Here's this award-winning image of a fungus making a fly its "zombie" slave

Enlarge / The story of a conquest: The fruiting body of a parasitic fungus springs from its victim's body. Roberto Garcia-Roa/CC BY 4.0

The striking photograph above vividly captures the spores of a parasitic "zombie" fungus (Ophiocordyceps) as they grow from the body of a host fly with exquisite details. No wonder it won the 2022 BMC Ecology and Evolution image competition, featured along with eight other winners in the BMC Ecology and Evolution journal. The winning images were chosen by the journal's editor and senior members of the journal's editorial board. According to the journal, the competition “gives ecologists and evolutionary biologists the opportunity to use their creativity to celebrate their research and the intersection of art and science.”

Roberto García-Roa, an evolutionary biologist and conservation photographer affiliated with both the University of Valencia in Spain and Lund University in Sweden, took his award-winning photo while hiking in the Peruvian jungle. The mushroom in question belongs to the Cordyceps family. There are over 400 different species of Cordyceps fungi, each targeting a particular insect species, whether it be ants, dragonflies, cockroaches, aphids or beetles. Consider Cordyceps an example of a natural population control mechanism to ensure that ecological balance is maintained.

According to García-Roa, Ophiocordyceps, like its zombifying relatives, infiltrates the host's exoskeleton and brain via airborne spores that attach to the host body. Once inside, the spores grow long tendrils called mycelia that eventually reach the brain and release chemicals that turn the hapless host into the fungus' zombie slave. The chemicals force the host to move to the most favorable place for the fungus to grow and grow. The fungus slowly feeds on the host, sprouting new spores throughout the body as a final indignity.

These germs burst and release even more spores into the air, which infect even more unsuspecting hosts, in what García-Roa calls "a conquest shaped by thousands of years of evolution". Board member Christy Anna Hipsley praised García-Roa's winning photograph for its "depth and composition that simultaneously conveys life and death - a matter that transcends time, space and even species." . The death of the fly gives life to the fungus.”

The winners and runners-up in the individual categories are below.

Winner: Relationships in Nature

Enlarge / Gone with the Bay. Flying under the influence - a waxwing feasts on fermented mountain ash berries. Alwin Hardenbol/CC BY 4.0

This image of a Bohemian waxwing (Bombycilla garrulus) feasting on fermented rowan berries is the work of ecologist Alwin Hardenbol, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Eastern Finland. According to Hardenbol, the birds love the berries so much that they migrate to where the berries are most abundant, not just in Finland, but also in Western, Eastern or Central Europe. Waxwings can eat twice their own weight in mountain ash berries in a single day. The birds feed and the berries disperse their seeds.

However, "while this relationship is very beneficial for seed dispersal, it comes at a cost to the birds," Hardenbol said. "When the berries become overripe, they begin to ferment...