this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
82 points (88.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43757 readers
2316 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Of the type often seen in movies where the body is rotten, no. Dead tissue doesn't move.
However, there are approximations:
For starters there's a type of fungus that hijacks ants, using it to spread its spores into other ants. It can control the ants movement to the point where it will cause the and to go to certain good spore-spread8ng places before the ant is devoured.
Then there's the disease that affects raindeer in some places. I don't remember the illness, but basically the mind goes byebye while the body is left to be controlled by less and less sophisticated parts of the brain, to the point where the animal can do nothing but walk in circles.
The deer one is chronic wasting disease
Iβve heard concern of it becoming a pandemic in deer populations and also scientists are worried itβll spread to people!
Yaaaaaaaaay. π«
It's caused by prions, which are definitely able to infect humans.
Prions are absolutely terrifying
I agree. I knew nothing about them until I went down a kuru rabbit hole the other night. Extremely freaky.
Itβs bonkers. Itβs resistant to everything, persists after being burned, etc.
It's wild. Even after a deer with it dies it can remain in the soil for a couple of years. Burning and chemicals doesn't affect it. The prion is just there, hanging out, waiting in the soil and water until another deer comes along and gets it doing normal deer things.
I mean, those fungi are crazy.
But my money is either on a rabies or toxoplasmosis mutation for the zombie apocalypse.
They wouldn't be the living dead, and I dont think there'd be anything to stop them from attacking each other, but that's be pretty close to zombies.
Just feral humans without higher brain function trying to attack and eat anything they can.
Figures we'd get runners. Can't catch a damn break.
I knew the ants would come up
Rabies is similar as well.
CWD is a prion, which is terrifying. thatβs also why it can live on corpses and even survive in vegetation
imagine being a spore and becoming conscious inside an ant, with an animal's brain.
That's NOT how those spores work bro, they don't gain cousciousness lmao
Also, ants aren't even conscious themselfs
EDIT: Typos.
probably yeah but its a lot of fun to imagine
Agree, that's funny lol