Monomad: Zombie

Talking about zombies, maybe you immediately remember the movie series "Resident Evil," starring the beautiful actress Milla Jovovich. But I don't want to review the movie.

I often wonder, do zombies really exist? I don't believe that zombies really exist in human life. I only believe that zombies exist in animal life, specifically in the insect world.

Yes, recently I observed a sweat bee and a bottle fly, and they were carcasses. They get stuck and stick to the twig.

According to a scientific article (What Are Zombie Bees?​) written by Dan Greenwood, I found information that the so-called "zombie bees" are honey bees that have been infected by a parasitic insect known as Apocephalus borealis. This then makes the behavior of honey bees change drastically when they are under the influence of these parasites.

Maybe Dan, the author of the article was just researching the behavior of infected honey bees. Even though not only honey bees, many other insects have the potential to be infected by parasitic insects and turn into zombies.

In fact, it's not just a parasitic insect infection, because it turns out there's a type of Cordyceps fungus that also often infects insects, turning them into zombies. I knew that after reading a Newsweek scientific article written by Robyn White.

So in conclusion, I believe that zombies really exist, but only in the lives of animals like insects, and that has been proven by scientific research.

Well, once in a while there's nothing wrong with writing about things that are scientific. I, and you, can certainly take a lot of knowledge from this.

As for the pictures here, they have been deliberately changed to black and white so that the scary nuances can be seen in these zombies.

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^{This is another entry I submitted for the daily #monomad challenge.}

^{All of the images here are my own work, taken with Xiaomi POCO NFC smartphone and an assembled external macro lens.}