O Lord protect us. - - (Old prayer of unknown heritage. Some say Scottish, some say Cornish)
And how about adding a line to it about zombie ants?
A paper in the journal BMC Ecology, published on May 9, 2011, describes the parasitism by a fungus on the tropical carpenter ant in Thailand. It’s a macabre description of how the ant is invaded by the fungus, which takes over its body, commands it to perform actions to ensure the survival and growth of the fungus, then uses its dead body to grow a stalk with spores that are ejected into the surrounding area, ready to infect other passing ants.
Oh, damn, that's the stuff of nightmares, that is. And you can bet that Hollywood screenwriters are looking at that gruesome photo right now and firing up their Macs to write proposals based on it.
h/t Radley Balko.
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