Cordyceps Turned These Ants Into Zombies
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- Опубликовано: 22 авг 2022
- This fungus was actually manipulating ants’ movements, forcing them to do something they’d never ordinarily do, something strange, yet specific…
Thanks to Franz Anthony (franzanth.com) and Dr. João Araújo for the excellent reconstructions of Ophiocordyceps and ancient ants.
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References:
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In a world where ants colonize fungus for food, there's one fungus that fights back...
Said in the ultimate movie trailer voice 😂
Wow. Poetic justice
it goes full circle.
Karma
Nearly. There are hundreds of species of fungus that fight back - on many species of ant, though carpenter ants seem to get more than their share of attacks.
"None of them effect people so dont worry"
The opening line to every sci fi horror
affect
In fact, que don't need "fungus" at all, we haver relógios, mídia, entertainement, etc....
😂🤣😂
The Last of Us show opening be like:
@@Qwnntm that first episode was awesome
I feel like wasps that parasitize caterpillars, spiders, etc. are a closer match to xenomorphs, but either way the comparison is fun.
Watch out for waspes
That would be a great topic for this video. Parasitoid wasps are likely the most diverse group of animals on the planet.
Ichnumenon fly!
For the record, those wasps were a direct influence on the concept, and the recent "Prometheus" films acknowledge this, showing them as having contrubuted to the Xenomorphs' genetic engineering by David.
One prehistoric parasitic wasp was is even named Xenomorpha
Never thought I'd feel such sympathy for an ant.
You should watch "Ants Canada". Go to his channel and be ready to become an Ant Ally 🤣
I feel bad for the fungus, to undergo such strong selective pressures as to push a fungus to hijack something so complex as the nervous system of a living animal. Imagine how big a population size would be needed to make such specific and complex adaptions. 99.9% probably didn't make it.
@@marlo018 i just discovered this channel because of you today, and the channel could make feel in love with Ants easily!
If you want to feel even more ant sympathy Ant-Man is a good movie to go to
The zombie ants or the ass-blasted ant?
"So what do we do?"
"Bomb"...
"All the ants wanted was to keep their colony clean and instead they got zombies." Pretty much the best line in all your videos! Bravo! Much better than "camerosaurus"
I know they are just Ant's but they are Life, it's sad to see this happen to any living being. Just think this weaponised from Biolabs. Hint we had one round of it already, not to mention, Gates said another one is coming but worse. ( BE CARFULL OF THE EXPERIMENTS YOUR FORCED TO COMPLY WITH, YOU ALWAYS HAVE A CHOICE ) You were ALL Warned since 1995 and again in 2005
I think it's hard to come up with an original pun 😅 so I'll give that camerosaurus joke a little credit 😆
I am legend, ant edition
@@simoncleret be p ok lkkkk kiooooooooooooooojjooooooooo
One theory is the endothermy ("warmbloodedness") developed because of fungus. Of the tens of thousands of species of fungi, only about 300 infect mammals. Since the vast majority of fungi can't tolerate 98 degrees, endothermy acts as excellent anti-fungal weapon.
So interesting!!
And it would explain why it happened twice convergently, with both birds and mammals.
Interesting theory, but maybe not just fungi, I would think other pathogens like viruses and bacteria would be included as well.
For example: Bats not being affected by many of the pathogens they carry because of their high metabolic rate. Or the immune response giving us fevers to reduce the activity of whatever infection we have.
@@pol.86 yessir. We should also try to understand why, despite the fungal assault, the pokilothermic reptiles & amphibians (not to mention insects) keep on truckin'.
I am sure any mammal would almost boil at 98 degrees (C of course)... 😁
You are probably talking F, but if we are talking science, SI (or metric system) is what's implied when you say 98. Human body temperature is about 37°C normally. 100 is boiling point of water (on see level attitude).
I've always wondered how something so complex such as this behavior evolved.
Your brain fungus will never let you find out or anyone else.
@@julianshepherd2038 It's more of a slime mold than a fungus.
Uhh I mean.... It's absolutely ridiculous to imply that there's anything controlling us! 😠
@@WanderTheNomad fun fact: myxomatosis-like thing is a thing also found in humans and monkeys, likely to make primates more susceptible to being food for lions in the same way it acts on mice and cats.
@@BoxStudioExecutive sounds a little like toxoplasmosis, Toxoplasma Gondii.
Probably in stages one commonality between arthropod infecting fungi is that they all produce psychedelic compounds such as psilocybin. These aren't exclusive to cordyceps like fungi but all such fungi have such chemical compounds. Psychedelic compounds appear to have evolved convergently many times within fungi lineages that are under a strong competition with insects for resources suggesting they play an important defensive role. However in a subset of fungi which have such compounds some seems to have been readapted for offensive use
Everyone summon Ants Canada.
Ants Canada friend 👍🏻👍🏻
@AntsCanada we need you bro
He does have a great channel. I enjoy his content.
Also... Summon the Senate!
AntsCanada: Please subscribe to my channel, hit the bell icon, welcome to the AC family, enjoy:)
Wow, that fossil is amazing! A moment in time shared by animal, fungi, and plant
right?! I know they need to use click bait titles to get views/funding, but the actual science and fossil evidence they bring on this channel is just impressive as hell.
Imagine all the documentation and expertise there has to have been done in human history to get to point to make the deductions that this rock pattern shows that some ants, from unfathomably long ago, had a mass suicide event since they were essentially brainwashed. Amazing.
I like what you did at the end when you said ' The Last of Us' - for those who don't get it, and I imagine there won't be many who don't, The Last of Us is a zombie survival game that came out in 2013, and the thing that turned people into zombies or the infected, was a mutated Cordyceps fungus like what infects ants! A sequel The Last of Us Part II that came out in 2020, and a show adaptation is being made about the first game by HBO. Both games did extremely well, and many call The Last Of Us one of the best zombie games, and even video games of all time, and that is for many reasons including the fact that it is based on a fungus that is very real. This was a great video!
Amazing games, really enjoyed the last fight with Abby. They did waste half the game trying to get me to empathize with her tho. I won’t say I didn’t enjoy playing through her part of the game. I didn’t mind dying as her as much as I did playing as Ellie, I felt like she deserved it more, lol.
RIP Joel
@@bujkaizack the story was brilliant. So powerful.
Just to clarify, they are called infected, not zombies, so it's not a zombie game. It still is the best game out there, specially part I, which also has a killer multiplayer, with quite an active player base. The last of us part I single player mode will get a new remake this fall.
@@jevvir that’s why I said or the infected. The games are in the same as zombies just with their own twist. I hope they make another game.
@@CLBrierley Yeah it's a zombie game just like The Walking Dead is a zombie show even though they never call them zombies. ;)
Death by butt fungus was not on my list of things I wanted to learn right before bed. But now I know that we over here in Germany 50 Million Years ago had the same weather Thailand has now. I also love the Alien reference. Dying by Alien having breakfast does not sound better than dying by fungus, but a lot more bloody.
Blake is hands down the best pbs eons host, dude just makes me laugh
And more educated
I like them all for their different quirks 😊
Big Daddy Blake
@@marksmangalactic9050 Absolutely. The only channel with more than two hosts I know of where I like all of the hosts.
I enjoy each of the hosts for their different narration styles but something about Blake's zeal for the puns is especially enjoyable
He actually made a Last of Us pun in a video about zombies. Well played.
About zombifying fungi no less!
Cordyceps is literally the fungus from the games lmao
What's amazing is that someone found ant bite marks on a fossilized leaf.
Imagine the attention to detail required
We do actually know a bit about the mechanisms by which Ophiocordyceps fungi hijack ants and its actually quite a bit more terrifying than direct behavioral manipulation since it turns out that the fungi largely avoids interacting with the ants nervous system instead blocking the ants brains ability to signal to control its muscles and rather directly triggering its own action potential signals to supplant control. So it is much better described as puppeteering the ant. Granted it takes time for the fungus to grow to be able to achieve that effect so behavioral manipulation is probably necessary to get to the puppeteering stage.
That said we do know a bit about that too and interestingly enough it involves a molecule called psilocybin. Psilocybin or an equivalent psychedelic compound appears to be a prerequisite for direct animal parasitism by fungi i.e. there are fungi which aren't parasitic which produce psychedelics but there are no direct parasitic fungi (we are discounting opportunistic infections of the skin or orifices as the fungus isn't acting as a coordinated multicellular organism) which do not produce psychedelics.
Psychedelics themselves appear to be a much more general product of convergent evolution which interestingly enough appears to likely have arisen as a defensive weapon against insects by disorienting them as they attack the fungus or directly compete for resources(decomposing plant material).
For more on this topic I recommend reading Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
Really informative and interesting comment, thanks for the book recommendation too.
Take note, sci-fi horror writers: fungal-type zombification does not take over your brain. It's much worse. Your mind is alert, coherent, and utterly horrified; perhaps with only enough control to scream at your friends that you can't stop, as your body carefully tills the soil to optimize conditions for the next planting cycle.
Your comment deserves more thumbs up, really informative comment.
I second the book recommendation. An excellent book, to learn more about fungi.
interesting comment but no way did someone call their kid "Merlin Sheldrake"
It's fascinating how ants' behaviour helps them, most of the time, to avoid the spread of diseases within the colony. Our film crew managed to shoot an incredible ant colony work where they carried leaves to their nest together, but in this case, they were seeking the fungus. Zombie ants, maybe? Not in this case; they actually use the fungus as nourishment. Thanks for the video!
Ants sanitize each other, destroy/remove dead bodies, and kill those already infected.
Sounds a lot like the QZ zone in the last of us. Though it can be cruel, an effective strategy when there are zombies running around.
Since ants love stealing and eating competitors’ larvae I can definitely see the chance of contamination
"And none of them infect people." Yet.
I've heard about these Zombie Ants about ten thousand times and I just have one question...
What has nobody made a B-movie with rubber suited zombie-ant people in it yet? COME ON PEOPLE.
One of the most famous video games ever made is all about cordyceps infecting humans, so it's kind of been done.
Ahh yes I know the game! Sonic the Hedgehog is one my all time faves
The Girl with All the Gifts is a A tier movie that really did a related idea well :)
There was a classic X-Files episode based on this.
@@telltellyn and it will have tv series out soon
I think the most scary part I've heard about this is that the fungi just goes for the muscles as a means of control and energy resources, so the nerves are left for last.
So the ant at some point tries to do something, and due to the infection, it can't control its body
Ah, I see it's time for an Eons take on Cordyceps. Great to hear a more in-depth evolutionary take on it for once.
Eons: I know what you're thinking...
Me: The last of us?
E: That's right, Xenomorphs from Alien!
Me: 😐
I love this host he has so much charisma
I got that reference!
Best game ever made!!
Tlou
8:04 I admire your restraint in withholding that reference until the end.
This has to be one of the coolest channels on RUclips.. it's topics are always interesting, yet the research and preparation are still very well done. Great presentation!!
When someone deciphers how a fungus can manipulate a host's behaviour, that's when Umbrella becomes a real threat.
For those wondering, no, Cordyceps cannot infect humans because our nervous systems are far too complex for them to infect. Also, each species of Cordyceps has evolve to infect only a specific species of insect. For example, a Cordyceps that has evolved to infect an ant species from Thailand can't infect an ant species from Florida
And it too warm
They can only infect things that are 70-80 degrees anything higher is instant death
The average human body temp is 90s
There are cordyceps within human environments. They are called "manipulative people"
"The Last of Us" is real. For the ants, of course. It is unfortunate for them. We should count ourselves lucky that the fungus didn't evolve to infect humans. Yet. 🍄🐜
That's what I was thinking too. XD
Blake: "But don't worry, they haven't evolved to infect us humans."
Me: "YET."
@@MurdogYT Yeah, the odds of it somehow mutating to infect us are incredibly, INCREDIBLY small. It doesn't mean it COULDN'T happen (weirder cosmic probabilities HAVE happened), but yeah, I think the odds of something like you winning the Powerball lottery 10 times in a row is still higher than cross-Order disease infections.
@@MurdogYT So far no modern strain of Rabies has developed that can control humans like it does the other mamales it takes over. Rabies makes the victims ingnore survival and go out to bite as many animals as possible but not kill them as it wants to make Rabies virus in the new host.
Legdend has humans having the same behavior but it has never been observed in humans but recent brain reasrch showing even more complexity to the human brain and how the human brain has cheats to work massively faster than all other animals means the low amount of DNA rabies virus has no answer for taking over the much more complex human all though it does kill humans dead but those humans don't normaly spreed the virus.
until you read in the paper headline "massive crops and food product recalls by FDA due to mold infestation"
Those images of bugs with fuzzy spikes of fungus growing out of them seriously always give me an empty cold feeling...some sickly feeling of primeval horror. It's mild of course, but it feels ancient and just deeply wrong
These videos are so well done. The background music, the images, the three original hosts. I even love the sound effects when an image comes up. Bravo!
So research has been done to figure out exactly how the bugs are controlled. (November 8, 2017), researchers at Penn State University released new information in regards to this. They found the fungus grow in between the muscle fibers ans it allows them to control the movements. No fungal matter was found in the brain of the ant so they speculate that the ants are just watching their bodies go into autopilot.
Can't wait for you guys to come back! Enjoy the break, Thank you for everything you guys are doing !
Love you guys! Keep making amazing content, we appreciate it!
Ah yes, the cordyceps fungus. One variant for just about every insect that gets too apex or overpopulated it seems. Amazing fungus. I cultivated cordyceps that attacked blow flys and got it so prevalent that there were thousands of moldy looking flies in my garden all zombified in their underleaf death grips. I played with humidifiers and temperatures, lighting and air flow. Lots of notes! I truly managed to improve the cordyceps life. I hope it enjoyed our time together.
I wish I had a fly cordceps in a miniature potted tree in my house to control the multiple fly swarms that appear in summer although I have no idea how they get in through tightly closed windows. One day last summer I got 32 of them in one hour's swatting but it wasn't all of them and since most of them crawl around on the window panes (they want out when they first wanted in - go figure) it makes for gross fly-gut covered windows.
Yes...!! Two villain scientists getting together to destroy the world accidentally...
Now I need for someone to make animated ants movie, but it's zombie horror.
another interesting tidbit, we use fungus similar to this during organ donation/organ transplant operations, because in humans these types of fungi are useful for their ability to suppress the immune system and prevent the body from having an immune response to the removal/addition of organs
Which and which country. I was in the industry and didn't hear of this. I'm curious :)
Man you are the GOAT. Xenomorph reference, The Last of Us Reference, and super geeky postscript. Well done.
This was a really cool video! When you get back, can you please bring it a video that follows the evolution of snails and slugs?? I've been asking for the for a while now 🥺😍
If you click on my profile & head over to my playlist library, I have the largest Malacology ( study of mollusks) resource on youtube which includes videos on gastropod ( snails, semi snails & slugs) evolution.
one of my greatest fears... cordyceps fungus figuring out how to penetrate the mammalian blood brain barrier.
Never knew ants have complex evolved health protocol
The Last of Ants
Freaking love this channel and you guys. Thanks for making nerdy science fun and adorable. And omg, the outtakes! More please. Have a great vacation.
Love the "THE LAST OF US" reference. You're the best!
6:23 I swear that stock footage must be incorrectly labeled "ants" because i have seen it in a ton of nature videos and they always get it wrong because those are in fact termites not ants.
Well, at that point they are talking about social insects in general an not specifically ants.
@@michaelcreek3813 Look it's not like it completely out of place or anything but i'm pretty sure the editor thought it was a video of ants, it's an honest mistake since that species of termite have darkened exoskeleton to protect from the sun because they have similar foraging behavior to ants, termites are usually much more reclusive. Besides in that part they have already mentioned ants and proceed to show 3/4 videos of ants.
If Umbrella decided to make zombies by using fungi spores, how screwed is humanity?
Blake's reactions are just so... so adorable!
Many fungus are hallucinogenic, so they evolved to modify the behavior of the animals eating them.
That went from quite stunning to quite horrific to quite stunning again pretty fast.
keep up the videos!! love seeing new ones pop up :)) always a pleasure
I had to be trusting to watch yet another video about zombie ants and you did not disappoint.
The infected ants have a song... "Cos I'm dying inside... to fungi..."
Watching this makes me want to rethink everything, I would love to catch and observe these guys all day.
I’m sure there was an episode of the X Files where humans get infected with a fungus and it erupts out of their throats. It scared the crap out of me as a 12 year old.
The reference to the video game series was brilliant. I see what you did there and love it.
Social immunity:
"All the ants wanted was to keep their colony free of disease, and they got zombies."
Hmm, are we not the mammalian equivalent of ants? Zombie apocalypse here we come!
Omg! My AP Research project was about this exact thing! Glad you guys are covering it :)
The images of those fungus infected ant corpses always get me! Great video!
(i) climb 2m (ii) go to underside of leaf (iii) grip and hold (iii) die at midday: .... that is a fairly complex instruction set for a simple fungus! It would be fascinating to understand how it does it.
This the channel I love every host!
All of you are so charismatic and fun! 💙💛
02:28 Such a precision mechanism. The ants are sent to die at a specific time of day and height off the ground. Nature inexorably executes.
If the world were to perhaps get warmer...
i love this channel so much. one of my favorites!
This is what I love about Eons -- not just dinosaurs! I mean I love me a dinosaur but there is so much more to learn!
There's a cool documentary about mushrooms that goes over this process on Netflix. It's really fascinating! I had no idea that fungi were used as pesticides.
Anyone else a fungi expert like me after watching "the last of us"?
You guys and girls outdid yourselves. This video is awsome!
I'm here to recommend "The Girl with All the Gifts" if anyone wants a zombie novel based on this idea!
I don't usually post comments on YT videos but your last of us interjection brought me here. Well done y'all. Thanks for all you do.
I was expecting an aswer as to how the fungus actually controls the ant's behavior to that degree. It's a very specific set of instructions that certainly didn't come out of nowhere. Usually when other organisms are "zombified" the changes in behavior are pretty simple in comparison (enhanced aggression, inhibitted flight response, etc).
I imagine it has to do with ants' instinct to self isolate and move away from the colony when they feel sick and the fungus is just "guiding" them to those specific spots with environmental cues, like light level and the day/night cycle. The part about biting down and holding on to leaves seems less complex.
There were likely many different mutations of the fungus that caused a variety of different chemical cues for the ants. Some that had them do lots of different behaviors. This specific set of behaviors happened to lead to more of this particular fungus being spread than the others and its version of the fungi just outcompeted the rest.
It's dumb luck, really. The behaviors that weren't beneficial to the spread of the fungus, didn't reproduce as much and eventually disappeared, leaving only the successful version. And each time a more successful mutation happened, that version is the one that got to take over.
Over millions of years, the fungus just gets more and more refined to a very complex set of behaviors.
@@NG-VQ37VHR I know this relationship evolved over a long period of time to become what it is today, but evolution has to work on something that was already there, it can't simply create something from nothing. In this case even more so, as the fungus can't create a behavior that wasn't already present in the ants, and the ants certainly didn't evolve new behavior to help the fungus.
Usually this type of parasite works in very simple ways, releasing a couple chemicals that inhibit or enhance certain functions of the brain, with the more complex behaviors that result being just what the victim's brain was already wired to do in those circumstances. It doesn't make sense that the fungus would've evolved one external chemical signal to tell the ant to abandon the colony, another to tell it to go find a leaf a certain distance off the ground, another to do it at a certain time of day, etc. The ants must've already had behaviors for these things and the fungus just learned how to exploit them, turning some signals on or off or altering their intensity. What I really wanted to know is what that mechanism was.
@@iamdanieloliveira
This paper is probably the best explanation you will get for now.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4174324/
In summary, guanidinobutyric acid (GBA) & sphingosines are produced in the ant's brain along with several other as yet unidentified metabolites. GBA is involved in the transport of compounds such as creatine and guanidinoacidic acid (GAA) across the blood-brain barrier and known to be involved in epileptic discharges and convulsions in rodents. Altered levels of creatine and GAA have been shown to cause neurological disorders. Sphingosines are part of sphingolipid metabolism, which affects all types of cell regulation. Defects can lead to cancers and neurological syndromes.
Apparently gene exporession in ants is strongly influenced by light and circadian ryhtm, so it's only at certain times of the day that the ant's natural brain chemistry produces whichever metabolite is necessary to interact with the fungal metabolites to trigger the induced behaviour. The death grip involves atrophy of the mandibular muscles leading to a locked jaw.
8:04 Nice reference
awesome timing, Costa Rican Cubes just posted a short video on his channel showing a Cicada, dead, being consumed by most likely by some type of Cordyceps
Anytime someone says "look at the trees" as proof of a deity, just refer them here or to a video on tarantula wasps.
Needs “Death Grips” music in the background. Great video.
We'll miss you while Eons is on break! Hope you have a lot of fungis 🤓
Thank you for an episode about my favorite animal
Sad that you're going on break for a month. I enjoy the videos a lot.
This is the first eons that I listened to and couldn't look at the screen. Fascinating but audio only for me. Those pictures were creeping me out. LOL
Same lol
SUPER fascinating! Scary (for ants), but very cool way to propagate as an adaptive (I want to say) spore/fungus!?!
Happy holidays!
Humans just can't be original. Human "We invented zombies!" 50 million year old fungi "Ahem!"
When you talked about social immunity, I immediately thought about ostracizing.
“This is ‘the last of us’ you’ll see for a month”
Nice
Another interesting one are the Rhizocephala barnacles (such as Loxothylacus panopaei) that do something similar to crabs and some other crustaceans. Those are probably worth an episode at some point.
Love all these nerdy references and jokes that I entirely got. 👍
Envious about the NOSTROMO flightsuit.
Cooler than heck y’all! That’s a whole bunch! You’re so damn funny too. Keep it up big dog!
What a coincidence. I just finished readings "Entangled Life" by Merlin Sheldrake and this same story is told in the book. So watching this episode was like deja vu
Love the "vibe check" that would be a keeper for me. LOL.
Brilliant video!
That DNA graphic you used is one of those illusions that spins in either direction.
Have a great summer break! I will miss y'all!
1 minute in and I've already hear Death Grip 3+ times: is this a Fantano video? 😂
Jokes aside, I'm always so shocked and amazed about fungi complex behaviors and their (most of the times) symbiotic/parasitic way to thrive.. the og biohackers
Every time he said death grip I thought of MC Ride’s screams lmao
YUH
IT GOES IT GOES IT GOES IT GOES IT GOES IT GOES IT GOES
A month without any episode will feel just like EONS !
What was the natural progression of this fungi gaining this ability? I’m sure it didn’t go from “normal” fungal reproduction to reproducing through zombifying insects with no steps in the middle. What were those stepping stones the fungi had to take?
The Last of Us on HBO brought me here!
Lol! Did not mis your “Last Of Us” reference at the end there; nicely done!
"Colton" - the mysterious Eontologist, the unsung hero of these videos!