ZOMBIE ANTS: A study was recently conducted by Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences on how a one living thing can control the mind of another. The study also uses additional data from field research from a citizen scientist in South Carolina,

According to an article published by Penn State, “Zombie Ant Fungi ‘Know’ brains of their hosts” by Chuck Gill, “A parasitic fungus that reproduces by manipulating the behavior of ants emits a cocktail of behavior-controlling chemicals when encountering the brain of its natural target host, but not when infecting other ant species, a new study shows.”

The study was on the impact of Ophiocordyceps, called the “zombie ant fungus,” that controls the brain of an ant in the ant species in the genus Camponotus. The fungi causes the ant species to die with their mandibles biting a plant material “providing a platform from which the fungus can grow and shoot spores to infect other ants.”

One researcher, David Hughes, assistant professor of entomology and biology, explained in the article, “This is one of the most complex examples of parasites controlling animal behavior because it is a microbe controlling an animal — the one without the brain controls the one with the brain. By employing metabolomics and controlled laboratory infections, we can now begin to understand how the fungi pull off this impressive trick.”

We had to look up metabolomics and found out they just studied the metabolites within the research subjects.

Through their research, they discovered the fungus can kill other ants, but it can only manipulate the behavior of the ant species with which it evolved.

The researchers removed ant brains, keeping the organs alive in special media. The fungus then was grown in the presence of brains from different ant species to determine what chemicals it produced for each brain.

The fungus was then grown next to ant brains from several ant species to see how the fungus reacted.

In the article, Hughes explained, “fungi are nourished via osmotrophy, by which they secrete compounds that degrade the bigger molecules in their environment into smaller ones that then can be taken up by the fungus. Using metabolomics, the researchers could determine precisely the chemical crosstalk between the fungus and the ant brain it grew alongside.

Neat.