By Susan Milius
The line between fungus biology and late-night television just got blurrier.
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A fungus that attacks living ants apparently manipulates their behavior for its own benefit, an international research team reports in the September American Naturalist.
When the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus strikes, an infected ant climbs to a leaf not far off the ground (often on the north-northwest side of a tree), bites in and dies with jaws locked in place. Experiments now show that these low-hanging leaves give the fungus prime conditions for growing a spore-bearing spike out of the ant’s neck, says study coauthor David Hughes of Harvard University.
“Demonstrating that a change in host behavior benefits parasite fitness is not easy and is rarely done,” says Shelley Adamo of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, who also has studied manipulative parasites. And she welcomes this paper because it does show that the fungus benefits from its host’s weird death.