Absurd Creatures of the Week: Disco Snails and Other Real-Life Zombies That'll Blow Your Mind

A staggering number of creatures out there (and even some fungi) have figured out how to mind-control their unfortunate hosts. In Absurd Creature of the Week, I’ve covered quite a few of these. But today I present to you my five favorites: Real-Life Zombies That I’m Sorry to Say Are Cooler Than Your Zombie Halloween Costume That You Really Just Phoned In. First up…
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The jewel wasp stings cockroaches in their brains, turning them into zombies. Or this one is telling the cockroach a secret ... with its stinger. Yeah probably not that though.Ram Gal

If you plan on going as a zombie for Halloween, I hate to break it to you but your costume is wildly inadequate. You don’t even have to show me, because I know that out in nature there are real-life zombies far more creatively horrifying than anything the human mind could ever muster. Also. You, Rob Zombie. You’re disappointing too. You aren’t even close to a real zombie.

Consider the fly larvae that makes its way into an ant's head, mind-controls it out of the colony, then pops its head off and matures in that cozy noodle. Or the worm that invades snails, forcing them out into the open and turning their eyeballs into strobing targets that birds pluck right out.

A staggering number of creatures out there (and even some fungi) have figured out how to mind-control their unfortunate hosts. In Absurd Creature of the Week, I've covered quite a few of these. But today I present to you my five favorites: Real-Life Zombies That I’m Sorry to Say Are Cooler Than Your Zombie Halloween Costume That You Really Just Phoned In. First up…

The Cockroach Pet of the Jewel Wasp (Above)

“This isn’t brain surgery,” my high school journalism teacher used to tell us when we screwed something up, which admittedly was pretty often. Really, though, brain surgery isn’t all that complex, because the jewel wasp, with its own simple little brain, has figured out how to perform it on cockroaches.

The female jewel wasp begins by hunting down a cockroach, biting onto its exoskeleton and driving her stinger between its two front legs, paralyzing them with venom so the victim can’t struggle. It then jams its stinger into the roach’s brain, feeling around for two specific spots to inject venom. When it backs off, the cockroach stays stuck right in that spot, obsessively grooming itself, while the wasp flies off and prepares a burrow.

When the wasp returns, she bites down on the zombified roach’s antenna and leads it to the tomb, where she lays an egg on its leg and seals it inside. When the larva hatches, it burrows into the still-perfectly-content roach and consumes its guts. Once its host is dead, the wasp pupates for a month in its nice little corpse home before emerging as an adult wasp to make humans feel not even remotely bad about what they've done to cockroaches before.

Read more: The Wasp That Enslaves Cockroaches With a Sting to the Brain

Those are worm larvae in the snail's eyes, just having a grand old time.

GIF: Nurie Mohamed/Source: Gilles San Martin/Wikimedia
The Disco Snail and the Worm That Dances in Its Eyes

It’s safe to say the vast majority of animals on this planet would count not getting eaten as a substantial victory. But not the parasitic worm Leucochloridium, which practically begs to be eaten.

It’s all a part of its truly bizarre life cycle. The worms will reproduce in the guts of birds and make their way out in droppings, which snails gobble up. The worms proceed to develop in the liver of their new host, sending shoots up to its eyestalks. Here the larvae begin a sort of strobing dance---and their mind-controlling of the snail.

Now, snails tend to be nocturnal, on account of the predators and heat of the daytime. But the worms---which have no way of telling night from day, oddly enough---force the snail to become not only highly active in the daytime, but to venture out into the open. Ideally for the worm but not so much for the snail, a bird will notice those strobing eyes, mistake them for caterpillars, and pluck them out.

Thus does the whole strange cycle begin anew. All is not lost for the snail, though, as it will regrow those eyes and go about its business, muttering to itself something about just wanting to be allowed to die.

Read more: The Parasitic Worm That Turns Snails Into Disco Zombies

Home is where the heart is. Or, for the ant-decapitating fly, where an ant's brain used to be.

S.D. Porter, USDA-ARS
Zombie Ants That Get Their Heads Popped Off From the Inside

Human babies may take comfort in a cozy crib, but the larva of the ant-decapitating fly (yeah, that’s its real name) prefers to snooze in the heads of ants. Its mother begins by deftly stinging an ant, depositing an egg in its body cavity. When it hatches, it tunnels into the ant’s head, where it feeds on bodily juices.

But because ants have what is known as social immunity, in which they find and expel comrades that are acting sick, the ant-decapitators must take care to control their host away from the colony into the leaf litter, where it's moist and relatively cool. Here, the larva releases a chemical that melts the ant’s tissues until its head pops right off, with the larva safely inside. It proceeds to eat the brain, then starts to pupate. After a few weeks, it emerges from the ant’s mouth and flies away to live a peaceful, uneventful life.

Nah, that’s not true at all. It's gonna raise hell.

Read more: This Fly Hijacks an Ant’s Brain — Then Pops Its Head Off

Unfortunately for the cricket, it survived giving painful birth to all of those worms.

GIF: Nurie Mohamed/WIRED. Video: Ben Hanelt
The Kamikaze Cricket With a Serious Worm Problem

Intestinal worms like the tapeworm hold a certain vaunted position among the horrifying things that can happen to the human body, but crickets have it much, much worse. They’re attacked by the horsehair worm, which turns them into suicidal maniacs.

Like the snail’s Leucochloridium worm, the horsehair needs to get eaten, first by mosquito larvae, which mature into flying adults that in turn get eaten by crickets. Inside the cricket, the worm erupts through its intestines into the abdominal cavity, where it grows to a foot long.

Crickets tend to do their best to avoid bodies of water, on account of the threats of drowning and predation by fish. But not crickets under the control of the horsehair horm. The parasite mind-controls its host to be super-jazzed about water, even to be positively itching to take a swim. The worm will bore a hole through the exoskeleton, then order the cricket to dive into a pond, where the parasite erupts out of its host in a rather horrific fashion.

In the lab, as many as 32 worms have emerged simultaneously from a single cricket. In nature, if it doesn’t drown or get snagged by a fish, incredibly the cricket will survive the ordeal. Its dignity, however, will not make it out alive.
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Read more: The Parasitic Worm That Turns Crickets Into Suicidal Maniacs__

The Cephalotes ant is literally the butt of jokes.

Stephen P. Yanoviak
The Skydiving Ants With Big, Red Zombie Butts

Cephalotes ants are immensely awesome due to their ability to skydive out of trees when in danger, only to steer right back to the trunk---plus they have heads shaped like doors that they use to block entrances to their colony. But they have a rather glaring weakness: They can't keep their butts out of the air.

Well, that is, if they're infected with a nematode worm, which makes its way into the ant's bum and turns it a beautiful red. The idea, it seems, is to make it look like a tasty berry, and therefore irresistible to passing birds. The worm even instructs the ant to stick its booty in the air, just in case it isn't conspicuous enough. That bird isn't going to get a berry, but it sure will get a belly full of worm eggs.

Now, the worm doesn't need the ant to complete its life cycle. But such a method does help it spread more efficiently around the rainforest---and maybe put those highfalutin skydiving ants in their place for once.

Read more: World’s Most Badass Ant Skydives, Uses Own Head as a Shield