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The environment is important and we should preserve it, at least that’s what Captain Planet said. Many terrible things are destroying the environment and the creatures that live in our forests, rivers and seas but there are a few dangers out there that are far scarier then anything you can imagine. Nature in all its cruelty has created organisms that in effect ‘zombify’ their hosts in order to breed and reproduce. Fortunately, these parasites are only prevalent in non-human creatures, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t know everything about them, you know… just in case.
Zombees!
Don’t judge us for the pun because it’s not a pun. It’s the shocking truth. Time magazine reports that parasitic flies lay their eggs in the abdomen of honey bees and their larve grow inside the bee. These larvae then emerge as fully-grown flies by breaking out of the bee’s thorax but before that, they insidiously control the behavior of the bees and we can’t seem to understand how!?
The parasite larvae are able to control the bee’s movements and they steer the host bee out of its colony and towards light sources. The larvae effectively take over the bee’s last remaining hours of life. There is no sting in the tail as the poor bee dies a horrifyingly nasty death and the fly goes on to adulthood looking to infect more bees.
It gets much worse though because nature has many more merciless little critters.There are evil parasitic insects such as wasps and flukes as well as mind-control fungi and all the stories involving these creatures make the name Bhayank Maut sound like a vacation spot in Thailand . Trust me, the bee story is probably the tamest of the lot. Mother Nature can be a total bitch. For real.
Mind-control comes in small packages.
The Brain Parasite
The name says it all really. The parasite is a single-celled organism called Toxoplasma gondii, which usually resides in the guts of cats and they breed by shedding eggs that get picked up by rats and other animals that cats eat. The parasite infects the brain of these animals with cysts, which affect the host in only one way so far. Rats which are infected by the virus lose their inhibition towards predators and are simply more likely to die. The scary part is that half of humanity is said to already be infected by this very same parasite!
Now it doesn’t have the same effect on humans as it does on rats but some changes in behavior and personality have been noticed in some studies (the changes range from fidelity to anger management but these results are still contended by other scientists), so we’re safe… for now. Just imagine what would happen if Toxoplasma gondii mutated a little bit more and started affecting more aspects of human personality and eventually move towards good old-fashioned mind-control? We would be facing some strange kind of living zombie apocalypse!
Biology just got a whole lot scarier
We must admit that none of these phenomena have anything to do with someone dying and then getting reanimated and therefore cannot technically lead to zombie outbreaks. However, preparing for the worst is certainly the best option. So stay away from cat shit and hope like hell you never have an encounter with any of those other creepy-crawlies!
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