It’s truly the stuff of a rollicking good B-movie: a parasite invades another organism, makes its way to the brain and summarily takes over, leaving the host able to do absolutely nothing apart from total dedication to the nefarious bidding of its parasitic overlord.
Good stuff. Pass the popcorn.
But this isn’t on the silver screen, rather here and now on our good, green earth. We wrote last year about a species of ant in Thailand who falls prey to a parasitic fungal invasion that causes the ant to perform one final act before it dies: chomp down a very specific species of leaf, one with the perfect moisture content and temperature, that will permit the fungus to propagate and take over a new batch of minions.
Simultaneously amazing and grisly, this dynamic of parasitic control of one species over another has been long known to occur in nature. But for University of Exeter researcher David Hughes, the driving question has been a sense for how long life on Earth has exhibited this unusual adaptive behavior. Working alongside colleagues from the US and Germany, Hughes may not quite have a final answer, but an amazing find in the fossil record proves that zombies have been with us for a very long time. As EurekAlert reports, a leaf fossil discovered in Germany shows telltale signs of the zombie ant death grip, and it has been dated at 48 million years.
Dr. Hughes explains the significance of the find:
“The evidence we found mirrors very closely the type of leaf scars that we find today, showing that the parasite has been working in the same way for a very long time. This is, as far as we know, the oldest evidence of parasites manipulating the behaviour of their hosts and it shows this parasitic association with ants is relatively ancient and not a recent development. Hopefully we can now find more fossilised evidence of parasitic manipulation. This will help us shed further light on the origins of this association so we can get a better idea of how it has evolved and spread.”
Photo by David P. Hughes via EurekAlert.