'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite • Hacker News Board

Re: 'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite

#91

Post by ionised » Fri, Nov 10, 2017, 11:50 AM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #2

>"Normally in animals, behavior is controlled by the brain sending signals to the muscles, but our results suggest that the parasite is controlling host behavior peripherally," Hughes said. "Almost like a puppeteer pulls the strings to make a marionette move, the fungus controls the ant's muscles to manipulate the host's legs and mandibles." Probably the most "And I Must Scream" moment in mother nature. Imagine a hum…

> Imagine a human gets infected by a parasite that controls their body but leaves their brain intact to observe what their body is doing

Sounds very Stargate SG-1!

Re: 'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite

#92

Post by FullMtlAlcoholc » Fri, Nov 10, 2017, 11:55 AM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #2

>"Normally in animals, behavior is controlled by the brain sending signals to the muscles, but our results suggest that the parasite is controlling host behavior peripherally," Hughes said. "Almost like a puppeteer pulls the strings to make a marionette move, the fungus controls the ant's muscles to manipulate the host's legs and mandibles." Probably the most "And I Must Scream" moment in mother nature. Imagine a hum…

>Probably the most "And I Must Scream" moment in mother nature.

Another contender for that crown is the tongue eating louse or Cymothoa exigua. It attaches itself to a fish's tongue. Then, the true horro begins. 'The parasite severs the blood vessels in the fish's tongue, causing the tongue to fall off. It then attaches itself to the stub of what was once its tongue and becomes the fish's new tongue'

I'd rather be a fungal thrall than have to a parasite take over as my tongue

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua

Re: 'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite

#93

Post by pavement » Fri, Nov 10, 2017, 4:57 PM UTC

red75prime wrote: post #78

pavement wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One, then, is left to wonder where the seat of organizational sentience really resides, if it resides in any of the independent organisms at all. Ants surely seem sentient, even if still lower-order animals. Is it just an emergent detail of aggregate reflexive behavior across all members? How (and why) would soldiers know to build a bridge with their bodies, to cross a water barrier, seemingly from birth? Maybe the l…

If there's no sequential bottleneck in information processing, where one piece of information is made available to almost all subsystems, then there's probably no consciousness. If it is the case, we cannot say that the system as a whole is aware of something, because there's no common 'something' available to all subsystems. Returning to ants, the anthill as a whole could probably be aware of a coarse assessment of…

Which is to conclude, either all ants are sentient, or no ants are sentient (but a variety of degrees of sentience is not expected), and the emergent behavior of a colony is its own phenomenon.