Zombies

By Trey Frank
#1 March
 Zombies are real!
A zombie crawls through the forest. When it reaches a good spot, it freezes in place. A stalk slowly
grows from its head. The stalk then spews out spores that spread, turning others into zombies.

This is no Halloween story about the zombie apocalypse. Its all true. The zombie isnt a human, though.
Its an ant. And the stalk that emerges from its head is a fungus. Its spores infect other ants, which lets
the zombie cycle begin anew.

In order to grow and spread, this fungus must hijack an ants brain. However weird this might seem,
it isnt all that unusual. The natural world is full of zombies under mind control. Zombie spiders and
cockroaches babysit developing wasp
larvae until the babies devour them.
Zombie fish flip around and dart toward
the surface of the water, seeming to beg
for birds to eat them. Zombie crickets,
beetles and praying mantises drown
themselves in water. Zombie rats are
drawn to the smell of the pee of cats that
may devour them.

All of these zombies have one thing

in common: parasites. A parasite lives
inside or on another creature, known as
its host. A parasite may be a fungus, a
worm or another tiny creature. All par-
asites eventually weaken or sicken their
hosts. Sometimes, the parasite kills or Underneath that worm-like thing is a spider
even eats its host. But death of the host now a zombie. The wasp larva on its back
isnt the freakiest goal. A parasite might
get its host to die in a certain place, or be controls the spiders brain, forcing it to spin
eaten by a certain creature. In order to a special web. That new web will protect the
accomplish these tricks, some parasites
have evolved the ability to hack into the
larva as it develops into an adult wasp.
hosts brain and influence its behavior in
very specific ways.

How do parasites turn insects and other animals into the walking almost-dead? Every parasite has its
own method, but the process usually involves altering chemicals within the victims brain. Researchers
are working hard to identify which chemicals are involved and how they end up so bizarrely altering
their hosts behavior.

Zombies are real!, https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/zombies-are-real, 2017, WEB, 3/30/17

 Zombies Would Wipe Out Humans in Less than
100 Days
The zombie apocalypse wont take long.

A new article in a peer-reviewed student journal finds that the zombie hordes would take Earths population down to a mere 273
survivors in 100 days.

The paper, published in the University of Leicesters Journal of Physics Special Topics, was a fanciful use of the so-called SIR
model, which is used in epidemiology to simulate how diseases spread over time. Its not the first time zombies have been used
as a public health metaphor. In December 2015, for example, the British medical journal The Lancet published a tongue-in-
cheek paper titled Zombie infections: epidemiology, treatment, and prevention. And a viral blog post from the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention urged zombie-apocalypse preparations as a metaphor for real-life disaster preparedness.

In the new analysis, the University of Leicester undergraduates assumed that each zombie would have 90 percent success at
finding and infecting one human per day a rate that would make the zombie virus twice as contagious as the Black Death, the
plague that devastated Europe in the 1300s. [Zombie Animals: 5 Real Cases of Body-Snatching]

The researchers further estimated that each zombie could live 20 days without braaaaaains.

Assuming a starting population of 7.5 billion people, approximately the worlds popula-
tion today, the students calculated that it would take 20 days for a single zombie to start
an epidemic of noticeable proportions. At that point, the pandemic would have begun.
Assuming no geographic isolation, in fact, the human population would drop to 181 by
day 100 of the epidemic, with 190 million zombies roaming around.

With some geographical isolation, the situation would be a tiny bit better for humans.
Assuming the zombie virus had to spread through contiguous regions and that zombies
were somewhat limited in their ability to travel (not leaving their current region until
there were 100,000 zombies roaming there), human survivors would number 273 by day
100, the study found.

A more realistic model might assume that each zombie could find fewer human victims
over time, the students wrote, because there would simply be fewer humans to find.

We have also not included the possibility for the humans to kill the zombies, they
wrote.

But never fear: In a follow-up paper, the students did just that. They extended the zombie life span to one year in order to up
the challenge a bit, but also gave each human a 10 percent chance of killing a zombie each day. They also accounted for human
reproduction, assuming reproductive-age women would be able to have a baby once every three years.

These assumptions provided some hope for humanity. Under this model, the human population rapidly dropped off to a few
hundred again. However, the zombies died off after 1,000 days, under this model; 10,000 days after the beginning of the epidem-
ic, the human population would start to recover again, the students found.

Zombies Would Wipe Out Humans in Less than 100 Days, http://www.livescience.com/57407-zombie-apocalypse-would-
take-100-days.html, 2017, WEB, 3/30/17