Endless Thread - Screamtime: Zombie Fungus

Episode Date: October 25, 2018

Imagine a fungus that could infiltrate your whole body, turn you into a puppet, and grow right out of the top of your head. Actually, you don't have to imagine it -- IT'S REAL. It's called Cordyceps, and fortunately, it only has this effect on insects... for now.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the I-Lap at WBUR, Boston. Dim Somm, is it the dimsum place? Or is it the New Saigon Ban-Me sandwich spot? No. Which place is it? The Joy Luck hot pot? Maybe it's a street down. Oh, here we go. Team Endless Thread is walking around Boston's Chinatown neighborhood. Talking about a restaurant recommended by a friend, which we cannot find. I used to live in that building that has been completely gutted, the shell of the building.

Is that a strip club? Is there a strip club there? Yeah. Here's the thing. This new Saigon sandwich situation looks quite legit. Despite Ben's spidey sense for sandwich shops, we aren't looking for food. Then, producer Josh Swartz and I are here looking for a rare dietary supplements. with legendary properties. The supplement is a fungus. It comes from the Himalayan Mountains, and it is difficult to harvest.

Only a few places here have it, so we're trying to overcome my interest in sandwiches and find the stuff we are actually here for. Well, you can get a sandwich after this. Yeah, we're going to get a sandwich. I'm going to get a sandwich. Yeah, there's some good smells for sure. This is it. This is where we're going in, right? Yes.

This place. Guys. Used to be a theater. We go into this market next door to the sandwich place, and there's a counter immediately to the right that looks a little like a perfume counter with a bunch of dried herbs in fancy cases. We asked the lady standing there

if she has what we're looking for. You don't know? Okay. Okay, we'll look further back. Is there not them? No, they do. This look bug-like. Okay. Okay, we need to find someone.

Should we try to ask this gentleman who's stocking the cabbage right? Yes, you should. We are having zero luck finding this supplement, by the way. I wonder if we should be finding the Chinese name for it and asking about that? I'm looking at this. Yeah. To-cho-Caso?

Okay. We'll show this guy. Oh, do you walk here? Do you know if you sell this up at the front? Back at the glass counter at the front of the store, an employee named Semison shows us a container the size of your palm. The case has golden cloth in it, a bunch of Chinese characters on it, and it's full of what looks like dried caterpillars with a thin black tendril growing out of one end. Almost like little petrified black hairs. We've found it.

Jackpot. Just one problem. So how, that's $290. Wow. Um... Uh... It's actually only $230, but still. Semicin tells us why it's so expensive.

This one, medicine quality for special. High price. What does the medicine do? I don't know for energy for men, for women, for blood, for anything for... Yeah, energy for men and women. Yeah, high price. Like it, like it, like it, like it, like it, like it's 24 gold. Like 24 karat gold?

Wow, this is amazing, though. Do you sell a lot of this? Is it hard to find? Oh, really hard. Semmisen points us to another place. So we leave the market and walk a few blocks away to a Chinese herb shop that might have cheaper options, Numb Be Hong. We didn't immediately find a cheaper option, but we did find. We call this Dongchongha Xiaohan. Yeah, this is kind of traditional Chinese medicine.

You can use as medicine and also you can use like a nutrition supplement for the body. So this is like really, really expensive one. Yeah. Yeah. How much is, oh wow. Yeah, this one, this box is like one ounce. Yeah. So it's like $1,40 for one box.

What does it do? It can make your body stronger and your immune immune system. Normally, people use for like cook, when they cook the soup. Okay. Yeah, don't put too much, you know. Someone told us that it's for sexual energy, right? Yeah, people, yeah, it's a lot of... Like Viagra or something.

Right, right. People talk about a lot of good things about these herbs. Yeah, but mainly. is make you body strong. This supplement is called corticeps. And the reason we're chasing down corticeps isn't that it's part of the male enhancement

industrial complex. Or the promise that is the drug industry's holy grail. Viagra for women. It's the fact that this supplement is a fungus that invades, controls, and eventually brutally murders insects, all in its unending quest for survival

and domination. This stuff in the fancy case looks like dried-up caterpillar carcasses because it is dried-up caterpillar carcasses. Expensive dried-up caterpillar carcasses that we must somehow find a way to eat, which is why we should thank Josh for his eagle eye and an ambition to eat bugs. Thank you. Oh, Ben, Ben, Emery. Yes, yes.

That's doable. Superior quality. This is a... Corticeps. Corticeps pills. 30 capsules. Guys, we're doing this. We're getting cortisps pills.

Is this the same thing? Same thing, right? It's the same thing, yes. Yeah, but this is like... Pills. You can take it. This we can afford. That's $18.

Guys, cordyceps on me. Moths, tarantulas, ants, caterpillars, all kinds of bugs are susceptible to corticeps. It takes them over and eats their brains. And in at least one case, it controls the insect before it kills it, which is why we're going to call this episode the zombie fungus. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you are listening to Endless Thread, the show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. I'm here with my co-host, Amory Siebertson,

and we are coming to you from Boston's NPR station, WBUR. All throughout the month of October, we have been bringing you scream time. Scary stories. from Reddit. So we're going to get to the part where we swallow ground-up bug bits in capsule form. But first, we're going to explore the weird, wonderful world of fungi. And we should say that the corticeps fungus itself isn't zombified. It zombifies its hosts, especially its ant hosts.

But even when it's not zombieifying bugs, it's still murdering them with abandon. There are pictures of lots of these different corticeps attacking lots of different bug species, and those pictures are on lots of different subredits. You got your moth fungus posts on the Nature is Metal subreddit. Then there's the tarantula torn up by some cordyceps on the WTF subreddit. And of course, on R.S.Crepy, the picture of an ant with tiny mushrooms coming out of its head. The stuff harvested in the Himalayas and sold as a dietary supplement is just the pricey example. But cordyceps fungi are actually found all over the world.

And each kind of corticeps fungus focuses on a single species. So, like a murderous corticeps fungus, we too are going to focus mostly on one example, the ant corticeps, because it's incredible. It is. Evidence? Well, this particular kind of cordyceps controls the behavior of the ant before the ant dies, which is unique among varieties of corticeps and really all fungi, not to mention mysterious. You could make the argument that fungi are having a bit of a moment.

The best-selling author Michael Pollan recently released a book called How to Change Your Mind, what the new science of psychedelics teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence. And there is a lot about fungi in that book. So we called him up to talk about the fungus that turns ants into zombies. You came across this in researching the book, right? Yeah. So the corticeps is a particularly ingenious and diabolical mushroom. So basically it's zombieizing the ant, turning the ant into its slave, taking over its mind and its body to spread its spore.

It's quite a remarkable thing. It's the horror film of the natural world. What your listeners need to do is go online and look up some YouTubes of corticeps. is one that I think Richard Attenborough did. He means David Attenborough, Richard's younger brother. By the way, this one video from the BBC's planet Earth was referenced by almost everyone we talked to for this story. Its infected brain directs this ant upwards.

It's made a huge impact, and the footage of the cortisps busting through the insect's brains is jaw-dropping. Like something out of science fiction, The fruiting body of the cordyceps erupts from the ant's head. From there, the tendril-like cordyceps mushroom reaches into the atmosphere as the ants' eyes go from lively to kind of milky. It is so freaking weird, but also exciting,

which is why people like Michael Pollan have written about it. Are you open to the possibility that in some large-scale fashion, mushrooms and fungi are engaging, in a slow campaign of mind control? No, I'm not there yet. I haven't taken enough mushrooms to buy into that idea. Okay, so maybe Michael Pollan isn't ready to go full fungi conspiracy theory. But nonetheless, there's a whole list of people just talking about the cordyceps ant fungus.

Yes, this is Amelia. Hey, Amelia. This is Amory. How are you? Hi, good and yourself? I'm doing great. Thank you for making. time to talk to us, especially first thing Monday morning. Amelia Sola Grosia is a lecturer at the University of North Georgia, and she has one of the coolest job descriptions I've heard in a minute. Well, my particular area of studies more so animal behavior. I'm more interested in how

social dynamics are affected by parasites. In this case, the parasite is the corticeps fungus. It's called ophiocorticeps. But before we learn about ophiocorticeps turning ants into zombies, we should get some of that regular ant knowledge. True. Drop some knowledge, Doc. I want to remind you that colonies can have from hundreds to thousands or millions of workers inside the nest. And each of them have a specific responsibility. Not all of them go out and collect food. And therefore, the ones that do come back, start feeding some in the colony. And then those are responsible for starting the cascade of feeding throughout the colony.

So that's how they like share with each other food. A cascade of ants regurgitating food for each other, another somewhat revolting and awesome idea. And interesting, right, that there's this really complex structure of an established ant colony. From the queen on down, workers, for instance, do all sorts of things. Excavate, care for little baby larva, and go out and forage food. And Amelia says that just like people, ants change jobs over the course of their lives. So workers that are younger are thought to take care of. of eggs and larvae.

And then over time, when they're no longer as valuable to the colony, then they start being workers that go outside of the nests. Workers that are cheap, in a sense, can go off and be exposed to predation more often or to parasites, and it wouldn't be such a cost to the colony. Kind of a brutal idea. But whatever the case, these older worker ants that leave the colony are the ants that end up being the most vulnerable to the cortiseps parasite.

Because they go out into the world to forage, they pick up some corticeps spores. And that's the beginning of one of the most disconcerting, gruesome transformations the insect world has ever seen. Isn't that right, David Attenborough? These bullet ants are showing some worrying

symptoms. You're damn right they are. Ants that are usually marching two by two, hurrah, etc. Are very sick. Now, at this stage, what happens is a lot of convulsions are occurring. It makes the ant leave the nest, walk in a drunkard manner.

In some occasions, they vomit. Vomiting zombie ants in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing, or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs.

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So we learned about ants, but really it's the fungus that is the star of this show. And we wanted to nerd out with a redditor about Ophiocorticeps. So we found Reddit user Brunfique. I'm Lee Dininger. I'm a master student at Yukon where I studied microbiology, but I'm also just like a mushroom geek and forest dweller. I got really, like, turned on to mushrooms and fungi.

As an undergrad, just taking biology course, and I just thought that they were the coolest thing. I was seeing these diagrams of, like, mushrooms going miles underground and these gigantic networks, and I was like, these are aliens. These aren't things, right? Can you talk about, like, how this works? Like, how, what happens? If we start with where a mushroom's life begins, it's as a spore.

And corticeps, those spores are like threads almost, like a really, really long, delicate thread that catches the wind very nicely. And it can drift along and break apart. And those just kind of lay in wait for a little while. Or they'll find their way onto an ant or something. And once it lands on there, it kind of like knows that it's go time. So it'll land on the insect and start to produce compounds to dig into its cuticle. The cuticle is just like the exoskeleton. They're really tough.

Bugs have a really hard time even like breathing and getting water because of how tough they're like shell is. But once they get through, they start flowing through this thing's open circulatory system because that's how bugs mostly are. They just have all of their organs and everything floating around in this fluid that has everything that they need. Yeah. Like, it's essentially their blood and their immune system and oxygen and everything. It's all mixed together. It's all mixed together, which is kind of really dangerous because if you have everything bathing in the same fluid and then you have a pathogen get in there,

has access to your entire body. This is where Ophiocortyceps does something truly amazing. The fungus has to bear fruit, so it needs to grow a mushroom, also known as the fungus's fruiting body, because that's how it spreads and makes more fungus. But growing a mushroom on the forest floor isn't the best option. So? It'll direct the ant to optimal fruiting conditions, which is, as a fungus, it likes a certain percentage of humidity, so it says start climbing up and just find the light and climb upwards toward that.

We'll get around usually like 25 centimeters off of the forest floor, and then it says bite onto a leaf. Watching this all go down is super weird. Because if you remember Amelia's description, this ant is like throwing up violently shaking. It's sort of clawing at its thorax while it's climbing. It is fully zombified at this point. This is a death march.

And the end of it is the corticeps forcing the ant to lock its mandibles onto something. Researchers have a name for this, the death grip. The ant just grabs with everything it has onto a leaf and sits and waits as the fungus grows to the rest of its body, digesting everything, going right into the brain, eating, and then getting all this energy to then produce its reproductive structure, which is the mushroom. And that burst, it's usually straight out of the ant's head. And it's, like, brutal. Whoa. Wow.

I try to always stay at optimal fruiting conditions as well. But is the ant itself capable of knowing what's going on? Yes. And also, it goes as far as, like, other ants know what's going on with that ant. They do? Yeah, that's where it gets, like, really... So they're like, don't follow that guy. He's messed up.

Oh, no, they jettison that aunt, usually. Because ants, ants are super social. They live in very close quarters. They're like, Ted's acting weird, man. I don't know. We got to get him out of our apartment. Ted's being weird. I think it would be Tabitha because all worker aunts are females, by the way.

Oh, well played. Tabitha. Tabitha's being real weird. We've got to get her out of his apartment. Oh, yeah, but it's just like worst case scenario. Somebody gets a flu. You live in a box with like 150,000 other people. Everybody gets sick.

Bad news. Everybody dies. They're extremely social. so they can actually sense the behavior is being altered, and they can sense that something is wrong or infected about the ant. We're all calling it mind control, but what does that, like, actually mean? Oh, it's more just behavioral change. You see a change in behavior in the ant,

and it's really just answering to the demands that the fungus is trying to set for it, which is climb really. high and then hang on to something and don't ever let go ever again. Ooh, that's like for something, that like you creeped me out. For some reason when you see this, don't ever let go. For sure. Don't ever let go. So unsettling, right?

Also, there's been a mystery regarding all of this. According to Lee, we've known what happens to the ant eventually. But we haven't known a lot about how the cortiseps controls the end. Ant's behavior. Everybody assumed that it's probably growing into the brain or growing to the brain or communicating somehow. It was really tough to understand what that interface was like. That was true until last year when research out of Penn State University changed the conversation, which means we're going to talk to one more zombie ant expert. My name is Meridahl Fredericksson. I'm currently a PhD student at the University of

Basel in Switzerland. Dr. Fredrickson used to work at Penn State, where she was really focused on this how question. How does ophiocorticeps force the ants to walk around and climb up stocks and clamp down on leaves like this? So the group of researchers at Penn State did pretty much what you imagine scientists do all day. They looked at ant pieces under the microscope.

I had to make my sample super small, so like, even though ants are small themselves and I only took a part of like the head and the, the leg. I still had to cut my sample. So it was like a millimeter by a millimeter, like a cube. And then stick it on a pin. I like glue it on there. And the discovery that Dr. Fredrickson and her colleagues made is that this fungus creates its own fungal network inside the ant,

a network of cells that communicates and works together. I think when I saw that they were, connecting to each other. I think that was, I realized that there was something there. Like, I was like, aha, they are, they are connecting. That's something that I didn't expect to see. That's not something that we had known about before. This connects to one of the things we've learned about all kinds of fungi. They build networks that communicate. Michael Pollan actually learned about this while researching his book on psychedelics. Among the cool things we've learned about mushrooms is that they connect trees in a forest. They, they form.

a kind of internet where they kind of colonize the root and the roots of plants put out sugars that the mushrooms like to eat in exchange for which the mushrooms reach deep into the earth and find nutrients that the tree needs and feed the tree with those nutrients they also connect the trees and the tree can actually send signals and messages to other trees in the forest so it's it's this invisible web basically underneath our feet that mushrooms create. It turns out that this ability, a fungi to create and spread networks, appears to be present inside the ants that have been infiltrated by corticeps.

It's how the fungus exerts control. If you need to manipulate the behavior of this giant thing that you find yourself in, it might not be enough for just one fungal cell to secrete some chemicals at any given time to manipulate the ant. So if it's going to affect the ant's behavior, it might have to do that in some coordinated way. But that coordinated network is not actually focused on the brain. It's focused on manipulating the body of the ant.

Our Redditor friend Lee describes it this way. So they make these frameworks around the ant muscles, and then they grow up to the brain, but not into the brain, just yet. So it's horrifying because it's not like you're a zombie. and now I control your ant body. It's like you are still alive, but I'm the one steering the ship, essentially. It's like, I control your ant body,

but your brain is free to be full of terror. Yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely terrifying. It's like, yeah, you're a puppet at that point. That's got to be the hebie-gebious zombie ant fact of all. Which raises the question, could we be susceptible to cordyceps? When you think about an ant being controlled,

and its brain not being its own, its body not being its own. You wonder, like, well, an ant is an animal, and I'm an animal. We share a lot of DNA, so how likely is it that that's going to happen to me? Is there a cortoceps for people? And you just, like, spiral out of control, and you start getting really paranoid because it's terrifying.

We don't want to imagine that that can ever happen to us. But wait, humans totally did imagine that it can happen to us. In the video game, The Last of Us, a zombie apocalypse adventure that features zombies infected by, yep, human cordyceps. Christ, how did this happen? They got no clue.

First they're saying it's just the south. This wasn't a tossed-off horror game plot point either. Game designers based the zombie-fying cordyceps, which, in the game, turns humans into horrifying fungal monsters with their head split open, on consultations with scientists. A fan of the game even made a line-for-line copy of the David Attenborough video we've been hearing.

Spores from a parasitic fungus called cordisets have infiltrated his body and their minds. And his mind. His infected brain directs this ant upwards. And then utterly disorientated. Then utterly disorientated, it grips a stem with its mandibles. Those afflicted... Well, the good news is that there's no cortisps taking over human brains yet.

How realistic is it that humans could ever be taken over by mushrooms the way that ants are taken over by corticeps? Well, Lee's been taken over by mushrooms already. And I think you guys are showing science as well. Oh, man. Can that be something that evolves? I'm going to say, humans are edging toward overpopulation. We have been overpopulated for a while, so there's no shortage of meat for sure.

Oh, my gosh. And fungi follow the stuff. They follow the resources. We have only documented like 7% of the fungi that exist on the planet. We know absolutely nothing about fungal diversity. So is there something that's already doing this? Maybe. Who knows? We did take a dose of the pills that we got in Chinatown, so without question, we're asking for it.

Except that we didn't take the ant-specific corticeps, and ours were probably grown in a lab. Oh, I feel better now. Yeah, also hence the much cheaper price tag. But we each took two of them, the whole endless thread team. Our engineer Paul said he had a little upset stomach. Josh? I felt a little sweaty. Ben?

I got like a kind of weird buzzing in my ear. ears and my eyes felt weird, which was creepy. I felt strong. Really? Nope. I actually felt a little out of it. Like my brain was pulsing. Well, if you start stumbling around and chewing on leaves, we're definitely going to get you out of here.

We got to protect the colony. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, who found some mushrooms when she was looking for bread stapled to trees. Iris Adler is our executive producer who says our reaction to those corticeps pills was unexpected. Mix and sound designed by Paul Vycass and John

Parati, who heard cordyceps could turn you into a zombie, and they said, Listen to this. Listen to this. Listen to this. Listen to this. Listen to this. Our web producer is Megan Kelly, and when we showed her photos of zombie ants, she was like, what is this thing? Michael Pope is our advisor, Reddit, who

thinks this whole episode came from one of Reddit's writing prompts. Even though you don't always hear his voice, it's important to point out that our fellow producer Josh Swartz can also say that Endless Thread is something I made. Extra production assistance from James Lindberg. Our intern is Candice Lim. Our theme music is by Squelcher. Huge thanks to Reddeter Flaming Loops for this week's artwork.

It is called Fun Guy and he made incredible animated custom artwork just for this episode. It is amazing. You can see it on our profile. On Reddit, we are Endless underscore Thread. you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did today. Hit us up there. My co-host and producer is Amory Siebertson. I'm senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. That I'll let myself out.