Thursday, September 02, 2021

Parasite on a parasite

I missed this story when it first came out: the zombie-ant fungus has a parasite of its own.

You probably know of the fungus that infects some ants, scrambling the ant's brain so that it wanders out to die and grow a mushroom out of its body. The ants try to defend against it by grooming each other, but it turns out that another fungus in turn infects the first one, cripling its fruiting body and making the resulting mushroom less contagious to ants.

I wonder if this new parasite is in some way cultivated by the ant colonies.

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