This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

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 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 Afio cortiseps

then eats through the corpse and sprouts a stock from the

ants body to release more spores and infect more ants. It's a harsh way to go.

It's not ideal, definitely not ideal. Mangolden 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 ant's 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 Biology.

Mangold hopes to get to the bottom of what those tiny particles do in follow-up work.

And in the meantime, unless you're a carpenter ant, rest assured you have nothing to worry about.

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