![]() ![]() Hooked up in this way, they can communicate and exchange nutrients. They connect to each other by building short tubes, a kind that have only ever been seen before in fungi that infect plants. But at some point, as Fredericksen’s images show, these single cells start working together. When the fungus first enters its host, it exists as single cells that float around the ant’s bloodstream, budding off new copies of themselves. “Something much more intricate must be going on.” To speed things up, Hughes teamed up with computer scientist Danny Chen, who trained an artificial intelligence to distinguish ant from fungus. It took three months to mark up just one muscle. She scanned each slice, compiled the images into a three-dimensional model, and painstakingly annotated which bits were ant and which bits were fungus. ![]() Hughes’s student Maridel Fredericksen used a special microscope to julienne infected ants into slices that were just 50 nanometers thick-a thousandth of the width of a human hair. He wants to know exactly how this puppet master controls its puppets- and his latest experiments suggest that it’s even more ghoulish than it first appears. It’s also an obsession of one David Hughes, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University, who has been studying it for years. It’s the organism behind the monsters of the video game The Last of Us and the zombies of the book The Girl With All the Gifts. The fungus’s skill at colonizing ants is surpassed only by its skill at colonizing popular culture. And because the ant typically climbs a leaf that overhangs its colony’s foraging trails, the fungal spores rain down onto its sisters below, zombifying them in turn. Eventually, it sends a long stalk through the ant’s head, growing into a bulbous capsule full of spores. It forces the ant to permanently lock its mandibles around a leaf. It stops the ant at a height of 25 centimeters-a zone with precisely the right temperature and humidity for the fungus to grow. Over the course of a week, it compels the ant to leave the safety of its nest and ascend a nearby plant stem. When the fungus infects a carpenter ant, it grows through the insect’s body, draining it of nutrients and hijacking its mind. And its body belongs to Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the zombie-ant fungus. If you’re in luck, you might find an ant clinging to the leaf’s central vein, jaws clamped tight for dear life. Find a leaf that’s hanging almost exactly 25 centimeters above the forest floor, no more and no less. ![]() Instead, go to a tropical country like Brazil, and venture deep into the jungle. To find the world’s most sinister examples of mind control, don’t look to science fiction. ![]()
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