It’s zombie season! At least if you’re watching the new season of the fungal thriller “The Last of Us,” airing right now on Max, which chronicles what happens after a fungus turns most of humanity into zombies.
It’s fiction for us, but for some organisms on the planet, it’s more like a documentary. The fungus that zombifies humanity in the show is based on Ophiocordyceps, a real fungal group that infects ants, takes over their brains and bodies, and turns them into spore factories.
But this isn’t the only example of real-life zombies. Science writer Mindy Weisberger found a whole book’s worth of stories about horrifying and creative zombies and zombie-makers that inhabit the Earth, which she writes about in Rise of the Zombie Bugs: The Surprising Science of Parasitic Mind-Control.
Host Flora Lichtman sits down with Weisberger to talk about the creepy and inventive lifestyles of these parasites, and how studying these zombifiers can teach us about ourselves.
