It’s Friday and it’s October 31, so you are in store for a super spoooooky edition of our weekly list of links.

Zombies? Whatevs, anyone who studies parasites knows that zombies are all over the place in nature!

In the Pacific Northwest, the Sockeye salmon are running, and boy do they look like something out of Walking Dead. As they start the migration, they give up on fighting disease and other, you know, life-sustaining processes in favor of makin’ babies. By the time they are spawning, they are completely falling apart, covered in fungal lesions (increased local diversity!), with totally shredded fins. Hey LADIES!

And because poor spiders get such a bad rap this time of year, here is some spider public image enhancement propaganda. – Emily Grason

For your Halloween enjoyment, here’s Cymothoa exigua, a marine isopod that destroys and then replaces the tongue of an unlucky fish host. Females of this species crawl in through the fish’s gills, feed on the blood from the tongue (causing the organ to atrophy and die), and then spend the rest of their life as the new, more terrifying fish tongue. The worst part? C. exigua doesn’t actually kill the fish, meaning its host has to live out the rest of its life with a tiny little crustacean just inside its mouth.

You may know crinoids as the ancient, visually appealing stalked echinoderms commonly called sea lilies or feather stars. What you may not know is that though they’re mostly sessile, they are able to crawl along the seafloor in an unsettling, Samara-like manner. Speaking of unsuspecting scares, here’s an amazing video of a Clione (sea angel) catching its prey. – Nate Johnson

What’s that lurking in the deep dark cold waters of the abyss? Maybe it was a goblin shark with 30+ rows of teeth and a protrusible jaw to snap up its prey… hopefully, it was Vampyroteuthis infernalis… the “vampire” “squid” from hell. Check out this video for why this ghost of cephalopods past is really neither. If you make it into shallower waters, beware the Desmarestia spp. which produce sulfuric acid for that slow painful burn. Dubbing it the acid kelp. -Kylla Benes

I would have to say that nothing in nature is creepier than flesh eating bacteria, such as the Group A streptococcus, that can cause  Necrotizing fasciitis,  an infirmity commonly known as flesh-eating disease or flesh-eating bacteria syndrome that infects and kills thousands of people every year. 

If you want to learn a little bit more about mathematical modeling, while celebrating Halloween, here are a couple of interesting and educative papers inspired on some popular fictional characters: zombies and vampires. Both papers use differential equations and ecological and behavioral data “collected” from classic movies, books and/or TV series in order to understand the spread of these scary creatures in the human population; Munz et al. modeled the spread of a zombie outbreak among humans. Their results are very disturbing; a zombie outbreak is very likely to lead to the collapse of our civilized world, unless we deal with it right away, using aggressive “control methods”.  Strielkowski et al. modeled the co-existence of humans and vampires, under three different scenarios: i) the Stoker-King model, which was based on Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” and Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot”; the Rice model, based on Anne Rice’s  “Vampire Chronicles”; iii)  the Harris-Meyer-Kostova model, based on Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight series”, Charlaine Harris’ “Sookie Stockhouse, “True Blood”  and Elizabeth Kostova’s “The Historian”. Their results seem to be a little more comforting than Munz et al., as they show that, at least, the Harris-Meyer-Kostova model indicates that we could peacefully co-exist with vampires, without even noticing their existence. I guess, it comes as no surprise that the Stoker-King model is the most dramatic scenario, leading to a rapid extinction of both, humans and vampires… – Vinicius Bastazini.

Here’s a creepy, but (maybe psuedo)scientific book asking what the world will look like 50 million years after humans go extinct. A friend of mine found a first edition, and we’ve been thumbing through it over the past few weeks. My favorites are the creatures that inhabit the island of batavia – where bats have evolved to fill every ecological niche from flower-mimicking insectivores to seal-like creatures evocative humanity’s descendants in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos.

The book was published two years after Gould and Lewontin’s Spandrels of San Marco, and I can’t help but wonder what they would have thought flipping through the pages. You can read through the entire book and check out all of the pictures here. -Fletcher Halliday

October 31, 2014