A fossil 99 million years old has preserved an ancient fly horrifying: with a body of a zombie fungus, similar to a mushroom, coming out of his head.
The insect, along with a young ant infected with a similar fungus, are two of the oldest examples of a bizarre natural phenomenon surrounding Fungal parasites that kidnap the bodies of their hosts before finally killing them.
“The fossil gives us this opportunity to visualize the old fossil -preserved ecological relationships,” said Yuhui Zhuang, a doctoral student at the Yunnan University Paleontology Institute in southwest China.
“In general, these two fossils are very rare, at least among the tens of thousands of fossil specimens we have seen, and only a few preserved the symbiotic relationship between fungi and insects,” added Zhuang, an author of a fossil study published on June 11 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Zhuang and his colleagues named two previously unknown species of ancient fungi of the genre Ophiocordyceps From its research on amber, fossil resin, which involved the use of optical microscopes to study the small pieces of amber and microcomputerized tomography to make 3D images of fungal infected insects.
They found the first, called Paleoophiocordyceps gerontoformicaein the ant and the second, Paleoophiocordyceps ironomyiaena Mosca.
Some species of Ophiocordyceps that today attack ant species are known as “Fungi Zombies of Ant” Because the fungal parasite can manipulate the behavior of its hosts for its own benefit. The HBO. HBO shares a controlling company, Warner Bros. Discovery, with CNN.
“The discovery of these two fossils suggests that terrestrial ecosystems were already very complex, and that Ophiocordyceps, in particular, may have started acting as a” predator “of insects in the Cretaceous period, regulating the populations of certain groups,” said Zhuang.
Today, parasitic fungi, also known as fungi entomopathogenicinfect a wide range of insect groups, including ants, flies, cicadas and beetlesaccording to the London Natural History Museum.
In the case of carpent ants, the fungus spore Ophiocordyceps She lands on an ant’s head, enters her brain through a weak area in the insect exoskeleton and takes control of the ant to facilitate her spread, said Conrad Labandeira, senior scientist and curator of fossil arthropods of the National Museum of Natural History Smithsonian in Washington, DC, who did not participate in the study.
Paleoophiocordyceps probably moved its hosts in similar way, according to Labandeira.
“It seems that ants, for some reason, have been shot early for zombification, and are currently the main receivers of this parasitoid fungus,” said Labandeira. He added that flies are rarely affected by these parasitic fungi today, making a particularly interesting fossilized example.
The species of fungus that infected the prehistoric ant can be an ancestor of ant zombies fungi, and therefore probably controlled the body of its host in similar ways, said study coautler João Araújo, mycology curator and assistant teacher at the Denmark Natural History Museum. Very few species of old parasitic fungi have been discovered, so little is known about their evolution.
The two insects were probably killed by the fungi before they were trapped in the sticky resin of the tree that ended up forming the amber, Araújo said, noting that most entomopathogenic fungi kills their hosts to produce the fruit body.
This lost diversity of parasites played a significant role in the formation of the planet we live in today, said Phil Barden, an associate professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology Institute of Technology, who worked with amber fossils.
“Even when we find a remarkable diversity of amber-preserved organisms, it is important to remember that we actually capture only a small glimpse. For any ant or fossil beetle, we can imagine all parasites, fungi and bacteria that such insects support,” said Barden, who has not participated in the new study by email.
It was “fascinating to see that part of the strangeness of the natural world we see today was also present at the height of the era of dinosaurs,” said study co -author Edmund Jarzembowski, a associate professor and scientist at the London Natural History Museum.
Although amber fossils have been some of the most exciting discoveries of paleontology in recent years, ethical concerns have emerged about the provenance of the amber of the region affected by the civil war.
Zhuang said fossils were obtained from Myanmar’s amber markets. The study noted that the species were acquired before 2017 and, as far as the authors know, were not involved in armed conflicts or ethnic disputes.
