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A 99 million year old amber has received an old fly in horror show fashion: with the mushroom-like fruit base of zombie fungus that breaks out of the head.
The insect, together with a second copy of a young ant infected with a similar mushroom, are two of the oldest examples of a bizarre natural phenomenon, in which mushroom parasites kidnap their hosts before they ultimately kill them.
“Amber gives us the opportunity to visualize the old ecological relationships upright in fossils,” said Yuhui Zhuang, doctoral student at the Institute for Paleontology at Yunnan University in southwestern China.
“Overall, these two fossils are very rare, at least among the tens of thousands of amber -colored specimens that we have seen, and only a few have kept the symbiotic relationship between mushrooms and insects,” added Zhuang, the main author of a study on the fossils, on June 11th in the journal process of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Zhuang and his colleagues called two previously unknown types of old mushrooms of the genus Ophiocordyceps from their research on the amber, which have involved the use of optical microscopes to investigate the tiny pieces of amber and microcomputer tomography to create 3D images of the infected insects with Fungi. They found the first named Paleoophiocordyceps Gerontoformicae on the Ant and the second, paleoophiocordyceps Ionomyiae, flying.
Some ophiocordyceps species that hunt ants today are referred to as “zombie-ant mushrooms” because the mushroom parasites can manipulate the behavior of its hosts to his own advantage. The phenomenon inspired the video game behind the HBO TV show “The Last of Us”. HBO shares a parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, with CNN.
“The discovery of these two fossils indicates that terrestrial ecosystems have already been very complex and that ophiocordyceps act in particular as” predators “of insects in the chalk season and regulated the population groups of certain groups,” said Zhuang via e -mail.
An ant infected with parasitic fungus, which is caught in 99 million year old amber. – Nanjing Institute for Geology and Paleontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences/Nigpas
Zombie mushrooms then and now
Today parasitic mushrooms, also known as entomopathogenic mushrooms, infect a wide range of insect groups, including ants, fly, spiders, cicadas and beetles, such as London’s natural history museum.
In the Case of Carpenter Ants, The Spore of the Ophiocordyceps Fungus Lands on the Head of An Ant, Eners Brain Through A Weak Area in the Insect’s Exoskeleton and Takes Control Of The Ant to Facilitate Its Spread, Said Conrad Labandeira, Senior Scientist and Curator of Fossil Arthropods at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, Who wasn’t Involved in the Study.
According to Labandeira, Paleoophiocordyceps probably zombified his host in a similar way.
“It seems that ants were targeted for the zombification for some reason and are currently the main recipients of this parasitoid mushroom,” said Labandeira. He added that flying is rarely affected by these parasitic mushrooms today and that a petrified example makes it particularly interesting.
The mushroom type that infected the prehistoric ant could be an ancestor of the zombie-ant mushroom, and therefore probably controlled his host’s body in a similar way, said co-author João Araújo, mycology curator and assistant professor in the Danish Natural History Museum. Very few copies of old parasitic fungi were discovered, so little is known about their development.
The two insects were probably killed by the mushrooms before they were caught in the sticky tree resin that ultimately forms amber, said Araújo and found that most entomopathogenic mushrooms kill their hosts to produce the fruit base.
This lost variety of parasites played an important role in the design of the planet, on which we live today, said Phil Barden, Associate Professor at the Department of Biosciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, which worked on amber fossils.
“Even if we find a remarkable variety of organisms that are locked up in Amber, it is important to remember that we really only grasp the smallest look. With a certain fossil ant or a beetle, we can imagine that all parasites, fungus and bacteria that support such insects were not involved in the new study.
A spider killed by an entomopathogenic mushroom. – Anton Sorokin/Alamy Stock Photo
It was “fascinating that the strangeness of the natural world that we see today was also present at the climax of the dinosaurs’ age,” said the co -author of Study, Edmund Jarzembowski, professor and deputy scientist in the London Natural History Museum.
The fossil is the latest that emerges from Myanmar’s rich amber fields.
While amber fossils have been some of the most exciting finds in paleontology in recent years, ethical concerns have emerged regarding the overweight of Bernstein from the region -bound region.
Zhuang said the fossils came from Myanmar’s amber markets. The study found that the specimens were acquired before 2017 and that according to the knowledge of the authors were not involved in armed conflicts or ethnic disputes.
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