Caught an amazing edition of Radiolab this week while I was out driving around. It turned into one of those moments where I took the long route so I could hear the entire thing.
It was a vigorous defense of parasites. Yes, parasites. The details of how the zombie wasp, the blood fluke and the nematode operate are diabolically cool.
This is long but if you listen, go all the way till the end. That’s the part that really piqued my interest. They discuss how parasites can affect the way animals behave (one parasite infects the brains of rats to make them attracted to cat urine so the rat will approach cats, get devoured and allow its parasite to move to a cat, the only host where it can reproduce). And then they speculate about how this might affect human behavior.
Could a cat-borne parasite be responsible for schizophrenia?
Are parasites slowly manipulating us and turning us into a race of zombies, much the way wasps do to cockroaches in the YouTube clip above?
Fascinating.