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This is Science Friday. I'm Flor Lichten. Today in the podcast, we'll take a look at the real-life zombies that walk among us and the zombie fires that take over their brains.

Parasitism is a great way to live. You have to do barely any work at all.

It's zombie season. At least if you're watching 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.

Billions of puppets with poisoned mines permanently fixed on one unifying goal.

To spread the infection to every last human alive by any means necessary.

It's fiction for us, but for some organisms on the planet, it's more like a documentary.

The fungus that zomophies humanity in the show is based on opheocorticeps, 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.

My next guest found a whole book's worth of stories about the real, horrifying, and creative zombie makers that inhabit the earth.

And she says that studying these zombies and zombifiers can teach us about ourselves.

Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and author of the new book, Rise of the Zombie Bugs,

the surprising science of parasitic mind control.

Mindy, welcome to Science Friday.

Hello, thanks for having me.

You know, when most people write nature books, they tend to gravitate towards the majesty of nature or like the cute fuzzies in the natural world. You went right for the freaky side. Why? Why zombies?

Well, yeah, fungi is cute and fuzzy, you know, from a certain perspective.

Yeah, right. Well, before I was a science writer, I was a filmmaker, and I was always attracted to the kind of low-budget filmmaking and zombie movies are a great example of that. So, you know, very early on zombies and zombie as in pop culture were very much on my radar. And so it wasn't until I was working on a project for the American Museum of Natural History where I first came across the zombie ant fungus ophiocorticeps. And that just blew, that blew my mind a little because I did not

realize that there were actual zomifying organisms in nature that could infect their hosts and

actively change their behavior. And, and then as a science journalist, I learned about other

types of behavior manipulating organisms.

And it's just so fascinating, just the idea that this parasite can not just infect its host,

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