The art of being a Zombie Ant Fungus

0:00Philip Ball:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30Bridget Nicholls:up at Whole Foods Market. This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture East. That's with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture East. That's with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. You know when people try a new food and suddenly it's like, okay, hold on. I got a new favorite food. That's the reaction a lot of people are having when they first try Kewpie mayo.

0:48Philip Ball:Yeah, it's the one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. You've probably seen it at the grocery store. And this mayo is different. Most mayonnaise uses whole eggs. Kewpie only uses egg yolks, which gives it this rich umami flavor. It's smoother, deeper, almost buttery. Once people try it, they start putting it on everything. Egg sandwiches, fries, burgers. Chefs use it, restaurants use it, people who really care about flavor use it. Put it on just about anything.

1:13Bridget Nicholls:Then you'll understand. Kewpie, the original Japanese mayonnaise.

1:24Philip Ball:These parasitic fungi, they're grotesque. They really are. I think there's no getting away from it. The fact that they colonise these insects, eat them from the inside so that the insects start sprouting these kind of tendrils of fungus. They're basically devoured until there's just this empty husk of insect left. To us, it just looks bizarre and really horrible.

1:50Merlin Sheldrake:To imagine that there's this fungus that goes into this ant and makes it behave in particular ways, really threatens our notions of being in control of our actions, our notions of self. You know, who am I if there's also this external thing inside of me influencing me? So I think it's quite scary.

2:10Bridget Nicholls:These fungi are known as zombie fungi because they seem to zombify the insects that they are growing within. So I think that brings with it quite a lot of baggage from our own human cultural worlds of horror and zombies and what zombies have come to mean.

2:31Bridget Nicholls:My name is Bridget Nichols. I am a cultural entomologist, which is the study of insects in culture. I put on events internationally which are between nature and science and the arts. So I'm the producer. Normally in radio the producer is in control but I'm wondering how you feel about that Bridget. I don't mind you announcing you're in control because you can say it doesn't mean you are. The producer creates the framework for the presenter to fill with ideas. and the producer gets to do the final edit, but the presenter gets to create a world. Cordyceps, or zombie ant fungus, is this fungus discovered by the British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace in 1859.

3:28Bridget Nicholls:When I first came across it a few years ago, I was immediately transfixed and read everything I could find about it for weeks until I needed to do something to tell the world about it. I had an idea for a play in which the cordyceps could come alive and be embodied in human form. It features actors and dancers and musicians and, of course, scientists. I'm very curious to see how the artists play with the zombie ant fungus story and the musicians and what they can bring to life from this amazing phenomenon, and also from the scientists, how we can extract some facts that really make the artists sing.

4:18Bridget Nicholls:My name is Merlin Sheldrake, and I'm a biologist and a writer. I study fungi, and fungi are a kingdom of life, which is as broad a category as animals or plants, but they aren't animals and they aren't plants, and they do things their own way. Some fungi have evolved an ability to grow inside insect bodies and control their behavior in a way that suits the fungus. One of these fungi is called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. You don't have a muscular animal body that can walk or bite or fly if you're a fungus. So if you need to disperse yourself from an evolutionary point of view, it sometimes makes sense to borrow an animal body, or in this case hijack one.

5:07Bridget Nicholls:And Ophiocordyceps unilateralis infects carpenter ants. The fungus starts to grow within its body, and as much as 40 % of an infected ant can be fungus. And the ant becomes fascinated by heights in what's called summit disease. This is a syndrome in which the ant is compelled to climb up the nearest plant and at a very particular height, the fungus forces the ant to bite onto the underside of a leaf in the death grip. The height is just the right height, given the temperature and humidity for the fungus to produce its spores. So these fungi are able to puppet these ants' behaviour with exquisite precision.

5:50Bridget Nicholls:And at that point, the fungus kills the ant and sprouts a structure out of the top of its head, which produces spores, rains down those spores on ants passing below. In the words of David Hughes, who is a prominent researcher in this field, an infected ant is a fungus in ants' clothing. And so the summit disease, the death grip, the behaviours of the infected ant, these are fungal behaviours expressed through the body of an ant. OK, brilliant. So now I want you to talk about art and science. OK. And you can bring in your own background that you've been exploring what art and science can bring to understanding nature for a really long time.

6:31Bridget Nicholls:And then how you're developing that with this piece. I've always been obsessed with consuming scientific data in science papers that are very dry. And then imagining how I could communicate this in Technicolor to represent it with the arts. Science really helps us understand mechanisms and behaviour and ecological systems. The arts allows us to explore that philosophical and embodied implications of what the science is telling us. I've always been fascinated by compelling stories of the invisible and how to make the invisible visible. and when I saw this zombie ant fungus relationship which is pretty deadly and unpleasant and weird for the ants particularly I then thought if we humanize it because humans always love stories about themselves then maybe we can start to look at how we can learn from it.

7:30Philip Ball:My name's Mark Brown I'm the director of the University Museum of Zoology at Cambridge University and a professor of evolutionary biology and ecology. I think historically there's been a tendency to pretend that scientists are objective organisms, unaffected by human emotion, unbiased, who can discover truth, whatever truth is, and then explain that clearly and objectively to non-scientists. I think that's hugely changed because I think there is an understanding across the scientific community that you engage people through narratives and through emotion. Having said that, science does rely upon fundamental concepts like allowing the data to speak for themselves as much as one possibly can, given the fact that we are not objective organisms and we are biased.

8:23Philip Ball:The scientific story has to be bounded by how science is done, because if we can't trust the data than to derive speculation from them or extrapolating them to explain other things is really shaky ground. And so there are aspects of science that are very different, I think, from aspects of practice in the arts and humanities.

8:48Bridget Nicholls:I first put on the play about the zombie ant fungus at the Royal Institution in London, and now we're taking it around the world. And I thought that the way that the cordyceps would speak would be unusual so I brought in the opera singer Laurie Lixenberg who's known for her unusual way of singing and I really wanted the audience to viscerally feel the sense of this is what it would be like for the ant to be taken over and possessed by the mushroom.

9:28Bridget Nicholls:My name is Laurie Lixenberg. I'm a mezzo-soprano, but I use that tag in the widest possible sense because it's led me to all kinds of explorations in music and sound, but very much connected to voice.

9:47Bridget Nicholls:In the piece I play a character called Sophia. She is a singer who is also experimenting with biologists particularly around the effect of sound on fungi and then she proceeds to involve the audience singing and discovers that a mushroom has indeed sprouted in the floorboards and this mushroom is meant to be a cordyceps, but we don't know what it is. What we do know is that it has an extraordinary effect on humans as the cordyceps has on ants. So it's like a human cordyceps variant that infects all of us. And this mushroom starts sporulating as I sing a particular song, which is all the names of different mushrooms in different languages, ancient languages from all over the world.

10:39Bridget Nicholls:my bag is really experimental music and trying to explore the voice from as many different angles as possible and what it can do and what it can communicate and so I really was exploring what would a mushroom sound like if it did sing what is the voice of a mushroom and what is the voice of the cordyceps if we could hear it as humans and it's not going to be Maria it's not going to be Madame Butterfly, is it? It's going to be something really weird and kind of otherworldly and alien.

11:28Philip Ball:My name is Philip Ball and I'm a science writer and commentator. I think that art is great at dealing with concepts that defy intuition, that defy our ability to articulate in words or to articulate in equations. But I wouldn't want that to be confused with the idea that art can then just be used to explain science. In fact, this drives artists who work at their sort of interface with science. It sometimes drives them mad that they are perceived as being there to just help scientists reach the public. What art can bring to science is a way of exploring the social, the intellectual implications that new scientific ideas bring up.

12:14Philip Ball:And that science doesn't have a mechanism for exploring. Actually, the best sci art, I think, really interrogates the science and sometimes acts as a kind of critique.

12:31Bridget Nicholls:I suppose what an artist brings is that we're idiots and we don't know what we're talking about so we can imagine beyond that because I think knowledge can be both liberating and constraining at the same time. I use the word idiot as a good thing. It's important to be an idiot and it's important to acknowledge one's inner idiot because from this point you can really listen. You're in a state of total openness. It's a state of childlike wonderment.

13:05Philip Ball:My name is Jason Singh. I'm a sound artist, a composer and a DJ. About 10 years ago, I started working in the realms of biosonification, working with technologies that allow us to listen to the natural world in very open ways. My work with fungi and mycelium came out of creating a sound piece derived from a patch of mycelium up in Dartmoor. All living things generate electricity and I use a device which I connect using these sensor clips or sticky pads which then go onto a leaf or they attach inside the mushroom and then what happens is is that the sort of electrical charge that is being generated is then converted into midi which is a language understood by audio software and then through those synthesizers and through my audio software I route it to different instruments and so it will generate melodies it will generate rhythms, effects.

14:17Philip Ball:Recently I recorded a flyer garrick which had a creature inside it that was eating it from the inside and hearing the sound of that mulching and squelching inside it that was literally the sounds of activity within the mushroom. It's just incredible what it does when it meets people's ears because you know there's this real fascination about what am I and what am I in relation to the world that I'm in? And so when you hear these strange worlds coming out of speakers, it's a very, very powerful way to engage with the natural world. About 50 % of animal species are parasites. Everything is parasitised.

14:58Philip Ball:We ourselves are full of parasites every moment of our lives, or we have them on us. There are parasites across all groups of life that actually manipulate the behaviour of their host. And so in that sense, what Ophiocordyceps does is not unique. And to a biologist, it's not shocking because there are many other parasites that have similar impacts. There are grasshoppers and crickets that hurl themselves into water bodies so that the parasite that's inside them, which is aquatic in its adult stage, can leave their body and mate. there are a whole array of parasites that affect behavior and the reason that they affect the behavior is to maximize their own transmission to the next host and if that requires the host to die that's what the parasite is going to evolve to do and obviously the host is also evolving to try to prevent the parasite exploiting it like that so it's a dance across the generations and at any moment in time the parasite might be winning or the host might be winning and we see a tiny snapshot in time of that relationship.

16:08Bridget Nicholls:Can you talk about what interests you about this parasitic relationship? I think the more I studied the cordyceps ant phenomenon, the more I realised that we could learn something from this. Am I autonomous or is something controlling me?

16:28Merlin Sheldrake:My name is Noor Siddharus. I'm a lecturer in cognitive neuroscience at Royal Hallway, University of London. My research is focused on how we make decisions and learn from the consequences of our actions and how this is also linked to our sense of control over our actions and their consequences and so how we come to have a sense of agency.

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17:52Merlin Sheldrake:I think us humans, we think we are in control. We feel like we are in our normal everyday life processing information and behaving according to what we want to do. At the same time, I think what is important to remember is that control is a matter of degrees rather than being a yes-no thing. So I think even us as humans, whether it's us at different time points, children versus adults, we have different degrees of control over our behavior. And some scientists have argued that perhaps we're not really in control in the intuitive way we think about it, because indeed we might be controlled by these neural processes, chemicals in our brains, and that itself would be subject to the loss of physics.

18:40Merlin Sheldrake:At the same time, I think it is a sort of dualistic mistake to separate us from our brains. And so that means that both our brain states and our brain function create the experiences that we have as individuals. But then again, our thoughts, our beliefs, the way we think about things will itself also shape these neural processes. So I think intentions, the sort of will we have to do things, is manifested in the neural processes rather than being something dissociable from it. If we don't see it as a yes or no, a binary, then we can do research to try to figure out what is it that leads us to feel more or less in control and be more or less in control.

19:26Bridget Nicholls:The living world is full of invitation, of coaxing, of seduction, of manipulation, of behavioral modification from one organism to another. And so you can see this as an expression of that, just a very intimate one, because the fungus is actually growing inside the body of the ant and is actually interposing itself into its most intimate processes. But I do think it's important to remember this larger picture, We ourselves, for example, we have microbiomes, and there's a whole field of biology called neuromicrobiology, which is arising to study the effects that these microbes have on our behaviors.

20:07Bridget Nicholls:We are also being influenced in many, many ways, of course, as we know, through the various industries of influence and control. But we are also being influenced biologically, not just by the organisms that live in and on us, but the organisms that live around us. And so I think these zombie fungi are part of a much larger story in the history of life. If you look around the world, there are many different ways to think about possession, different spiritual traditions, different cultural stories and mythologies. And possession could be something that people are ready to receive or want to receive.

20:47Bridget Nicholls:Something that you are maybe calling in. or possession might be something that you want to stop, to get rid of, to be exorcised. Questions and fears about control are obviously very ancient.

21:00Philip Ball:So it's kind of interesting to ask why it's only in modern times that this seems to sort of be manifested in the myth of the zombie. It plays into the fear that things and people in particular might not be what they seem to be. And in fact, you know, this is the trope that philosophers talk about all the time. Could there be such a thing as metaphysical zombies, creatures that look exactly like us and behave exactly like us, but if we could see inside, under the lid, we would find there's nothing there? And of course, today, we're confronted with exactly that, with ChatGPT and, you know, other chatbots, that as far as we know, that is exactly what they are.

21:45Philip Ball:They give this incredible impression of being conscious, of being able to engage in conversations, of even being empathetic to us. And yet, as far as we know, they're just algorithms doing statistics. So we kind of made the zombie, the philosophical zombie, and now we're having to grapple with what that means. And of course, one of the big fears about these systems is exactly this, that they're going to take control. And maybe they'll turn us into zombies as well.

22:15Merlin Sheldrake:The Last of Us is a show people might have seen where they're indeed taking the cordyceps and imagining that they might get to us humans when people get contaminated that become violent and the kind of classic zombie style will come and attack people and want to propagate. There's parallels of what is coming in to invade, whether it's our country or our own selves. And can we maintain notions of a self as an individual or as a nation? And that might lead us to want to take back control. I think perhaps sometimes not always in the most useful way.

22:56Philip Ball:It seems to me that the myth of the zombie provides a recognised cultural structure for exploring anxiety. But I wonder also whether there's something about the way that it plays on what some modern biologists have been wanting to tell us. That actually, we are just controlled by our genes. That all organisms are just passive vehicles. Robots made by genes for their own purposes. What interested me about the TV series The Last of Us, which explored this phenomenon of zombification of ants by fungus by transferring it to humans, it explored it in a way that made use of this zombie myth that we've had for a long time.

23:44Philip Ball:but it certainly wasn't something being brought about by voodoo magic. It was actually portrayed as a natural process and what you had was basically a species jump. As with Covid, we're not by any means in control of nature to the degree that we might think we are, if we are at all. Fungi do things in different ways to us and that makes it hard for us to conceptualise them but also makes them an object of wonder as well, I think. Ophiocordyceps is interesting because in and of itself, the photos of it are shocking. And it is very shocking, but it's very alien. And it's easy then to put it in a box and say, it doesn't concern me.

24:27Philip Ball:And in one sense, it doesn't because we're not ants and we're not going to get infected by Ophiocordyceps. But in another sense, it does concern us because it's about understanding the natural world and its complexity. I think one thing which has emerged in biology relatively recently over the last sort of five years or so is the concept of individuality is much harder to think about biologically than perhaps we had assumed. Symbiosis is a very specific term in biology. It means living together and it encompasses relationships that are parasitic all the way through to relationships that are deeply mutualistic.