What is almost dead that has eight hairy legs, so many eyes, and that leaps out of its hole to devour poor, unwary prey? One could think of the beginning of a dark horror story that young ants told each other in the evenings to scare each other. And yet aren’t we saying that fiction is catching up with reality? Unless it’s the other way around.
The world of small animals is inhabited by extremely strange creatures. You may have heard of those ants “zombified” by a horrible parasitic fungus, or those burrowing spiders, predators on the lookout, emerging from a burrow camouflaged by some sort of trapdoor made of silk and rubble pounce on their prey. Mix the two and you get what looks like the new species of parasitic fungus close to the Ophiocordyceps made famous by The Last of Us game and series.
This was brought to light by scientists working to determine the remaining biodiversity in a forest north of Rio de Janeiro, one of the most threatened ecosystems on earth. Several arachnids and insect-parasitic fungi caught their attention, and while more analysis is needed before these species can be officially declared new, they are unknown to the mycologists who made up the team. One of the species close to those that produce “zombified” ants, and described as “really awesome” by mycologist João Araújo of the New York Botanical Garden, who discovered them, attacks trapdoor spiders, but nothing’s wrong.” shows for now states that it controls the movements of the infected arachnid before killing it.