Christ and the Anthill

Dying for the colony's sins

A Carpenter Ant attacked by Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. The fungus is reproducing by sprouting a fruiting body out of the ant's body. It is cruel and horrible, and yet fascinating. What's happening, exactly? Is this a sacrifice to the fungus God? Is the ant sacrificing herself for the colony, just like Christ sacrificed himself for humankind?

(Reposted with some edits from “The Proud Holobionts”)

There are things in nature that are far from the happy world of the animals shown in Disney's cartoons. That Nature is “Red in Tooth and Claw” is well known since the times of Tennyson, but sometimes Gaia seems to have a touch of sadism in her heart. One case is that of the "Zombie Fungus" and how it captures ants, devouring them from the inside. It was discovered in 1859 by Alfred Russel Wallace, who was the co-discoverer with Darwin of evolution by natural selection.

An exquisitely evil story:

"When the fungus infects a carpenter ant, it grows through the insect’s body, draining it of nutrients and hijacking its mind. Over the course of a week, it compels the ant to leave the safety of its nest and ascend a nearby plant stem. It stops the ant at a height of 25 centimeters—a zone with precisely the right temperature and humidity for the fungus to grow. It forces the ant to permanently lock its mandibles around a leaf. Eventually, it sends a long stalk through the ant’s head, growing into a bulbous capsule full of spores. And because the ant typically climbs a leaf that overhangs its colony’s foraging trails, the fungal spores rain down onto its sisters below, zombifying them in turn.

"So what we have here is a hostile takeover of a uniquely malevolent kind. Enemy forces invading a host’s body and using that body like a walkie-talkie to communicate with each other and influence the brain from afar. Hughes thinks the fungus might also exert more direct control over the ant’s muscles, literally controlling them “as a puppeteer controls as a marionette doll.”

Note the cruelty of the procedure: the fungus does not touch the ant's brain. It only cuts all the communications the brain has with the muscles of the ant's body. We may imagine the poor creature watching in horror as its body is snatched away from its control and led to do things that no sane ant would ever do. The ultimate horror? Surely, it has been the source of inspiration for many horror movies. So, is Gaia really such a bitch?

The answer, as usual, is nuanced. Gaia is not a Goddess -- she is a Daimona (Δαίμονα) —  a servant of the Almighty, just like all of us. She just happens to be the highest-ranking daimon on Earth. Daimons (also called “holobionts”) are not necessarily cruel, but they are not necessarily benevolent and merciful, either.  

Ants, despite much fictional characterization, are not minimalist versions of human factory workers. Of course, we will never know what an ant thinks, but we can say that it is not an "organism" in the same sense as a human being. An ant is not a creature for which we can define a genetic individuality. It is only an expression of the genotype of the ant colony it is part of. It is no more an individual than a red blood cell in our body. For an ant colony, losing a few ants is nothing worse than for us losing a few drops of blood.  

If the ant is not an organism, then it has no obvious interest in developing a form of defense against fungal attacks. As a sterile female, it wouldn't be able to pass this information to its descendants. It is the anthill that evolves, not single ants. Only the anthill can be seen as a full-fledged organism.

So, the term zombification is wrong in many respects. Mainly because what we see is not a fungus-ant interaction. It is a fungus-anthill interaction. Only the anthill could develop forms of resistance against this kind of attack and pass them to its descendants. But, apparently, that was never a priority. Reports Merlin Sheldrake in his book "Entangled Life" that there are traces of this fungus affecting ants already more than 45 million years ago. If there had been an advantage for the anthill in evolving a defense against this fungus, there was plenty of time to do that.  

Indeed, when the zombie fungus attacks an ant, we have no evidence that the anthill is heavily damaged. The number of attacked ants remains small, and the complex fungus-colony interaction is influenced by several elements, including “hyperparasites,” other species of fungi that slow down the action of the zombie-ant fungus.

So, this is not an attack. But what is it, exactly? The fungus and the anthill can be seen as a holobiont in themselves. The fungus communicates with the anthill by infecting a few ants and using them to reproduce itself. The anthill doesn't care about giving the fungus a few of its ants. It does that, surely, in exchange for something. Useful information? Maybe, but we will never know what the fungus is telling to the ants.

Unlike ants, we humans are organisms interacting all the time individually with the microscopic world of fungi, bacteria, archaea, and viruses. Hordes of these creatures continuously come into contact with our bodies when we breathe, eat, and touch something. But these zillions of tiny creatures do not normally zombify us. That does not happen because, for tens of millions of years, our ancestors engaged in “conversations” with them using the language of chemistry. Our body knows how to deal with them, and they know how to deal with us. Most of them are not parasites, they are symbionts that live with us. They will not damage us unless we choose to stop communicating with them by masking, disinfecting, distancing, and other useless rituals. Only if we continue this unnatural behavior do we risk seeing mushrooms sprout from the back of our heads.

Yet, there remains a dark fascination with the zombie-ant fungus. A single ant moves away from the colony to reach a high place, from where she (a female worker) gives herself completely to the fungus that grows out of her body in a sort of apotheosis that looks not unlike the Christian myth of the sacrifice on the cross. 

A "sacrifice" means to separate something from the human sphere and transfer it to the divine sphere. It is a form of communication with the Gods. Do the ants of the colony see the death of the infected ant as a sacrifice to the Fungus God? Did that ant die for the colony’s sins? As I said, we can't know what an ant thinks, but we know that the macrocosm reflects the microcosm and the holobiont universe is fractal. So, we should not be surprised to see a reflection of our theological thoughts on such a small scale as an anthill. 

And, in the end, Gaia always knows best.