Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcult.co.

J-P. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T dot C-O.J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacol.

This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science. I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

It's straight out of a horror movie. An ant, infected with a fungus, starts behaving strangely.

It crawls as high as it can in the forest, grabs a leaf or twig in its mouth, and bites hard.

It enters into this death grip phenotype is what we call it.

Colleen Mangold, a molecular biologist at Penn State.

And a couple of hours after initiation of that behavior, the ant will die.

The fungus, known as aphiocortyps, then eats through the corpse and sprouts a stalk from the

ant's body to release more spores and infect more ants.

It's a harsh way to go. It's not ideal.

Definitely not ideal. Mangeold and her colleagues wanted to get to the bottom of why the ants do this,

specifically how do they get their death grip? So they dissected infected ants and zoomed in on their

jaw muscles with electron microscopes. They saw that the fungus had invaded and grown into jaw muscle cells,

perhaps to suck up nutrients, and they spotted lots of mysterious tiny particles, which might be

produced by the ants immune system, or by the fungus, as a way of communicating with the muscle

and forcing it to contract. Whatever the mechanism, they found that the ant's jaw muscles had

contracted so hard

they'd been irreparably damaged. The full details and gory pictures are in the journal of experimental

...