Controlling one's emotions may not be easy, but most people can control one's behavior, but for this fruit fly, emotions and behaviors can no longer dominate.
You may have seen zombie movies, but it's hard to believe that those things actually happen to humans, but in fact similar events are quite common in the microscopic world.
An ordinary day
On this day, fruit flies, as usual, are looking for food in the kitchen, and the cut fruit is obviously the best choice.
After eating wildly on the last day of life, the fruit fly did not know that there was an invisible fungus that silently passed through its body surface and lurked into its body. The fruit fly didn't feel anything wrong at all, it still ate and drank, rubbing its hands and washing its face. But inside it, the fungus is feeding on its fat and growing rapidly, and its purpose is to control the mind of the fruit fly.
At dusk, four or five days after being parasitized, the fruit flies became less and less elegant.
It begins to trance, it forgets its setting of liking dry food, and goes uncontrollably to the highest part of the area, then it begins to twitch, and its last sanity is fighting the fungus!
But it did fail, and now it's nothing more than a fungus-driven device. The fungus is full of reproduction, where to understand the romance of riding a Gundam.
It was enough for the fungus to spend 4-5 days seizing the fruit fly's thoughts, only to let the fruit fly stick out of its mouthparts, spit out a viscous liquid, fix itself high, and tilt its wings upwards.
diffusion
The fruit fly is dead, and its life as a fruit fly and Gundam is short.
Tiny spore launchers burst out from the fruit fly's body, and the white spores visible to the naked eye shoot out at high speed, and this white mucus is composed of hundreds of lollipop-like protrusions, each of which emits a tiny bell-shaped spore at high speed. Now the spores only need to enter another fly to grow. This process can last for several hours, and if there is a slight breeze at this time, the spores can fly farther, and it is no wonder that the fungus has to manipulate the flies to go high.
No matter where the spores fall, as long as there are fruit flies to touch, tragedy is brewing.
Some idiots don't know what's going on, they pass by the dead fruit flies, not knowing that they are the next to die. These spores themselves can also be shelled by the cicadas, emit the spores again, and try to get the spores to the thinner skin of the fruit flies.
Parasitic fruit flies are still excitedly searching for food, but the end of their lives, we already know.
Under the crisis
The scientific name of this fungus is Entomophthora muscae, fly mold, simple and rough literal translation is "fly destroyer", this name is a real fit, it will parasitize fruit flies, and it will become a zombie-like state and kill to reproduce, fortunately they can not parasitize humans, this sentence is very similar to the opening sentence of a zombie movie. We humans can control body temperature to kill this fungus.
The discoverer was Brad Mulens, an entomologist who studies fungi at the University of California, Riverside.
This fungus follows many dogmas, they are just parasitic flies; They kill parasites at dusk; They manipulate the parasite to the highest place they can find, a condition known in Japan as Dusk Syndrome.
Scientists wanted to rely on them to control these rubbing guys in the kitchen, but they can control other creatures overbearingly, and the spores are very fragile, or very bone-headed, and cannot be cultivated in the laboratory.