The idea of examining the fossil record for evidence of the distinctive bite marks came to David Hughes, a behavioural ecologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as he was sitting in on a palaeobotany undergraduate course. He had just returned from fieldwork in southern Thailand where he had been studying fungal parasites infecting carpenter ants and controlling their behaviour. “Could this parasitic relationship have evolved much earlier in Earth’s history?” he asked himself.

“The distinctive pattern of the bite marks and their association with the veins of the leaf is actually quite striking and unusual to see in fossil leaves,” says Paul Kenrick, head of research at the Natural History Museum’s Department of Palaeontology in London. “This find is telling us something significant about the evolution of the interactions between organisms and their dependencies.” If the marks are those left by dying ants, the complex ant–parasite relationship must have evolved at least 48 million years ago, he says.

-NATURE MAGAZINE-

Science Fiction is Nature’s b*tch.

tOM

(and they told me science can’t be made interesting!)

http://www.markoftedal.com/2009/08/zombie-ant-fungus.html

Have any parasites been discovered that change mammalian – and dare I say it – human – behavior?

Toxoplasma gondii is a protozoan that infects cats (it’s primary host) and a variety of other warm-blooded creatures. In rats the larval form, forms cysts on the rats’ brain and modifies their behaviour so that they become ‘fearless’ they no longer avoid light and tend not to stick to walls/skirting boards as they normally do but wander into the open more. More importantly, for toxoplasma gondii, infected rats no longer fear the smell of cat urine and may even be attracted to it.

All of these modified behaviours mean that the toxoplasma infected rat is more likely to end up inside a cat – where the larval form matures to the adult and pumps out toxoplasma oocysts that end up in the cat’s poop.

Toxoplasma also infects humans, normally it is not a problem for the human hosts unless they are somehow immuno-compromised (did I just make up that word?). However there has been some research that suggests that t.gondii infection does have an effect on it’s human hosts – from a slightly increased prevalence of depression to ‘… slower reaction times and a 6-fold increased risk of traffic accidents among those infected’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii

Carl: Here’s some Toxoplasma on the Loom, too.