Sigh. The mainstream press really won’t let up with this ‘call anything we don’t like or find creepy a Zombie’ routine.

Case in point, the ‘Zombie ant’ saga continues as researchers find that the previous, allegedly ‘Zombie’ making fungus is itself parasitized by another fungus:

For the first time, researchers have discovered how an ant colony can survive an onslaught of zombie-fungus, also known as Ophiocordyceps, a behavior altering, deadly parasite.

…

In their new study, David Hughes, an entomologist at Penn State and his team describe a hyperparasitic fungus – that is, a parasitic fungus that exploits another parasitic fungus – that helps ants to ward off a zombie epidemic.

“In a case where biology is stranger than fiction, the parasite of the zombie-ant fungus is itself a fungus,” Hughes said in a statement.

As you can see, this negative, Anti-Zombie framing even pervades the scientific communtiy, to the point where even an entomologist (who should know the difference between conventional biological life and Zombies, we think) describes a living fungus, and a living ant, as somehow ‘Zombie’.

Yikes.

Tags: Academia, Don't Use the Zed Word, Journamalism, Mainstream Media

This entry was posted by John Sears on Saturday, May 5th, 2012 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.