Science Daily assures us these shocking, primordial monsters are very real:
“This leaf shows clear signs of one well documented form of zombie-parasite, a fungus which infects ants and then manipulates their behaviour.”
The fungus, called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, causes ants to leave their colonies and head for a leaf which provides the ideal conditions for the host to reproduce.
When it gets there the ant goes into a ‘death grip’- biting down very hard on the major vein of a leaf. This means that when the ant dies, its body stays put so the fungus has time to grow and release its spores to infect other ants.
The death grip bite leaves a very distinct scar on the leaves. This prompted Dr Hughes, together with research partners Conrad Labandeira from the Smithsonian Institution in the USA and Torsten Wappler, from the Steinmann Institute in Germany, to search for potential evidence of the fungus at work by studying the fossilised remains of leaves.
After studying leaf fossils from the Messel Pit, a site on the eastern side of the Rhine Rift Valley in Hesse, Germany, they found clear evidence of the death grip bite in a 48-million-year-old leaf specimen.
I’m going to introduce a concept that I’ll humbly call The Balfour Heuristic: The scarier a creature is, the longer its species has been around.