Turns Out the U.S. Has Its Very Own Species of Ant-Zombifying Fungus

[unhappycamper]

http://www.wired.com/2014/08/zombie-ant-fungus-in-the-us/



Turns Out the U.S. Has Its Very Own Species of Ant-Zombifying Fungus
By Matt Simon
08.22.14 | 1:10 pm

Zombie ants, the ghostly slaves of a mind-controlling fungus seen creeping around places like South America for years, have now been spotted in the United States. But don’t panic—they’ve probably been here all along, and we only just now noticed.

Scientists at Penn State have for the first time shown that a fungus here in the U.S. invades the brains of ants, manipulates them into a very specific spot in the forest, and kills them before raining down spores on their comrades.

Scientists had discovered the same fungus—now known as Ophiocordyceps unilateralis sensu lato (sensu lato meaning “in the broad sense,” meaning they’re working on a name)—in the U.S. back in the late 1800s, but had no idea it was capable of manipulating ants. Then in 2009, Penn State’s David Hughes stumbled across the Flickr feed of a woman named Kim Fleming, who had found and photographed ants infected with the mind-controlling fungus in her backyard in South Carolina. He and his team have been working with her to describe the remarkable zombification ever since.



The fungus mind-controls its host to bite down on a twig, then kills it and emerges as a stalk out of the back of its noodle.

Now, it was thought that each species of mind-controlling Ophiocordyceps fungi specialized in attacking just a single species of ant. This new species, however, is capable of infecting two different species of ant in the southern U.S.

[Octafish]

1. Amazing! A mind controlling fungus? Who knew?