THIS striking image looks like the stuff of nightmares – and it isn’t far off. It shows the fruiting bodies of a parasitic fungus bursting through the body of a fly, a deadly conquest that has been honed by evolution.
This dramatic and highly disturbing sight was captured by evolutionary biologist and photographer Roberto García Roa at the University of Valencia, Spain, and won him the top prize in the BMC Ecology and Evolution image competition.
Also known as zombie fungi, most species in this family are parasites that use their spores to control the minds of insects, such as flies and ants. The bodies of these creatures are then used to spread the fungus and infect more organisms, even other fungi.
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García Roa came across the infected insect while trekking in Peru’s Tambopata National Reserve. The fungus was able to infiltrate the exoskeleton and mind of the fly, then compelled the insect to move to a more favourable spot for the fungus’s growth, said García Roa, in an announcement about his winning image. “The fruiting bodies have then erupted from the fly’s body and will be jettisoned in order to infect more victims, ” he said.
Other species of zombie fungi, such as Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, are able to alter the behaviour of ants so that they leave their trails and attach to the undersides of leaves, their heads becoming vessels for the fungus’s spores.
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Real Zombies And Body Snatchers Live Among Us
1 These 7 mathematical facts will blow your mind 2 Experimental weight loss pill seems to be more potent than Ozempic 3 The surprising promise and profound perils of AIs that fake empathy 4 Genomes of modern Indian people include wide range of Neanderthal DNA 5 D-Wave says its quantum computers can solve otherwise impossible tasks 6 Ukraine may have been first part of Europe colonised by early humans 7 Google launches $5m prize to find actual uses for quantum computers 8 How concussion can lead to brain damage - and what to do to prevent it 9 Wearing make-up during exercise may harm your skin health 10 The physicist trying to create space-time from scratchThe animal kingdom is full of zombies. These poor creatures are not undead monsters out to eat brains. They are mindless puppets whose bodies have been taken over by parasites. Such parasites include viruses, worms, wasps and other organisms. And once one of these parasites has infected a host, it can force that host to do its bidding — even at the cost of the host’s life.
There are many of these creepy zombifying parasites, which can be found throughout the world. Here are three to start you off:
Ophiocordyceps: This is group, or genus, of fungi. When the spores of these fungi land on an insect, they burrow their way inside. They start growing and hijack their host’s mind. The fungus steers its victim to a place with the right temperature, humidity or other conditions needed for the fungus to grow. Stalks of the fungus then sprout out of the insect’s body to spew spores onto new victims.
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Euhaplorchis californiensis: These worms make their home in a carpet-like layer atop the brains of California killifish. But they can only reproduce inside the guts of birds. So, the worms force fish to swim near the surface of the water. There, a fish is more likely to catch the eye of — and get eaten by — a bird.
Jewel wasp: Females of this species inject mind-controlling venom into the brains of cockroaches. This allows a wasp to lead around a cockroach by its antenna like a dog on a leash. The wasp takes the cockroach back to the wasp’s nest, where it lays an egg on the cockroach. When the egg hatches, the baby wasp devours the roach for dinner.
Zombies are real! Some parasites worm their way into other creatures’ brains and alter their victims’ behavior. Meet zombie ants, spiders, cockroaches, fish and more. (10/27/2016) Readability: 7.1
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Infected caterpillars become zombies that climb to their deaths By tampering with genes involved in vision, a virus can send caterpillars on a doomed quest for sunlight. (4/22/2022) Readability: 7.4
Here’s how cockroaches fight off zombie-makers Stand tall. Kick, kick and kick some more. Scientists observed these successful tactics among some study subjects that avoided becoming true zombies. (10/31/2018) Readability: 6.0
@sciencenewsofficial Nature is full of parasites that take over their victims’ minds and drive them toward self-destruction. #zombies #parasites #insects #science #learnitontiktok ♬ original sound – sciencenewsofficial
Close Encounters With The Zombie Fungus
Parasites have evolved all sorts of sneaky ways to get around, get into hosts and evade detection. Build your own custom parasite, and see what kind of havoc a critter with those characteristics could wreak on its host.Once the fungus invades its victim’s body, it’s already too late. The invader spreads through the host in a matter of days. The victim, unaware of what is happening, becomes driven to climb to a high spot. Just before dying, the infected body—a zombie—grasps a perch as the mature fungal invader erupts from the back of the zombie’s head to rain down spores on unsuspecting victims below, starting the cycle again. This isn’t the latest gross-out moment from a George A. Romero horror film; it is part of a very real evolutionary arms race between a parasitic fungus and its victims, ants.
, Hollywood’s animated corpses have a nasty habit of creating more of the walking dead. Controlled by some inexplicable force, perhaps an intensely virulent pathogen, the main preoccupation of a zombie is making other zombies. The story line is pure drive-in movie schlock, yet the popular mythology of zombies has lately been spattered with a coating of biological truth. There actually are organisms that have evolved to control the minds and bodies of other creatures, turning once normal individuals into dazed victims that fulfill the parasite’s need to reproduce itself.
. The parasites infest many kinds of arthropods—from butterflies to cockroaches—but it is among ants that the fungi’s ability to control other beings’ behavior is most apparent. One prototypical scenario is found in Costa Rica, where infected bullet ants (
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Ants, which forage on the ground and nest in the canopy. When infected, these ants shamble toward “ant graveyards, ” where they bite down on the undersides of leaves, anchoring their fungus-infested husks at a level of the forest with just the right humidity and temperature to allow the fungus to grow properly. When Sandra Andersen of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues placed the bodies of infected ants higher in the canopy, the parasites grew abnormally, and infested ants placed on the ground were eaten by other insects. “The fungus is sensitive to UV light, and the heavy rainfall in a tropical forest would most likely also be able to damage the fungus, ” Andersen says. “The position of the ant on the underside of the leaf limits the exposure of the parasite.” The fungus drives the ants to seek out specific places to die that best benefit the growth of the fungus.
Like parasites have been manipulating other organisms for millions of years—their disturbing behavior has been preserved in the fossil record. Forty-eight million years ago, during the global hothouse epoch of the Eocene, the place now known as Messel, Germany, was draped in a lush, semitropical forest. Archaic primates scrambled among the trees; cousins of early horses browsed; and an
Like fungus caused ants to put a death grip on leaves just before the infesting fungus fully overran their bodies. Exceptionally preserved fossil leaves from the Messel quarry show the same pattern of leaf scars made by some living ant species when they have become fungus-controlled zombies.
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Ant have caused its gaster to turn red and mimic berries found in its habitat. This attracts birds which help spread the parasites to new ant colonies. Yanoviak et al., 2008
The nematode infestation thinned the exoskeleton of the ant's gaster, which, combined with the presence of nematode eggs, caused it to look red and to detach easily from the rest of the ant's body. Christian Ziegler
After the nematode eggs pass through the bird's digestive system, they are deposited back onto the forest floor in bird droppings. Christian Ziegler
Cordyceps Zombie Fungus Takes Over Ants' Bodies
Scientists are looking for these types of interactions even farther back in time. “Now that we know the behavior like this can fossilize, I would not be surprised if we find more, ” says University of Exeter behavioral ecologist David Hughes. “I believe samples tens of millions of years older are likely.” The fungus is clearly ancient: in 2008, another team announced that a 105-million-year-old insect trapped in amber was shot through with an
Like fungus. It is possible that zombie-style parasitism between the fungus and its hosts goes back to the Cretaceous days of the dinosaurs (though evidence of zombie dinosaurs has not been forthcoming).
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