Dr. Jacqualine Grant Discusses Nature's Walking Dead

Published: November 04, 2013 | Read Time: 1 minutes

Halloween may be over, but the haunting season's undead remains a hot topic on SUU's campus, with great anticipation for Dr. Jacqualine Grant's upcoming presentation, "Nature's Walking Dead: Zombies are in your Backyard."

Promising to be both educational and entertaining, Grant, assistant professor of biology and curator for SUU’s Garth and Jerri Frehner Museum of Natural History, will discuss the real life undead in nature's actual zombies — the animals, insects and plants among us that seem to defy nature's rules of life and death.

According to Grant, “The walking dead conjures images of human corpses trailing body parts through the cemetery. Human zombies are a scary thought, but nature, as usual, has an even scarier version of zombification. During this seminar we’ll learn about the real living dead – Nature’s zombies."

Among these zombies among us, according to Grant: frogs that come back from frozen death and suspended animation, ants that live while their brains are eaten by tiny flies, spiders that return to life after drowning, a fungus that enslaves flies and ants, and a parasite that cause mice to want to be eaten by cats.

"Nature's Waling Dead: Zombies are in your Backyard" will be at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, November 5, in the Braithwaite Fine Arts Gallery. It is free and open to the public.

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