[Animals] Zombie animals: 10 real-life cases of body-snatching

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Zombie movies have got it all wrong. Zombifying viruses are unlikely to give dead people the brain-munchies — but real-life parasites have the power to take over brains and make real zombies.

Here are 10 of the most shocking examples of bona fide zombie-ism in the animal world.

Parasites put pill bugs in deliberate danger

Roly-poly bugs, potato bugs, pill bugs: They're cute and innocuous members of the insect world, right? Sure, as long as they haven't been taken over by an acanthocephalan (Plagiorhynchus cylindraceus) parasite. According to the University of Michigan's Animal Diversity Web, the parasite lives in the intestinal tracts of starlings (Sturnidae) and gets pooped out and eaten by  hungry pill bugs, which love bird poop. Once inside the body of an oblivious roly-poly, the parasite takes over its brain and urges the zombified bug to do ill-advised things, such as making its whereabouts widely known to predators like starlings. And thus the parasite completes its journey when a starling swoops in and eats the zombie pill bug, and the parasite waits for its chance to find another bug upon which to practice mind control.

Kidnapped cockroaches carry the larvae of wasps

It's straight out of Hollywood: A quick stab to the brain turns an innocent onlooker into the victim of a brutal assault and kidnapping. Except this time, that defenseless victim is one of the world's most hated insects —the cockroach— and the villain is a wasp. In this true story, the venom of the emerald cockroach wasp (Ampulex compressa) renders the cockroach unable to move, though it is not paralyzed, according to research published in 2010 in the journal PLUS ONE. Once the cockroach is immobilized, the wasp implants its abdomen with a single egg and drags it into the wasp's lair. The larva later hatches and eats the still-living but zombie-like cockroach from the inside out. A month later, the now-mature wasp flies away from the scene of the crime, leaving only a rotting cockroach carcass behind. 

https://www.livescience.com/34196-zombie-animals.html