
Speaker 8: then use all kinds of cursing.
Speaker 2: You damn.
Speaker 8: Drifts. So I've worked with bullet ants, I published a
Speaker 8: few papers on them, and I've only been stung by
Speaker 8: them once and that was in the lab when I
Speaker 8: was being dumb. And so it's possible to work with
Speaker 8: them and not get stung if you just treat them
Speaker 8: with respect and understand how they behave.
Speaker 6: Well, hello, what happened? What happened? Tell me everything? You
Speaker 6: were in the lab you got stung with it by
Speaker 6: a bullet ant?
Speaker 8: Where how how so I was in the lab and
Speaker 8: I needed to weigh this ant because I was putting
Speaker 8: We're doing experiments with microbes in their guts, and so
Speaker 8: to weigh the ant, I needed to put it in
Speaker 8: a container and weigh the ant in the container. They
Speaker 8: used to track the weight of the container. But I
Speaker 8: realized that when I weighed the cup, it didn't have
Speaker 8: a lid on it, and I was like, oh, I
Speaker 8: need to weigh a cup with the lid. But I
Speaker 8: wasn't thinking that that cup that had the lid on
Speaker 8: it was the one that had the ant that I
Speaker 8: was weighing in it. I just wasn't thinking. And so
Speaker 8: the moment I got the lid.
Speaker 4: Off, PS, if you haven't already, now would be a
Speaker 4: good time to cover the years of your children or
Speaker 4: my mom.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 8: It just got me right on the tip of my finger,
Speaker 8: and I was like fuck, fu fu, and I flung
Speaker 8: the ad like somewhere in the balance room and it
Speaker 8: was roaming around Meanwhile. So I have like like this,
Speaker 8: you know, sophomore in college. I'm showing her how to
Speaker 8: do this experiment for the rest of the summer.
Speaker 7: That she sees this.
Speaker 8: It was like, oh my god, it was so bad.
Speaker 8: It was really really bad.
Speaker 4: But how does it compare to the blue, black, amber
Speaker 4: winged beast of the tarantula hawk wasp? Okay, well, there's
Speaker 4: this bug guy, his name's Justin oh Schmidt, who apparently
Speaker 4: is cursed and has been stung by just every painful thing.
Speaker 4: Who better to formulate the Schmidt Pain Index? Literally no one,
Speaker 4: because no one wants to go through that, so we
Speaker 4: all trust Justin's accounts. So Schmidt says that the tarantula
Speaker 4: hawksting feels like quote, a running hair dryer that has
Speaker 4: just been dropped into your bubble bath, but that fades
Speaker 4: after a few minutes. The bullet ansting, however, he describes
Speaker 4: as pure, intense, brilliant pain that can last up to
Speaker 4: twelve hours. But the point is, just don't piss off
Speaker 4: a tarantula hawk wasp.
Speaker 7: My bibiz like this was did not evolve to cause
Speaker 7: us pain. Right. It's not a really beautiful wasp, but
Speaker 7: it goes after tarantulas. It just it stings the Bejesus
Speaker 7: out of them, and it's big enough to where it
Speaker 7: can actually drag away the tarantula and put it in
Speaker 7: a burrow. So it doesn't have to do this complex
Speaker 7: behavioral manipulation. The jewel wasp pass too, but I would
Speaker 7: not go anywhere a new one. It's in the desert
Speaker 7: in the Southwest. Just if you see wasp walk the
Speaker 7: other way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've seen him in real life and they're gorgeous. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but I get excited because that means there's tarantulas around.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, this is what I'm an indoorsy person.
Speaker 5: By the way.
Speaker 6: Ps.
Speaker 4: Recently, I was on a hike in the Santa Monica
Speaker 4: Mountains and I saw tarantola in the wild and it
Speaker 4: was the most thrilling celebsiting I've ever seen. In la
Speaker 4: And in the late summer, man spiders go lumbering about,
Speaker 4: just brave and horny, and I got to witness one
Speaker 4: with my wide eyes. Anyway, back to other scary things
Speaker 4: like if you can turn into a fungus zombie, which
Speaker 4: was on the vulnerable mines of patrons Gen Squirrel, Alvarez, Fiberglass,
Speaker 4: Holly Giorgio, Emily Burns, Kayaki Shimoto, Dave Brewer, and Mitch
Speaker 4: can any of these cordyceps? Can it infect humans or
Speaker 4: is it just mammals or like, no, we're too warm.
Speaker 4: Don't worry about it.
Speaker 7: We are in luckily no danger hair So okay, there
Speaker 7: have been reports of you can get infected by a fungus, fine,
Speaker 7: like a foot fungus. Right, it's a nile fungus infection,
Speaker 7: don and your brain is not manipulating your behavior. These
Speaker 7: are so specific in their manipulations that there's just no
Speaker 7: way short of I don't know, ten fifteen million years
Speaker 7: of very specific evolution where the fungus somehow evolves away
Speaker 7: from ants and it too humans. But why would it? Right,
Speaker 7: Like ants are so abundant on planet Earth, it's this constant,
Speaker 7: massive food source for these fungui to actually do their thing.
Speaker 7: So no, do not worry. We of course, as humans
Speaker 7: do have behaviorally manipulating parasites, but fungus is not one
Speaker 7: of them. Last of us, I think is a great
Speaker 7: rendition of what it might happen. But honestly, I feel
Speaker 7: like it's so much more fascinating what it's actually doing
Speaker 7: to ants versus what it theoretically could do to humans.
Speaker 4: I want to get to those questions about humans, So
Speaker 4: let's ask some questions from patrons. Can we may we
Speaker 4: love it nice?
Speaker 5: Okay?
Speaker 4: But before we get there a quick detour to donate
Speaker 4: to a cause chosen by mister Simon, which is the
Speaker 4: World Wildlife Fund, which works in over one hundred countries
Speaker 4: to conserve and restore biodiversity, to reduce humanity's environmental footprint,
Speaker 4: and to ensure the sustainable use of natural resources to
Speaker 4: support current and future generations. Find out more at Worldwildlife
Speaker 4: dot org. And that donation was made possible by sponsors.
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Speaker 4: Okay, let's see exactly what's on your mind. Okay, Greg Wallach,
Speaker 4: Leela Laco, Earl of graml Kin, Tiger Gury, and Cynthia B.
Speaker 4: Want to know about toxoplasmosis. Greg asked, does toxoplasmosis turn
Speaker 4: a person into a crazy cat lady like it does
Speaker 4: with rats? Laila Laco wants to know do toxoplasmosis infections
Speaker 4: really change people's actions and personalities or zephyelin flam any
Speaker 4: idea great questions.
Speaker 7: And this is a very fascinating case of a parasite
Speaker 7: that is probably in some way, some subtle ways, manipulating
Speaker 7: human behavior. So Toxoplasma, this is a microbe that does
Speaker 7: not belong in humans. Life cycle actually goes between rats
Speaker 7: and cats. So in order to complete its life cycle
Speaker 7: within a rat or a mouse, it needs to get
Speaker 7: eaten by a cat. And to do that it actually
Speaker 7: manipulates the behavior of a rodent to not only not
Speaker 7: be afraid of cats, but to actually be attracted to
Speaker 7: their urine. Bad survival technique on account of that leading
Speaker 7: to getting eaten very quickly. But this is just like
Speaker 7: AFIO is mind controlling ants, which is like those a
Speaker 7: catocephaline worms are kind of piling around the amphipods and
Speaker 7: in those lakes. The microbe is using those rodents as
Speaker 7: vehicles to get into cats. So if they're getting into cats,
Speaker 7: they're coming out in cat poop. And this is why
Speaker 7: pregnant women should in no way be anywhere near cat
Speaker 7: poop because this has the toxo plasma and from that
Speaker 7: you can get toxoplasmosis, which is actually very dangerous for
Speaker 7: the developing child.
Speaker 4: All Right, the CDC echoes this, and pregnant people, if
Speaker 4: you must change cat litter, do so with gloves and
Speaker 4: ppe and wash your hands, and also make someone else
Speaker 4: do it, because you are growing a child, and that
Speaker 4: child could develop vision loss, seizures, or cognitive difficulties if
Speaker 4: infected in utero. And yeah, millions of people have toxo
Speaker 4: actually billions, about ten percent of the American population, but yeah,
Speaker 4: they think fifty percent worldwide, and outdoor cats and stray
Speaker 4: kitties are more likely to have it from hunting infected animals.
Speaker 4: So this is another vote for keeping your cats inside.
Speaker 4: You can see the Pelinology episode for more on that
Speaker 4: and yeh taso. It's not just for litterboxes. According to
Speaker 4: the CDC, it can live in the environment for many
Speaker 4: months and can contaminate soil and water, fruits and veggies, sandboxes,
Speaker 4: grass where animals graze, or any place where an infected
Speaker 4: cat may have left you a turd. Gardening, wash your myths,
Speaker 4: wash your veggies. So mind controlling parasites. They're scarier than
Speaker 4: ghosts who are just sticking around in the attic with
Speaker 4: some chains.
Speaker 7: There's a growing body of research showing some behavioral issues
Speaker 7: around people who are infact with toxic plasmosis. This is
Speaker 7: I think about a third of the population and it's
Speaker 7: been linked to aggression. There was a study that found
Speaker 7: that people tend to be in more car crashes with
Speaker 7: toxic plasmosis, which also might be a link to aggression.
Speaker 7: It really comes down to this, I think, really this
Speaker 7: fallacy that we as humans are fully in control of
Speaker 7: what we are doing, where there is all sorts of
Speaker 7: things happening in our brain that we have no control over.
Speaker 7: I'm the specific believer in free will, if you can
Speaker 7: believe it, but there's also these outside influences, so it's
Speaker 7: like you can get toxicoplasma in your brain and it's
Speaker 7: not like it intentionally doing it, but because were mammals
Speaker 7: were related to mice and rats in the way past,
Speaker 7: but still related, it's just kind of a byproduct. It
Speaker 7: does some strange things to our brain as well, and
Speaker 7: then it makes you think like, well, what other kinds
Speaker 7: of microbes have gotten in our brain and are subtly
Speaker 7: affecting our behavior. It's a good question and maybe one
Speaker 7: that not many people want to think about.
Speaker 9: Earl A.
Speaker 4: Grammaken and Kristin Rosenblaum want to know about rabies. Kristin
Speaker 4: asks what are different methods used to take over the
Speaker 4: nervous system. I'm thinking about rabies.
Speaker 7: When you think about what rabies does to people, which
Speaker 7: is truly terrible, and the myth of the zombie, they
Speaker 7: align very well. So rabies is not meant to be
Speaker 7: in humans. You get it in raccoons, coyotes, these sorts
Speaker 7: of things that undergo these really diabolical manipulations. So the
Speaker 7: virus makes the animal hyper aggressive, It proliferates in the saliva,
Speaker 7: so when it orders, basically that that creature to bite
Speaker 7: on to another animal. That's the way that it transmits
Speaker 7: itself between different hosts. And of course we are not
Speaker 7: meant as humans to be part of that life cycle
Speaker 7: for the rabies virus, but we just happen to be
Speaker 7: also manipulated by its. Again, this is truly diabolical stuff.
Speaker 7: So people with rabies, it's essentially a death sentence. Almost
Speaker 7: nobody who has contracted rabies has survived it unless you
Speaker 7: get the vaccine. I want to say this, and I
Speaker 7: truly mean that. This is not like, oh, I should
Speaker 7: go watch this sort of thing. There are videos of this.
Speaker 7: I would not if you come across and don't ever
Speaker 7: watch it. It's really really difficult stuff to watch because
Speaker 7: you can see the person struggling. They can be hyper aggressive,
Speaker 7: like a raccoon or a coyote could, but they're also
Speaker 7: afraid of water. So this is a manipulation on the
Speaker 7: part of the parasite for its other hosts to keep
Speaker 7: those animals from drinking and washing the virus out of
Speaker 7: its mouth. So there's more that virus where when it
Speaker 7: bites on, it's better able to transmit. It's a truly
Speaker 7: horrific thing to happen to humans, and it's probably the
Speaker 7: basis of the zombie myth, which is like this person
Speaker 7: that is locked up, kind of mumbling and really struggling.
Speaker 4: I know he said not to and of course I did.
Speaker 4: And yeah, grainy footage of blurred children's faces, one agitated
Speaker 4: in a hospital bed, recoiling at water offered by his
Speaker 4: really despondent mom. It was really gutting and to know
Speaker 4: how grim the prognosis is, it's just awful. And while
Speaker 4: most infections happen with a bite, you can contract rabies
Speaker 4: from saliva on an open wound, and once it's contracted,
Speaker 4: Raby's is so deadly that even if you wake up
Speaker 4: with a bat in your room, the medical protocol is
Speaker 4: post exposure prophylactics, which is a series of shots just
Speaker 4: in case you were scratched or bitten in your sleep. Obviously,
Speaker 4: with larger infected animals, it's easier to discern if you've
Speaker 4: had a bite. So while Raby's deaths are rare in
Speaker 4: the US, be careful make sure your pets have their shots.
Speaker 4: Rabies is a real zero out of ten. Would not
Speaker 4: recommend no stars on Yelp, double thumbs down. A couple
Speaker 4: of people wanted to know. Uh otter k Hosts aka
Speaker 4: Chris p wanted to know. According to the Worldwide Web,
Speaker 4: there's a powder that could be inhaled generally unwillingly, which
Speaker 4: makes the inhaler easily manipulated. How about the veracity of
Speaker 4: Haitian zombies with textro dotoxins from pofferfish? Anything else in
Speaker 4: human beings that would count as zombification? Or does one
Speaker 4: have to be alive to do behavioral manipulation? Or can
Speaker 4: a plant do behavioral manipulation?
Speaker 7: Yeah, you got to be a less So like the
Speaker 7: proper zombie in popular culture comes back from the dead,
Speaker 7: right as far as we know, that's not possible for people. Luckily,
Speaker 7: that would be very problematic if people started popping up
Speaker 7: from the dead.
Speaker 4: Really would legally having to go to the courthouse and
Speaker 4: reverse record.
Speaker 6: That would be such a nightmare, a lot of paperwork,
Speaker 6: so much paperwork.
Speaker 7: We don't need that.
Speaker 4: Petrodoxin PSS the magic pixie dust derived from puffer fish
Speaker 4: or newts, and it can cause very unfun reactions like
Speaker 4: numbness and barfing and motor paralysis, respiratory arrest, and the
Speaker 4: big D that sends you up to heaven. Cooking doesn't
Speaker 4: even neutralize it, and it can get you via ingestion, injection, inhalation,
Speaker 4: or break in your skin. It's an opportunist and it
Speaker 4: apparently blocks fast voltage gated sodium channels in the nervous system.
Speaker 4: But more importantly, there's no antidote. So if you're on
Speaker 4: vacation and your drunk brother in law challenges you to
Speaker 4: try the pufferfish, just say no, man, or say I
Speaker 4: hate you, Derek.
Speaker 5: Everybody hates you.
Speaker 6: Do you think that.
Speaker 4: Human beings can be zombies to other human beings by
Speaker 4: engaging your behavioral manipulation?
Speaker 7: Oh my god, I think that's that's the main route
Speaker 7: of our manipulation. I'd almost rather be taken over by
Speaker 7: a fungus manipulated by people for the rest of my life.
Speaker 7: But yeah, it's like it gets at these really sticky
Speaker 7: questions about free will, right, Like, if we are able
Speaker 7: to fully parts the way that consciousness works, then would
Speaker 7: realize that, oh man, we're just kind of chemicals and
Speaker 7: electricity and gobs of fat in our brains. Right if
Speaker 7: parasites are so just proficient at hijacking these systems, reaching
Speaker 7: across the tree of life like a fungus is an
Speaker 7: entirely different animal, not even entirely different organism than an ant. Right,
Speaker 7: there's fully assuming the body of another organism. It's kind
Speaker 7: of a profound question. It's not my profound question. I
Speaker 7: didn't think this up. But when does an ant that's
Speaker 7: infected by afia corceps stop being an ant and start
Speaker 7: being something new, something like a zombie?
Speaker 8: Like?
Speaker 7: What is the dividing line there? It's weird to think about,
Speaker 7: but it's again not just having an ants happening all
Speaker 7: across the animal kingdom.
Speaker 4: So we've done quantum montology about the universe and if
Speaker 4: it's real, But one's up for a metaphysical ontology episode
Speaker 4: on the philosophical study of being. That one might be
Speaker 4: the scariest of all, because it's much easier to just
Speaker 4: play video games or scroll on TikTok instead of feeling
Speaker 4: our feelings and confronting our own existence. Anyway, a bunch
Speaker 4: of people had good questions about applications in humans. Emily Straffer,
Speaker 4: Dave Cannon, Isabelle Leclerc, Mark Phillips, Anne Marie Vertzpicki wanted
Speaker 4: to know, well, in Anne Marie's words, what are neurologists
Speaker 4: saying about parasitic mind control, and Emily asked, is it
Speaker 4: possible to target only certain parts of our brain for
Speaker 4: mind control? Could we use something like this to treat
Speaker 4: depression or other mental illness?
Speaker 7: Yeah? Great questions. So in the book, I visited a
Speaker 7: scientist that Nyu, who is working with rodents with this
Speaker 7: fascinating system actually injecting materials that kind of break into
Speaker 7: individual cells in the brain and respond then to light.
Speaker 7: So she's able to shine light into the brain and
Speaker 7: activate parts of that brain, one of which being for ASI.
Speaker 7: It can actually make these rodents much more aggressive. So
Speaker 7: it's like learning more about how the brain operates in
Speaker 7: these ways. And I don't think she's looking to do
Speaker 7: the same thing to humans, like some sort of diabolical
Speaker 7: lab where she's shining light in people's brains and making
Speaker 7: them angry. But it's I think of this really fascinating
Speaker 7: notion that as we learn more about the human brain,
Speaker 7: what makes it tick. Hopefully that does not go in
Speaker 7: the direction of somebody saying, well, if I know what
Speaker 7: makes it tick, these are the ways I can behaviorally
Speaker 7: manipulate those brains, like coffeo cordys EPs might in a
Speaker 7: South American jungle.
Speaker 4: So in Plight a Living Dead, you can see the
Speaker 4: chapter titled the brain Hacked Rat that wore a funny
Speaker 4: hat and destroyed the notion of free Will, which details
Speaker 4: a work of neuroscientist doctor Anagret Faulkner now at Princeton,
Speaker 4: who uses optogenetics to stimulate rodent aggression through fiber optic
Speaker 4: cables in the hypothalmus a very specifically infected subject. Involves
Speaker 4: a bit of neurosurgery virology technology to accomplish this mind control,
Speaker 4: and very complicated. It seems a lot easier just to
Speaker 4: give the mice tiny little phones and show them pictures
Speaker 4: of richer, prettier mice with better lives. That's probably a
Speaker 4: faster process too. On that note, Buddy Freaking Gyerson and
Speaker 4: Andrew McAdams both had questions Buddy's words, what are your
Speaker 4: thoughts on fast versus slow zombies? And Andrew asked, when
Speaker 4: humans become zombies, do you think they're going to be
Speaker 4: slow moving like Donna the Dead or will they have
Speaker 4: dramatically increased physical abilities?
Speaker 7: Love the question. I think that this looking at these
Speaker 7: parasites and then natural world gives us some actually very
Speaker 7: fascinating windows into this. So if you are off your
Speaker 7: cortyceps infecting an ant, you don't really necessarily need to
Speaker 7: worry about the speed with which you're controlling that ant, right,
Speaker 7: You just don't want it to look weird enough that
Speaker 7: it gets discovered by its sisters and dumped in the graveyard.
Speaker 7: But there are other parasites out there, so like the
Speaker 7: camp the cephalens that I was talking about that in fact,
Speaker 7: the little crustaceans and the lakes, they need to make
Speaker 7: sure that their hosts are not only full control of
Speaker 7: their bodies, but able to get to those specific parts
Speaker 7: of the lake, either to the surface to be eaten
Speaker 7: by a bird or farther down the water column to
Speaker 7: be eaten by a fish. So when we're thinking about
Speaker 7: parasites turning their hosts into vehicles, into these sorts of zombies,
Speaker 7: do you want a fast zombie? Sometimes yeah, for sure,
Speaker 7: Like if you need it to complete your life cycle.
Speaker 7: Does the horsehair worm in the cricket need it to
Speaker 7: be well enough to get into that body of water. Absolutely,
Speaker 7: But there are others like the jewel wasp and the cockroach.
Speaker 7: There's no speed considerations here. It just stupefies the host.
Speaker 7: So what would be the case in humans, I would
Speaker 7: argue that it would be a speed thing. Like, if
Speaker 7: it's about the virus ordering around the human host to
Speaker 7: bite more humans, you don't want a slow, bumbling zombie host.
Speaker 7: You want like a twenty eight days later, super speedy
Speaker 7: zombie that can bite more and more people. Because it's
Speaker 7: like from an evolutionary sense, if the virus can pass
Speaker 7: itself on to more and more hosts, it's able to
Speaker 7: further more generations of speedy zombies that sort of thing.
Speaker 7: So yeah, looking to the natural world, I would vote
Speaker 7: on us becoming fast ones. I feel like that's a
Speaker 7: controversial topic and I'm probably going to get dragged for
Speaker 7: it on the internet.
Speaker 8: Thought, what a drag.
Speaker 4: Sarah RL wants to know. Have you ever dressed as
Speaker 4: a zomb b for Halloween? Such as the insect or
Speaker 4: an Apopephalus borealis. I don't know what that is, but
Speaker 4: maybe you do.
Speaker 7: Oh, yes, the decapitating flies. I have not dressed up
Speaker 7: as any of these animals. Unfortunately. I feel like like
Speaker 7: at a Halloween party, it would take a very long
Speaker 7: time for me to disc what it is I'm doing here,
Speaker 7: and then the people would just go mad. Eyes would
Speaker 7: blaze over, and they would they would walk away, which
Speaker 7: is fine. I don't like talking to people with parties anyway,
Speaker 7: so forget about it.
Speaker 4: Our eyes wouldn't glaze over because ant decapitating flies are thrilling.
Speaker 4: But the short version, according to math writing, is that
Speaker 4: a ford fly pierces a host ant between the legs,
Speaker 4: launches an egg torpedo into its body, and then it
Speaker 4: gets out of dodge. It's like, thanks man. It lets
Speaker 4: the ant do the whole pregnancy part, and the larvae
Speaker 4: migrates to the ant's head, living off of its sweet
Speaker 4: sweet juices before mind controlling it to leave the colony
Speaker 4: to more humid leaf litter, and then put ah off
Speaker 4: pops its head and like Marilyn out of birthday cake,
Speaker 4: now you have another homicidal fly. Oh the circle of
Speaker 4: life is so beautiful and brutal and disgusting. Michael max
Speaker 4: Joran wants to know massapora and cicadas going bananas?
Speaker 5: What's up with that?
Speaker 7: Flies? Salt shakers of death? I think is what what
Speaker 7: they're referring to. Cicadas get infected with this fungus, So
Speaker 7: what this fungus does? It's not an intricate manipulator like
Speaker 7: Opfield cordyceps is, but it just rots away the abdomen
Speaker 7: of the cicada to the point where you can have
Speaker 7: like you find cicada's kind of dragging themselves around, missing
Speaker 7: basically the entirety of their abdomen that it's just been
Speaker 7: eaten away. So this one's fascinating because this was not
Speaker 7: me who thought of the name flying salt shaker of death.
Speaker 7: But when it's flying through the air, it's actually shedding
Speaker 7: those scores, which then fall onto more cicadas, not unlike
Speaker 7: the way that Opfiod corda steps is operating. It's just
Speaker 7: not manipulating the behavior of the cicada as much.
Speaker 4: Yes, we have a whole episode on cicadas. It's linked
Speaker 4: in the show notes. And a highlight of my life
Speaker 4: was catching the emergence of brood ten in the Midwest
Speaker 4: a few years back, and cicadas, you can sing in
Speaker 4: my ear as loudly as you want, even though I'm
Speaker 4: never going to mate with you. Potato Popper wants to
Speaker 4: know what about the caterpillar that gets ants to be
Speaker 4: at zombie bodyguards by having them consume its secretions of
Speaker 4: dopamine that make them less likely to move away from
Speaker 4: the caterpillar and more likely to be aggressive.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's a super cool one. There's a wasp that
Speaker 7: injects its eggs into caterpillars as well, and they grow
Speaker 7: throughout its body and then erupt through the caterpillar skin.
Speaker 7: And the caterpillar doesn't die because as they're erupting, they're
Speaker 7: shedding parts of their skin that plug up the wounds,
Speaker 7: and it keeps the caterpillar alive to act as a
Speaker 7: bodyguard as those little babies are developing. So that's fun.
Speaker 7: But yeah, so caterpillars actually have all these really cool
Speaker 7: interactions with ants and kind of terrifying ways. Do I
Speaker 7: have time for like a like a really interesting one? Okay,
Speaker 7: So yeah, there's this really lazily named species called the
Speaker 7: large blue butterfly. It is what it says on the tin.
Speaker 7: It's caterpillar does something even crazier. It lets itself get
Speaker 7: captured by ants that take it back into the colony,
Speaker 7: which would like presumably turned into food, right, but no,
Speaker 7: it also releases pheromones that trick those worker ants into
Speaker 7: thinking that it is not only part of the colony
Speaker 7: but actually the queen, so they dote on it, they
Speaker 7: take care of it. They feed the colony's actual larvae
Speaker 7: to this caterpillar that just goes to town on these things,
Speaker 7: tricking the ants into thinking that just one of their own.
Speaker 7: Gets even crazier because there's a hyperparasitoid wasp that comes
Speaker 7: into all of this, releases its own pheromones as it's
Speaker 7: entering the colony, and this freaks out the workers. They
Speaker 7: run around going absolutely bonkers. In the confusion. The wasp
Speaker 7: comes up to that caterpillar, which had itself zombified the ants,
Speaker 7: injects it with its eggs and leaves the nest like
Speaker 7: it's zombies all the way down, right, it went after
Speaker 7: the other. But caterpillars, I love that question because they're
Speaker 7: so cute and cuddly and lovely, but it can be
Speaker 7: a little bit diabolical. Rough, Yeah, about grasping opportunities, right,
Speaker 7: You got.
Speaker 5: To get your bag, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Last listener question, let's end on a bummer. Robert g
Speaker 4: Auditt and Caitlin Kalinowski wanted to know about global warming.
Speaker 4: Robert's words. With a global temperature increase, there are signs
Speaker 4: fungi might be adapting to live at our slowly dropping
Speaker 4: body temperatures now at ninety seven point five, down from
Speaker 4: ninety eight point six. I didn't know that. Are we
Speaker 4: at risk for pathogenic brain killing fungi like cortysceps as
Speaker 4: time goes on? Shiesh.
Speaker 7: They say, yeah, A great question, and it's a heavy
Speaker 7: field within climate science, which is determining which pathogens we
Speaker 7: have to worry about more on a warming planet. So where,
Speaker 7: for instance, will the conditions warmer, perhaps wetter conditions become
Speaker 7: better for fungi. Where are we going to get like
Speaker 7: the expansion of malaria because mosquitoes are moving into new areas.
Speaker 7: It's a great question and not a bright topic, but
Speaker 7: it's going to be super important for public health going forward.
Speaker 7: That's much worrying about, like behaviorally manipulating parasites like these
Speaker 7: songi that we've been talking about, but certainly all manner
Speaker 7: of others that are going to expand their ranges due
Speaker 7: to climate change. That's a I'm sorry, that's a bummer.
Speaker 7: I don't know how to phrase that.
Speaker 4: Listen, there's no good way to phrase that large of
Speaker 4: bad news. And if that doesn't get you might be
Speaker 4: the microplastics again. His latest book about microplastics is called
Speaker 4: a Poison Like no Other, and it's linked in the
Speaker 4: show Not. It's just in case you'd like more info
Speaker 4: and terror in your life. I'm just asking two bummer
Speaker 4: questions in a row, but last questions that I always ask.
Speaker 4: Usually I say, what's the worst thing about your job?
Speaker 4: But I want to know what the SUCKI ist zombie
Speaker 4: movie or something that bums you out about zombies, or
Speaker 4: something that sucks about zombies, or the worst artistic interpretation
Speaker 4: you've seen.
Speaker 7: I think what bothers me most is just how they
Speaker 7: keep coming, like not unlike zombies. It's run its course.
Speaker 7: Let's move on from zombies. Let's maybe think of something.
Speaker 7: And this is coming from a person wrote a book
Speaker 7: about something like I'm sick of hearing about them because
Speaker 7: I also I ruined it for myself, because I feel
Speaker 7: like what has happened in nature, what has evolved many, many,
Speaker 7: many times independently across the tree of life, is so
Speaker 7: much more interesting than what some hackey screenwriter cobbled together
Speaker 7: in a coke fueled afternoon. But that's just me being grumpy.
Speaker 4: Favorite thing about writing the book, favorite story, or favorite
Speaker 4: experience traveling.
Speaker 7: I think the walking through New Mexico looking for the
Speaker 7: horsehair worms. There was the guy that side just walk
Speaker 7: me around. There was a sign that said like beware
Speaker 7: of bears and mountain lions or something along those lines,
Speaker 7: and he's like, don't worry about I've never seen a
Speaker 7: bear or amountain lime out here. It's like, well, they
Speaker 7: put the sign up for some sort of reason. He
Speaker 7: was a good guy. I loved him, and I guess
Speaker 7: about him in the book, but I don't. I'm not
Speaker 7: a hiker. I actually despise hiker. I'm sorry, what but
Speaker 7: that was the best hike that I've ever been on
Speaker 7: because I got to hold a handful of horsehair worms.
Speaker 7: And it's it's just like I feel, this is a
Speaker 7: stupid word. I didn't use the word blessed ever, but
Speaker 7: it's the best way I can think of, Like I'm
Speaker 7: blessed to have a job that allows me to not
Speaker 7: only go do things like that, but to go to
Speaker 7: work every day and like learn from very smart people
Speaker 7: as you do, like people that are maybe two or
Speaker 7: three times smarter than me. It's a humbling experience, but
Speaker 7: it's also I get to learn every day, and it's
Speaker 7: I love it, every every minute of it.
Speaker 5: Is there a reason you're hate hiking? Just curious?
Speaker 7: I don't so it's I understand it's stupid, and I'm
Speaker 7: going to get dried for this as well, but I
Speaker 7: I just don't like that there's nothing at the end
Speaker 7: right Like I am. Okay, I could walk fifty miles
Speaker 7: through a city if there's some cool destination like a bookstore,
Speaker 7: and then I'm totally fine walking all the way back.
Speaker 7: I don't understand walking up a mountain to see like
Speaker 7: a rock or a tree. How do you like if
Speaker 7: you've seen one tree, you've seen all of them. I'm
Speaker 7: not saying the outdoors are bad. I'm just saying that
Speaker 7: the method of experiencing the outdoors by way of a
Speaker 7: hike is my less than favorite thing to do. In
Speaker 7: addition to the predators out there, don't forget about the
Speaker 7: bears and mountain lions. What if they eat you.
Speaker 4: I'm fueled by snacks and knowing that when you get
Speaker 4: to where you're going, you stop and you have a
Speaker 4: snack and then you go back. So a lot of
Speaker 4: the time I'm thinking about whatever kind of trail mix
Speaker 4: with m and ms and stuff we got.
Speaker 7: I've never thought about it in the snack perspective, but
Speaker 7: that makes sense. Maybe I should just let up a
Speaker 7: backpack with good snacks.
Speaker 4: Well, I wish you many years of indoor activities.
Speaker 7: Thank you.
Speaker 4: Please keep writing books because they're some of my favorite.
Speaker 4: You and Mary Roach are just killing the game out there.
Speaker 4: Thank you just writing such good stuff. So I hope
Speaker 4: people pick up this one and then if they're too
Speaker 4: happy about it, get your Microplastics book.
Speaker 7: Yeah, want a sweet dose of reality, buckle up.
Speaker 5: This has been a joy. Thank you so much.
Speaker 7: Likewise, I really appreciate it. Good talking on so.
Speaker 4: Ask smart authors, unsmart questions and you're bound to stagger
Speaker 4: away with just a brainload of goodies. Thank you so
Speaker 4: much to mapal Matt Simon for obliging and telling me
Speaker 4: all about these critters. His book Plight of the Living
Speaker 4: Dead details even more and it's just such a fun read.
Speaker 4: And his new book, A Poison Like No Other, is
Speaker 4: linked in the show notes for you. There's also a
Speaker 4: link to the World Wildlife Fund. We are at ologies
Speaker 4: on Instagram and Twitter. I'm at Ali Ward with one
Speaker 4: l on both smologies or kid friendly versions of classic episodes,
Speaker 4: and they're linked in the show notes or up at
Speaker 4: aliwar dot com, slash smologies. Thank you Zigredriguez, Thomas and
Speaker 4: Jared Sleeper of mind gem Media for editing those, as
Speaker 4: well as Mercedes Maitland to Aaron Talbert for adminting theologies
Speaker 4: podcast Facebook group. Emily White of the Wordery makes our
Speaker 4: professional transcripts. Susan Hale is our lord and managing director.
Speaker 4: Noel Dilworth's scheduling producer, Kelly ar Dwyer makes the website,
Speaker 4: and the puppeteer of our editing process is Mercedes Maitland
Speaker 4: of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn made the theme music and
Speaker 4: if you stick around to the end of the episode,
Speaker 4: I tell you a secret. And last week, okay, okay,
Speaker 4: buckle up, I was coming back in the East Coast
Speaker 4: on the plane with Sharrett and it had been like
Speaker 4: a weirdly hellish travel day with this layover and a storm,
Speaker 4: the worst turbulence I've ever been in. And we were
Speaker 4: sitting in the back row of the plane right next
Speaker 4: to the toilet, and we had our ten year old daughter, Gremy,
Speaker 4: who is a delight and also a dog, and we
Speaker 4: were landing after this really long twelve hour airport day
Speaker 4: and I went to wake Gremmy up under the seat
Speaker 4: and her ear felt cold, so I shook her and
Speaker 4: she didn't move or wake up, and she hates her
Speaker 4: pause being touched, so I was hunched overkind of touching
Speaker 4: her paws.
Speaker 5: Nothing.
Speaker 4: And I told Jarret kind of in a panic, and
Speaker 4: he tried to wake her. Nothing, and he pulled her
Speaker 4: travel carrier out of the seat, and we were both
Speaker 4: on this plane screaming Grammy, Grammy, and my whole life
Speaker 4: just changed because Gmy had died on a plane while
Speaker 4: we were sitting two feet away, totally unaware that she
Speaker 4: passed under our feet. And I almost threw up. Jarret
Speaker 4: was about to start crying, and then her head popped up.
Speaker 4: She's like, hey, guys, you get any cheese. I don't
Speaker 4: know how she was sleeping so soundly. We thought for
Speaker 4: a good minute she was dead. So hug your loved ones,
Speaker 4: because it's not often that they spontaneously resurrect from the
Speaker 4: seeming dead a week before Halloween.
Speaker 5: Anyway, Very lucky.
Speaker 9: Or bye pacadermatology, mombiology, ydo zoology, lithology and technology, meteorology, paratology, anthology.
Speaker 6: You are going to feel like a zombie after this.
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