Attack of the zombie ants!

What's cleverer - an ant or a fungus? The answer seems obvious: the ant. And that's the right answer, as an ant displays many more complex behaviours than a fungus. And yet there is a curious and fascinating way in which, albeit in a deliberately stretched sense of the term, certain fungi outsmart ants.

They do this by infecting ants that cross their path and affecting their nervous systems. The ant is made to direct itself onto (say) a plant where it will end its life by clamping its mandibles around a vein in a leaf at the top of the plant. Meantime, the fungus has been growing inside the ant. When the ant dies and decays high up on the plant, the spores are released into the wind to fall onto the ground to grow into fungi that can infect new ants.

This recent article reports the discovery that such ants have been discovered in Brazil and this older one (both are from The Guardian and have links to more detailed articles) reports that fungi have been pulling this trick for at least 48 million years.