Monday, May 18, 2009

Every Fly’s Nightmare





I found about a dozen dead flies like this one, head down, tongues extended, clinging to the flower heads of meadow foxtail grass. They’ve been killed by a fungus called Entomophthora muscae, that invades the insect through one of the joints in its external skeleton and attacks its nervous system, modifying its behaviour so that it climbs to the top of grass stems and clings on while the fungus digests its internal organs. Fully fed, the fungus then erupts through the joints in its victim's body, covering the dead fly's abdomen with a felty mass of fungal material that produces gelatinous-coated spores that cling to the next hapless fly that arrives in the scene, sealing its fate. The spores can be fired some distance from the corpse, so they also coat surrounding vegetation. The bottom photograph shows the highly magnified (x200) sticky spores and the next one up shows a mass of sticky spores adhering to a hair on the leg of the corpse (x100). It's Hammer House of Horrors stuff.

7 comments:

  1. 'struth - makes athlete's foot look like a walk in the park.

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  2. Makes the morning news sound like a walk in the park!

    I really appreciate you pointing out the "larger world".

    Thanks!

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  3. Good grief. That's brilliant. But how are you going to follow that?
    In another one of those lovely coincidences I have just been reading about digger wasps and their endearing habit of stinging prey to paralyse not kill so that their nippers, hatching from eggs laid inside the prey's body, can feast on live meat.
    There's the making of a new blog here, on all the gruesome stuff of the insect world.

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  4. Wonderfully informative, that's why I love the internet, I learn something new every day, thank you so much.

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  5. Hi Rob and Ron,It is all a bit horrific, but nothing compared with some of the fungi that attack tropical spiders - check out http://www.whatsthatbug.com/2008/10/26/fungus-riddled-spider/

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  6. Hi Nyctalus, I think I have some photos that I took last year of the wasps that you mention, carrying their prey into their nest tunnels - will see if I can find them

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  7. Thanks for visiting, Toffeeapple, it's a pleasure to have people to share these things with.

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