Simon - Plight of the living dead: what real-life zombies reveal about our world -- and ourselves

Advance Praise for

This book is fantastic! The sci-fi stories youve read barely hold a candle to the gruesome ways in which parasites manipulate their hosts in real life. This book will make your skin crawl with some of the best examples of manipulation weve encountered, fascinate you with what we know about how parasites achieve these amazing feats of control, and leave you wondering what this all means for the nature of free will. Youll be thinking about this book long after youre done reading it.

Kelly Weinersmith, New York Times bestselling co-author of Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies Thatll Improve and/or Ruin Everything

Matt Simon is, to borrow his term, a zombifier: Plight of the Living Dead will infect your brain, forcing you to spout a stream of bizarre factsabout fat-sucking worms, muscle-eating fungi, brain-stabbing waspsuntil your friends buy the book for themselves, and the chain of infection continues.

Mark Essig, author of Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig

A gruesome, fascinating, and somehow hilarious exploration of the most devious, mind-altering tactics of the bug wars. I found myself cringing, laughing, learning, but most of all thankful Im not an ant.

Cody Cassidy, author of And Then Youre Dead: What Really Happens If You Get Swallowed By a Whale, Are Shot from a Cannon, or Go Barreling over Niagra

PENGUIN BOOKS

PLIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

Matt Simon is a science writer at Wired magazine, where he specializes in zoology, particularly of the bizarre variety, and the author of The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar. He is one of just a handful of humans to witness the fabled mating ritual of the axolotl salamander. He lives in San Francisco.

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Copyright 2018 by Matthew Simon

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Quotations in from The Conquest of a Bombus terrestris Colony by a Psithyrus vestalis Female by Cor Van Honk et al., Apidologie, 1981, 12 (1), pp. 5767.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Simon, Matt, author.

Title: Plight of the living dead: what the animal kingdoms real-life zombies reveal about natureand ourselves / Matt Simon.

Description: New York, New York: Penguin Books, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018004526 (print) | LCCN 2018015907 (ebook) |ISBN 9781524705145 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143131410 (paperback) | Subjects: LCSH: Parasites. | Predation (Biology)

Classification: LCC QL757 (ebook) | LCC QL757 .S48 2018 (print) | DDC 591.6/5dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004526

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Cover design: David Litman

Cover photograph: kc_film / Shutterstock

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For all those humans out there whove had the common decency not to rise from their graves.

I ts a mythical creature thats so familiar, it may as well be real. The human gone wrong, the shell of a person racked with a virus that, in retrospect, really took scientists by surprise. Symptoms include stiffened joints and the consequent outstretched arms. The moaning, of course. Sunken eyes. Sometimes the beast just kind of stands there, as if lost in thought. Bits of the creature are falling offtoes and such, which wont be missed. And lets not forget the yearning for human flesh and general refusal to die.

The zombieor living dead, or walking dead, or undead, or really any dead other than dead deadis a monster phenomenon. You were probably a zombie for Halloween once. At the very least youve taken too much NyQuil and felt like a zombie. Hollywood puts out so many zombie films every year, something like 95 percent of Americans have acted in at least one of them. Theres zombie comedies and zombie romances and even zombie reimaginings of classic literature because yeah sure why not. Our culture is obsessed with the zombie, a legend that both fascinates us and forces us to confront tricky questions about what it means to be human.

The zombie may as well be real not just because Hollywood cant seem to quit it, but because the thing makes biological sense. Not the reanimating corpses bitthats unreasonable. But think about it from the theoretical viruss perspective: It has to find new hosts, and what better way to do that than to assume control over the zombies mind, making its victim yearn for human flesh? One bite and boom, transmission. A virus makes its way around a population not by way of sneezes, but through sophisticated behavioral manipulations that turn its host into an unwitting vehicle.

The zombie may as well be real because it actually is, only in a far more incredible and diabolical and horrifying way than a screenwriter could ever dream up. Because all across the animal kingdom, parasites are climbing into other creatures and mind-controlling them. Be they worms or wasps or microbes, certain organisms have figured out how to brainwash their victims in ways so clever and precise, they make Hollywoods creations look downright irresponsible.

In September 2013, I was pacing in my kitchen, talking on the phone with presumably a madman. In South America, he told me, a fungus invades ants bodies and takes over their minds, manipulating them with unreal precision and consistency. The parasite steers the ants out of the colony and up a tree always at noon, always ordering them to bite onto a leaf always about a foot off the ground. This just so happens to be where the temperature and humidity are ideal for the funguss growth. And the body snatcher has positioned its host right above the colonys trail, so as it erupts out of the back of the zombie ants head and sprays its spores, it infects more victims. A parasite without a brain of its own has brainwashed one of the most loyal creatures on Earth to betray its family in spectacular fashion.

This mad scientist, the world expert on the zombie ant, was putting me in a tough spot. As he walked me through the manipulations and the mechanisms and the horrifying implications, I walked myself around the room with the chills, excited as hell to write about his work, but almost certain that he was conning me. My job as a science writer was and is to listen to people who dedicate their lives to science, then tell their stories in ways that make sense to humans. But pacing that kitchenwhich slanted dramatically to the south, by the way, so I had to concentrate on the most bizarre thing Ive ever heard