Zombies

Hijacking the body of another animal is nothing new in the opportunistic world of parasitism. But for the first time, scientists have observed how one crafty flatworm can switch ‘zombie mode’ on and off, leaving its host ant stuck between life and death.

The animal kingdom is home to all kinds of stories – even horror stories. Scientists at Brown University have now uncovered a creepy new zombie story involving worms that propagate by hack their shrimp host's genome to take control of their minds.

A fungus is known to control the minds and bodies of ants to help itself reproduce, but it’s not the only insect to use the morbid tactic. Certain species of parasitic wasps have been found to “zombify” spiders, and now a new review paper has examined exactly how the insects pull off this feat.

To us vampires are the stuff of movies, but for many ancient cultures the undead were seen as a very real threat. Now archaeologists excavating a children’s cemetery in Italy have uncovered the skeleton of a child with a large stone jammed into its mouth, to prevent the body returning from the dead.

It’s one of nature’s most disturbing horror stories: a fungus takes control of a living ant to spread spores through the colony. But now a study led by Penn State University has found that the fungus makes these “zombie ants” without directly infecting the brains of its hosts.

For people in medieval England, zombies weren’t fictional entertainment, they were an existential threat. Bones from a medieval North Yorkshire village have been found to bear telltale battle-scars, when the living took some extreme measures to make sure the dead stayed dead.