Zombie ants

22:55Okay, we're back and we're talking about the name of a fungus that I cannot pronounce, but is amazingly adept at manipulating ants. This is a really nice, like, turn of the tables. Usually I'm the one who can't pronounce things. We've got to do more episodes with, like, complex Latinate names. But, okay, so one of the first things I think is so amazing about this system is that it evades the social immune system that ants have. So ants are very genetically related to one another. And they work together for this common goal of, like, helping the queen create more offspring and stuff like that. And they have complex fractional relationships, right?

23:33It's not just, like, you have kids that are half you. You're, like, related by a quarter or a sixth or a third or something complicated, right? I think it's like three quarters. Like you're way more closely related than like, you know, my brother and I would be, for example, typical siblings. And so they're like, you know, pretty close to you genetically. And so this tends to result in what look like altruistic behaviors. And so if one of the ants comes into the colony and is clearly infected with something, the nest has a social immune response where other nest mates will be like, oh, you can't bring that in here, man.

24:07And they will, in some cases, kill that ant and then go put it in a graveyard somewhere far away from the nest so that it can't infect the rest of the nest. Based just on the behavior, it's not like it's giving off some pheromones or something. I think in a lot of cases, we don't know exactly how the nest mates can tell. It's probably some combination of behaviors. And then ants are a species that in particular tends to communicate a lot with chemical cues. So it could be that they sort of smell or whatever taste a nest mate. And they're like, no, that's weird. We're kicking you out. Daniel, you taste funny.

24:39We're killing you. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Daniel, that's not how your forehead is supposed to taste. And I licked it. And now you can't live here anymore. Wow. Dantial. Dantial. And so anyway, so usually when an infected nest mate comes back, it gets picked up on and they get killed and kicked out. Brutal but fair. Brutal but fair. And this is a pathogen that you would want to put a stop to. So, you know, if they don't capture this individual and kill it, it is going to create essentially like a stock of infectious propagules nearby. So anyway, there should be selective pressure for this.

25:13And so how does it evade this selective pressure? Why can't the other ants tell? So we don't have a great handle on why the other ants can't tell. Part of it seems to be that in at least some systems, so I'm going to be talking about this system like every system acts the same way, but just sort of like with the tardigrades, some questions have been asked in one ophiocordyceps species infecting one ant species. Some questions have been asked in other systems, but we're going to mix and match for the purpose of this show. But there's the disclaimer. So some ants, the timing of their behavior changes and they interact with nest mates less often.

25:46And so part of the story might be that instead of just like blindly going into the nest and then getting found out, these ants that are infected are avoiding nest mates. So they never get found out. They never get their forehead licked. And so they're able to escape in that way. It could also be like the scent of the fungus is being masked in some way. But through mechanisms we don't understand, it manages to evade the social immunity of the nest. Wow. Amazing. Yeah, pretty cool. All right. So now you've got this ant that's infected. Its nest mates haven't killed it like they probably should have.

26:18And then at some point, it does that drunkard's walk. And we don't really understand why that drunkard's walk happens. But there is a chemical that's produced by the ant that is associated with something that causes like staggering and seizures in other insects. And so we think that it's going out there and it's starting to do this staggering thing because of some chemicals produced by the fungus. It gets down to the forest floor. And now the interesting question is, how does it know where to go? So this is the summit disease part. It starts climbing up, but we're trying to figure out how does it know where to stop?

26:53How does it know where a good spot is? Well, it's very confusing to me that the behavior is so complex that it includes climbing down and then climbing up. Like I could see it somehow is pulling on some lever inside the brain to make it go up or to make it go down. But to make it go down and then up, like that's really amazing. That is really amazing. I mean, I think part of the selection pressure there, and this is just me telling a story. I haven't, we don't, I don't know that we've tested this, but if the ant had gone down, it's probably one going down a big trunk and they tend to attach to like thin stems.

27:27And we'll get into that in a second. But also if it just kind of clung in an area where foraging ants would be going up and down anyway, if a foraging ant sees a dead ant with a stalk coming out of its neck, that it is going to throw over into the trash can. And so that would be the end for the fungus too. So that tells us why that strategy, the simpler strategy wouldn't work of just like clinging to the tree. But it leaves us still impressed with this complex strategy of climbing down and then climbing up. Right. And so let me go ahead and jump ahead a little bit to the benefit of climbing back up again.

28:01So there's been an experiment done where they took ants that had like settled in at a particular location and they cut the leaf off that the ant was on and they moved it up. And when you move it up, the temperature and the humidity are no longer good for the fungus and the fungus can't make that stalk and it can't make the infectious propagules that rain down on the other foragers. And so there is this like kind of narrow band that the fungus needs to be in in order to complete its development. And so, you know, it takes some work to find exactly the right spot. And it's fascinating to me to imagine all the evolutionary dead ends, you know, ants that just went down and never climbed up.

28:38Ants that climbed up the tree instead and didn't propagate. It's incredible that this whole thing came together. Yeah, yeah, it really is. And I'm sure that a lot of times when researchers go out to study this kind of stuff, like if you're too low, then spiders and other scavengers come along and they'll eat the zombie ant. And so there's probably some instances where the ant dies in the wrong spot, but the researchers never find it because something has eaten it and it's gone. So you do the best you can with the data you've got. So tell us about this climbing up. How does it know where to stop, that it gets this right height?

29:13Like, do we understand the mechanisms for how it knows how high it is? It's not like doing GPS or something. So we think it's cueing in on light, which is amazing to me because it's inside the body of an ant. And so how is it getting information about light? So what they did was they found what's called ant graveyards. So the ants tend to accumulate in certain areas of the forest. And so they're like, OK, we know this is an area that's good because the fungus have chosen to be here before. and then they put a little bit of a light shade over the zombie graveyard. And so now that area is getting a little bit less light than it was getting before.

29:48And what they found was that if you go back in future weeks, that area doesn't get as many new ants as nearby areas that have more light. So it looks like the fungus is driving the ants towards areas that have certain amounts of light. And then they looked, there were still some newly infected ants that went into the areas with the shades. and if you followed what was happening with that fungus over time, the fungus was less able to produce those stalks and produce, I'm just going to call them baby fungus because no one wants to hear me try to say propagule again. So less baby fungus gets made in areas where you've got these shades.

30:24I see. And so the ants are using the light as a cue for where to go. Is the light important in making the baby funguses or is it just like a signal to the fungus of when the ant has crawled up to the right height? I think that the light is used as a proxy for information about temperature and humidity. And it could be that the light is important for some way too. I don't know, fungus, I don't know. But nature's complicated. But it does look like things like temperature and humidity and light are all important for the way the fungus is able to develop. Wow, fascinating. And this is the part that you see in other insects too.

30:58I talked about those zombie flies and those caterpillars. This climbing up thing happens in a lot of insect systems. And then you said they also bite down. They like clamp onto this plant. Why is that part important? Is it because the ant's going to die and you want it to stay there? Yeah. So you want the ant to stay put. And so in the tropics, what happens is they find a leaf. They crawl along the bottom of the leaf, along the major leaf veins. And the ants will clamp down with their mandibles. They've got these pincers. And their muscles will like hyper contract. So they'll like really strongly bite down.

31:32and then the ants will never be able to open their mandibles again and they will die there. Wow. And so that's how they hold on. Okay. And this is called the death grip. And one of the things that's interesting is that depending on where you are in the world, the death grip will look a little bit different. So in the tropics, they tend to bite down on leaves. But if you go to like North Carolina, for example, instead of biting down on leaves, they'll bite down on stems and they'll also wrap their legs around them. And so they'll hold on with their legs and with their pinsy parts. And we think that the reason that they hang out on stems instead of leaves in areas that are farther north, like North Carolina, is because in the tropics, leaves really never fall off the trees.

32:17Or they at least don't have a seasonal pattern of falling off in the winter. Whereas farther north, if you bite down on a leaf, you've got until like, I don't know, August, September or October before those leaves start to fall off. But if you're on the stem, then you can stay up there for longer raining fire down upon the other ants. And so it looks like there have been four different instances where you've gotten this evolutionary transition from biting down on leaves to biting down on things like stems. This is fascinating. I love these moments in science when you can look at what's going on and unravel it and tell a story.

32:52I remember Hazel summarizing all of science once she says, like, stuff happened and we figured out why. And I'm like, yeah, that's pretty much the whole idea. So by looking at this pattern of how things evolve differently in different parts of the world where the conditions are slightly different, we start to get a sense for how this all came together. That's incredible. Yeah, it's really incredible. And I got to see one in North Carolina. I'll put a picture on this online when it comes out. But we found one in North Carolina and Andrew Turner found it. I was out looking for snakes and salamanders.

33:27and Andrew Turner, a friend of mine, was like, is that a zombie ant? And I freaked out. Anyone in like a one mile radius probably heard me scream because I didn't think I was going to get to see a zombie ant. So anyway, I've seen them in North Carolina and then Andrew Turner put one in like a resin for me. And so I've got it on my desk and it is my favorite. And what are we looking at? We are looking at, this is a bit of stem and on the bottom there's an ant that's got its legs wrapped around the stem. It's biting down with its mandibles. You can see it's got a big stalk coming out of the side of its head.

33:59The spore that the fungus would come out of is kind of small. It's hard to see, but it's about maybe three quarters of the way up the stem. Best thing I own. Best thing. You have children, too. Don't forget. I don't own them. You know, they could choose to leave at one point, but this will never leave. Oh, I see. It's a special place in your heart. It is. All right. So the ant bites down. And one of the cool things about this, what we call a death grip, is that it leaves a very distinctive mark. So if you find leaves, you'll see that they've got, it looks like, you know, like scissors cut on either side of the veins.

34:40And there are 48 million year old leaf fossils from Germany that have these little scissor cuts in them. And we think that these are like essentially fossil records of behavior showing that like around the time a bunch of the different mammalian species were sort of evolving into existence, this manipulation was already happening. And, you know, you can't be 100 % sure the ants weren't still attached or anything like that. But it's indirect evidence that this is sort of an ancient association and a manipulation that's been going on for longer than humans have been on this planet. And so when the ant mandibles do this hyper contraction, they make a special sort of pattern that they can't otherwise make because it's just the ant mandible, right?

35:21It's not like how is this pattern different from a normal ant chomp? So, first of all, a lot of ants don't chomp around leaf veins like this. So you might be thinking about leaf cutter ants and leaf cutter ants will cut out like chunks of leaves and bring them back to their nests so that they can they feed them to fungus and that they're sort of like a farming situation. But anyway, ants don't usually just go and like chomp down on leaves around the veins and then do nothing else with it. I see. So it's also the location of the chomp. Yeah, it's also the location of the chomp. Wow. Amazing. Yeah, pretty cool.

35:55And so you tend to get aggregations in these good parts of the forest where the conditions are good for fungal growth. And so you end up with these ant graveyards where you've got a bunch of these zombified ants hanging on the underside of stems or leaves, raining fungal spores down on their nest mates below. And does the fungus actually kill the ant? Or does this sort of death march end up exhausting the ant? Or why does the ant die? I don't know if the ant dies because once it bites down, it can't use its mandibles again. I don't know if it just eventually dies because it runs out of energy or if the fungus kills it.

36:29But I do know that pretty soon after it bites down, the fungus starts consuming the inside of the ant to make more fungal tissue instead. And how long is it like spraying propagules for? That really depends on where you are. I think in some parts of the world it happens for like just a couple months. I think in some areas I think it can happen for like a year. That really depends on the environment that you're in. All right, and let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll hear about how this benefits the fungus and how the ant manages to pull this all off.

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39:20Okay, we're back and we're talking about the death march of zombie ants. Kelly, tell us why the fungus makes this happen. Why can't the fungus just find some other friendlier way to spread itself? I don't know why it doesn't find a friendlier way to do it, but we do know that this method seems to work for the fungus. As we sort of hinted at earlier, it's actually pretty easy to move these ants to different places to test out, like, where would the best place be for these ants to have settled down? So you can cut off a leaf, and if you move it up too high, as we mentioned earlier, the temperature and humidity and lighting conditions are just not good.

39:57And the fungus will essentially never be able to produce that stalk that makes the spores, and so that's the end of the line for the fungus. Not great. And if you move it down too low, it gets found by scavengers. And so unlike a lot of other examples where we have a nice story, here we've been able to manipulate the system a little bit and say, you know, look, if you do something different than what we're seeing, the fungus is quite clearly doing less well. The fungus either gets eaten and killed or it can't make babies. I'm still sort of amazed that this whole thing works. Like I can imagine a fungus infecting an ant and it makes a small change in the ant's behavior and maybe that benefits it a little bit.

40:32But this benefit requires such complex behavior for the ant to go down and then across and then up and then bite and all this stuff. All these pieces have to basically fall into place due to random mutation. So how do you get all the way to this complex behavior when none of the individual pieces on their own are going to benefit the fungus? Yeah, that's a great question. So one thing that's worth noting is that, you know, as we've mentioned earlier, this summiting disease thing happens pretty often. So it suggests that there's something about insects where it's not too hard to manipulate their ability to go up or stay up.

41:05And so a number of different kinds of parasites and pathogens have found the switch. I can't say I'm an expert on what that switch is, but there's a couple different routes to up and stay there. But you can imagine that this happened, you know, step by step. So maybe the first thing that happened was that ants that were starting to show signs of being infected by the fungus left the nest so that the nest mates didn't kill them. And maybe they died on the forest floor. And then there happens to be an ant that climbed up a little bit before it died. And that helped the fungus relative to just dying on the floor.

41:37And so you can imagine how each step could have happened first and then been honed over time. but this is definitely one of those things where we have to tell a story and we can't be exactly sure what happened in what order i mean maybe what happened first is that the ants that are infected by a fungus would die high up and they'd never go back to their nest and maybe the nest stuff came later by some ant that happened to wander back but wasn't discovered for whatever reason and so you know each step there's selective pressure for whatever benefits the fungus more But the exact path that this took, I think the best we can do is speculate.

42:12I see. But it's plausible to string these complex behaviors together because each individual one already does benefit the fungus. So, yeah, that makes sense. I wonder what in 100 million years this fungus will have this ants doing. Like, oh, it turns out if they do the Macarena before they bite down. Yeah, yeah, it could be. I mean, I would imagine that like as climate is changing across the planet, the exact location we're biting down is the most beneficial might change. And so there might be selection to like tinker with exactly where the ants end up. So you keep getting the right temperature and humidity.

42:45And maybe that will be like, you know, you should go to areas with even less light because everything is getting too warm and too hot. And so less light will be a little cooler and the temperatures will be right. Anyway, so I can imagine that happening. But part of understanding the steps is probably understanding the mechanisms because that gives you some insights. Yeah, like what's going on inside the ant that lets the fungus, what are these levers that the fungus is pushing? Yeah. So first let me just talk briefly about how we start answering these questions. So as we've discussed, there's a bunch of different steps here that the fungus is doing.

43:19And so the answer for how does the fungus manipulate behavior probably differs depending on what step you're talking about. Different ants, different answer.

43:32Do I tell you often enough how much I like working with you, Daniel? Because I really do. I'm just going for the easy puns because somebody has to. I know. The dad jokes, the amazing dad jokes. So the way that, you know, for example, if you're trying to figure out what differs between an ant that gets ignored by its nest mates and an ant that gets dumped, well, you can, for example, infect some ants with ophiocordyceps and other ants with a different kind of fungus and send them both into a nest and see how they interact differently with their nest mates, how the nest mates interact differently with them.

44:06and then you can look at the different chemical profiles and say like this one is emitting these chemicals and this one is emitting these chemicals and then try to figure out, you know, is the fungus, is ophiocordyceps producing some chemicals that the other fungus doesn't produce and then start looking into those as candidates for what's happening there. Do you need an IRB for these kinds of experiments or can we just experiment willy-nilly on ants? Do ants have any rights? That's a good question. So IRBs are almost exclusively for humans So you don't need an IRB. But you can't just experiment on dogs and chimps and rats, right?

44:40There is some ethics there. Yep. For dogs and chimps and rats, you need an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee protocol. And you have to jump through many hoops to make that happen, which we'll talk about on another episode. But for invertebrates like ants, you don't need to do those kinds of protocols. Wow. But I will say that everyone who I've ever talked to who works with animals, even just little ants, gets pretty emotionally attached to them. And they do worry about, like, how do I euthanize this ant to get my data in the way that will, like, make it fastest? And, you know, I don't think we really know if ants feel pain or not.

45:14But, like, if they do, how could we do it so that they'll feel the least amount of pain? So nobody's just callously grinding up ants. They're, like, shedding a tear while grinding up ants. That's nice. Yeah. Let's move on. All right. No, but I mean, jokes aside, you're saying that scientists involved understand the costs here in terms of lives and experiences, even of the little ants. And that's nice. Yes, no, they do. And I think they try to make the ants' lives as natural and as nice as possible before these experiments happen. But so mostly the point I wanted to make was how we do these different comparisons to get a handle on what might be happening.

45:51And the answer is, you know, at very similar time points, you look at ants that are uninfected, ants that are infected by ophiocordyceps, and ants that are infected by other fungus that are bad for the ant, but we don't think they manipulate behavior in any way. And by looking to see what's happening differently in the bodies and the behavior of the ants in those three different categories, we can start getting some like candidate molecules for, you know, this might be the thing that's getting produced by the fungus to change the behavior. And so they found a lot of stuff that differs. And that's not too surprising because the ants are doing complicated behaviors.

46:29There's a lot of behaviors. I feel like what we really want as humans is that the answer is there's this one molecule. And that tells you everything. And that's fascinating. But really it ends up being like hundreds of molecules that are being produced that we think are important in every single different step. So there's not like a really nice, easy to tell story. But a couple of things that pop out is that enterotoxins seem like they're important. These are toxins that are released by things like bacteria, like E. coli. We're not totally sure what the toxin is doing to the ants, but it might be playing a role in breaking down ant muscles at particular times.

47:04So maybe after the ant bites down, those muscles get broken down so the ant can't leave. And that might be what the toxin is doing when it's released at that point. I think it's great to try to dig into the details and understand the mechanisms to make sure the story that we're telling is the real story. And also because you could discover surprising things when you dig into the details. But what else could we learn by doing this? Is there the possibility here of a surprise that we discover, oh, it's not actually working the way that we expected? Yeah. So a lot of people think of these behavior manipulating parasites and pathogens as like evolutionary neuroscientists.

47:41So they've been interacting with their host for, you know, in this case, it looks like more than 48 million years. And through the process of natural selection, they've maybe happened upon solutions for changing the ants behavior. And so by looking to see what is the fungus making, if it's a compound we've never seen before, maybe we've unlocked some tiny piece of the puzzle for how brains work and how you can modify behavior. And, you know, you could imagine maybe if you've got some pest in a field, if you make them all like, you know, climb up and stay up and then die, they'll like stop messing with your field.

48:14And so like whenever we can understand even how insect behavior works, it gives you some extra tools to not just, you know, understand how your world works, but also to maybe sort of control some of the negative aspects of like pest organisms. Wow. So the fungus has been doing neuroscience experiments on the ants for 48 million years without ever writing a paper and getting their PhD. That's got to set some kind of record. They don't have to worry about tenure. They don't have to get grants. They don't have to write permits and protocols. It really seems unfair, the head start that they've gotten.

48:43But if we study them, then we can sort of extract their secrets. And maybe this will help us like jump ahead in our study of neuroscience, which I think is a cool idea. Yeah. And so they also found what they call a bioactive compound where they've never sort of seen this before. But it looks like another compound that, as we talked about earlier, causes insects to stagger. And so this might explain why they sort of like walk down the tree like they're drunk. But we think, and this is just hypothesizing at this point, we think it might be important in those systems where the ants are clinging to the bottom of stems.

49:15if the ants are feeling like all sort of wobbly and uneven, they might hug down on the stem to hold themselves so they don't fall off of it. And that could be sort of the moment that the fungus kills them so that they will be really clinging hard to the stem. And at this point, this is just a story. And we know that we need to dig into it more. But that's where we are right now. So it's complicated. And do we know like where in the ant the fungus ends up? Like does the ant have a little ant brain and the fungus is sitting on top of it? like cackling maniacally and pulling levers? Yeah, so this is really neat.

49:49So I've already mentioned that Charissa DeBecker's lab has been doing some important work on timing and they've been working on chemicals that are produced by the fungus. David Hughes did some work with collaborators where they scanned ants with an electron microscope. So like very, very detailed scans and they put all of the scans together. And what they found was that the fungus is forming a network and it's invading a bunch of different muscles And so the way it was described in the popular press was that you could think of it as like the fungus essentially having strings on a puppet where it could be like pulling up and down.

50:24And that might be overselling it a little bit. But one of the things that they thought was interesting was that it doesn't seem to be invading the brain tissue. So it's touching the brain but not going into the brain tissue. This was made a pretty big deal in the PopSci articles at the time. I wasn't as impressed with that. So like the brain infecting parasite that I studied on fish for my PhD also sat on top of the brain and not inside of it. And there's some other evidence in the zombie ant system that the fungus is kind of protecting the brain. So you can imagine that like if you're inside of the brain, you might just like totally screw up your ride.

51:00Like it's not going to do what you want because you've just totally debilitated it. And now it's obvious and the other ants can tell. And so it looks like it's sort of tinkering with the brain without actually like sticking its hands in there. But it does have its, you know, hypha, which are like fungal fingers inside the other muscles. Wow. Amazing. And I see something amazing here in the outline. Tell me about hyperparasites. Are these like the superhero version of parasites? Kind of. Were they bitten by a radioactive spider? No, no, no, no, no. You've watched too many movies, Daniel. This is true.

51:35Yeah, but just as cool. So, you know, you've got this fungus that manipulates ant behavior, but there are other fungal species that infect Ophiocordyceps. So the ant will be like, you know, clinging to a stem and you'll find fungus that is living on top of Ophiocordyceps and is sapping the Ophiocordyceps energy. It's like fungus inception. Wait, fungus ant-ception. Whoa, dad jokes galore. This might be our most dad jokey episode yet. I didn't see it coming. Wow. So this fungus thought it was pulling the strings, but its strings were being pulled the whole time. There are so many levels in nature.

52:13I am so glad to be where I am. So, okay. So I promised at the beginning of the episode that I would answer if Ophiocordyceps could jump to humans and manipulate us. Daniel, so now I'm going to ask you, what is your favorite representation of a fungus that jumps to humans? And you could just say, I don't watch the same shows as you do, Kelly. I'm not a fan of the zombie genre in general. The violence and the goo and like, not a fan. So yeah, I'm going to have to leave it to you. All right. Well, okay. I've been really liking the last of us lately, but not necessarily because it like Hughes so closely to what happens in nature.

52:54So that one starts by saying like, yes, I know it seems unlikely that I think they call it cordyceps. The genus name has changed a little bit, but anyway, I, yes, it seems unlikely that it could jump to humans, but the way our environment is changing, we can't rule it out or something like that. And then fast forward decades and humans are infected by the fungus. I think it is highly unlikely. Why is that? Well, okay. So even in nature, we talked about at the beginning of the show that each Ophiocordyceps species tends to infect and manipulate specific ant species. So they are so specialized that they can't even like manipulate closely related ants.

53:32Like that's too much of a jump. So maybe like if you know how to fly a Cessna, that doesn't mean that if somebody drops you into like a 747, you're going to know how to land that thing. Yes, exactly. Right. And human brains are so incredibly different than ant brains. I suppose it's possible that a fungus might be able to eke out an existence in us. But I even think that would be quite a jump. But if it could, the probability that it would be able to control our behavior in a way that would benefit the fungus seems pretty close to zero. And I'm not being negative about the movies and TV shows and books that are great and Daniel's missing out.

54:11I think it's great that they created these worlds. And if they're consistent with their rules, I'm on board. But I'm a person with massive anxiety. And it doesn't keep me up at night worrying that Ophiocordyceps is going to jump to me or my kids. Well, I have a theory for how this fungus can jump to humans and benefit itself. Okay. If you think of this fungus as little neuroscientists, then what should it do? It should get humans to help it out. So if it infects human brains and makes those humans interested in this ant puzzle, so they come along basically acting like colleagues and figuring out like, hey, how does this actually work?

54:45And maybe it can help like, you know, super engineer this fungus to be even more efficient. I feel like you're in a roundabout way trying to get back to the like, it's okay that I eat cookies at night thing. Like, you know, if the fungus benefits from me eating cookies. But you know what is interesting? So Ophiocordyceps sinensis infects, I think it's caterpillars, but it infects critters. But instead of having them climb up, it has them burrow into the ground. And then the fungal stalk grows out of the ground and like pops up. And humans have decided that this is amazing in tea. And so people will actually go out in search of this and they can sell it for a lot of money.

55:26And I think you can even buy this in the United States, like tea with Ophiocordyceps sinensis in it. And so, you know, maybe Ophiocordyceps sinensis jumps to us and makes us want the tea. And so then we'll start big farms where we sort of seed their hosts with the fungus so that they can start growing up and then we can replicate it. So maybe that'll be the route. Or maybe that'll just be the story in your Netflix show. Netflix, call us. We're ready. Yeah. You know, I wrote fiction once, and I kind of think it was a disaster. So I don't see me starting a new fictional series. But if anybody would like scientific input on their own series, I am available.

56:09And she promises not to be completely a wet blanket. I, you know, I don't like to make promises I can't keep.

56:19I'll try to play along. All right. So just to sort of reiterate, I love this system because we've dug into more of the different pieces in this system than a bunch of other systems, but there's so much we have left to learn. And as we mentioned earlier, like we're discovering molecules that we've never seen before. This might be a way to help us understand how brains work and how we can sort of tinker with behavior. It might give us some inputs on how to like control insect populations. There's so much cool stuff we might have left to learn as we continue digging into the system. Amazing. And it's incredible what we can learn from like ants and fungus.

56:53And sometimes that tells us something deeper about the way brains work. And so you never know where the next great scientific discovery will come from and who's really pulling your strings. That's right. But the next great scientific discovery is probably coming from biology. That's what I think. As long as it gets into people's heads and makes them listen to the podcast, I'm all for it. Or gives Daniel an excuse for eating cookies in the middle of the night. Chomp, chomp, chomp.

57:27Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D &K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. Ice Cube's Big Three season is heating up.

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