Skip to main content

The night I saw a zombie in South Brisbane Cemetery

I visited South Brisbane Cemetery recently, hoping to photograph nocturnal creepy-crawlies for a Halloween-themed blog post.

And boy, did I find something creepy. I found a zombie! 

Now I know what you might be thinking: “That man has watched too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and on that point, you are actually correct, but I swear that I did find a zombie, only I didn’t know it at the time. To me, it was just a spider. A spider with a small, white grub on its back.


The spider belongs to the cobweb spider family Theridiidae, whose best known member in Australia is the red-back spider. This particular spider was pea-sized and had a messy web in the foliage of a weeping fig. I never figured out which species it is because learning about the grub became my focus, but if anyone reading this can enlighten me, please let me know.

As for the grub, it’s the larval form of a wasp in the Ichneumonidae family, which are perhaps nature’s most famous parasitoids. * Within this family are a small group of closely-related genera that target cobweb spiders, and unlike most spider-hungry grubs, they don’t feed on the host from the inside, nor is the host paralysed. The spider just keeps living its life as normal, except that as the grub attached to its body grows, the behaviour of the spider begins to change.


Scientists discovered a few years ago that wasp larvae in the Zatypota genus are seemingly able to control the behaviour of their spider hosts through mind-control. The mechanism for this is not completely understood, but hypothesised to involve tapping into the spider’s hormonal system, then switching certain behaviours on and off. The most striking example of this is when the wasp larvae induces its host to construct a specially-made silken shelter to pupate inside of—the spider’s final act before being killed and consumed.

Research conducted here in Brisbane’s suburbs has determined that Zatypota kauros is our common local species in this genus-group of wasps, and also that this species can occasionally target hosts outside of the cobweb spider family. Such as humans. **

So how’s that for a Halloween graveyard story?! Zombie mind-control and cold-blooded murder… enough excitement for one night I think!

* A parasitoid is a parasite which kills its host.

** Just kidding. Though they are big meanies to our delightful golden orb-weavers.


Further Reading:

Smithsonian Magazine (related species)

Zatypota percontatoria (related species with detailed info)

Brisbane Zatypota research paper (PDF file)

Labels:

Comments

  1. Marmille31 October 2021 at 18:47

    Life in a graveyard. Never boring!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Christian Perrin2 November 2021 at 19:40

      Can surprisingly be a good place to see wildlife!

      Delete
  2. Data Hound11 February 2022 at 21:24

    You didn't happen to see a Devil's Coachman while you were there, did you. Seems like an appropriate location.

    ReplyDelete
  3. L24 March 2022 at 05:27

    Wow, this is facinating. What a cool story.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Suburb Guide: Lawnton

Fan-tailed cuckoos are most often seen on a low branch, keeping an eye-out for caterpillars below. Straddling the lush banks of the North Pine River, Lawnton is a suburb of Moreton Bay Regional Council steeped in history . Originally inhabited by the Turrbal people, the land would have been cloaked for many hundreds of thousands of years by a lowland rainforest ecosystem, featuring the hoop pine (Araucaria cunninghamii) for which the river is named after. Unfortunately, the rich soils allowing the vegetation to thrive also made the place attractive to European settlers that wished to farm the land, leading to great conflict with the Indigenous inhabitants. This was eased temporarily by local pioneering figure Tom Petrie, who had lived with and forged a respectful relationship with the Turrbal people, including Dalaipi, leader of the North Pine tribe. By 1858, however, the Aboriginal people of the area were removed and sent to live in isolated reserves around South-east Queenslan
6 comments
Read more

Tadpoles of South-eastern Australia: A Guide With Keys

Book review Reed New Holland Publishing, 2002. It’s noon on a warm autumn day and I am driving south along Beaudesert Road towards the peripheral suburbs of Brisbane’s southside that remain largely a mystery to me. I have decided that not knowing the amphibian fauna inhabiting the suburb of Algester is a personal error that I simply must rectify. My favourite way to search for frogs is to go spotlighting on humid spring and summer nights, but I have left it a little late this year and doubt my chances at finding them now that the evenings have mercifully turned cooler. Instead, I am going to survey the local amphibian population in a way that is quite new to me, aided by a secret weapon sitting in the passenger seat next to me: Marion Anstis’s book, Tadpoles of South-eastern Australia: A Guide With Keys .
4 comments
Read more

Wild Plants of Ipswich

I've never really taken much notice of plants until recently, regarding them usually as just the thing that a bird perches on while you're watching it. This week I decided it was time to change that attitude by trying my hand at plant identification in Denmark Hill Conservation Park, located in the centre of Ipswich. The park is just 11.5 hectares in size, but preserves a patch of bushland that acts as an 'island refuge' in a sea of suburbia. I did my best to focus on the trees and not be too distracted by birds or the resident Koala   (Phascolarctos cinereus)  population, and came up with nine interesting trees and plants seen on the Water Tower Circuit.
12 comments
Read more