Zombies, it turns out, are real — and science journalist Mindy Weisberger can give you plenty of examples of them.

She’s read up on the fungi that take over flies’ bodies, partially digesting them from the inside out before forcing them to climb up blades of grass, so that fungal spores can explode out from their swollen corpses and claim new victims.

She’s considered the hairworms that grow inside of crickets before inducing their hosts to toss themselves into a nearby body of water, where the worms emerge from the crickets’ exoskeleton in a miniature but all-too-real imitation of the alien in Alien.

She’s even researched the snails that fall victim to certain flatworms. The flatworms’ larvae need to be eaten by birds to reach the next stage of their lifecycle, so broodsacs full of larvae take up residence in the snails’ eyestalks and turn them into pulsing, colorful, caterpillar-like bird-lures. The parasite also manipulates the snails into wandering into the open in order to increase the odds that a bird will spot the snails and devour both their eyestalks and the larvae within them.

Weisberger dug into these specific nightmare-inducing examples of parasitic mind-control — and many others — as part of her effort to understand real-life “zombification” in her book, Rise of the Zombie Bugs. What she found was that these natural zombie stories are not only sources of inspiration for horrifying fiction — they could also inspire researchers who are trying to better understand everything from immune responses to pest control.

So we spoke to Weisberger about research on real-life zombies for Unexplainable, Vox’s science podcast. What follows is a version of our conversation, edited for clarity and length. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Unexplainable wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Let’s start by just defining some terms. What do we mean when we say “zombifier,” or “zombie?”

Sure. A zombifier is an organism that manipulates the behavior of its host, and a zombie is an organism that is being manipulated to........

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