Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.

There's a fungus in the jungles of the world known as Cordyceps. Now, Cordyceps are fascinating fungus, if you can imagine such a thing. They are first and foremost parasitic. Now, in general understanding parasitic symbiosis often refers to one living, sentient creature living off of another. Sometimes it can be one plant living off of another. What makes Cordyceps so interesting is that they are fungus that live by infecting insects and basically using their bodies as hosts to grow and spread.

One of the more devious and ultimately creepier Cordyceps is the one called Cordyceps unilateralis. What C. unilateralis does is infect carpenter ants and then it takes over their mind. By controlling the ant's brain it forces the ant to climb upward into the forest until it finds a suitable place to stop. Then the ant is forced to bite down on a stem or thick underside of a leaf. At this point the fungus begins to grow, erupting out of the top of the head of the ant, killing it. After about three weeks of growth the end of the spore explodes sending out tiny spores all over the jungle to infect more ants. C. unilateralis has been known to wipe out entire colonies, so the ants have developed a sort of sixth sense about it. When a fellow ant becomes infected, one of the ants from the colony will carry the "sick" ant far away from the colony so that when it dies it doesn't infect other ants. It's really quite an interesting site to behold, check it out.