- Zombies are ubiquitous in horror films, TV shows, and sci-fi novels.
- While the concept of reanimated corpses seems unrealistic, certain viruses and parasites in nature can cause animals to act in a zombie-like manner.
- Diseases like rabies and sleeping sickness can cause an animal to behave in ways that are out of its control, and the stings of certain insects can cause their victims to act like undead slaves.
- Here are nine examples of zombie-like phenomena in nature.
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Zombies are ubiquitous in popular culture - the undead appear in everything from Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" to movies like "World War Z" and TV shows like "The Walking Dead."
Even the White Walkers in "Game of Thrones" raise an army of undead wights - corpses that have been reanimated with magic and kill on command.
Zombies are typically defined as will-less, supernaturally reanimated creatures that sometimes behave in markedly strange ways. Although a zombie apocalypse may seem outside the realm of plausibility, more than a handful of real viruses and parasites can cause members of the animal kingdom to act like the undead. Diseases like rabies, for example, prompt aggressive and strange behavior, while some insect stings enable one type of bug to exert its will over another.
Read More: 'Zombie deer disease' has now hit 24 US states. You could be eating infected meat without knowing it.
Some fictional stories even portray the zombie condition as passed through bites or bodily fluids (we see this in the movies "I Am Legend" and "28 Days Later"); that type of transmission is true of illnesses like chronic wasting disease, which affect an animal's brain and central nervous system.
Here are nine ways animals can turn into something akin to a zombie.