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with plants as endophytes. Surprisingly, you do not have to go Amazon forest to see them because they can be present anywhere, be it agricultural fields, forests, grasslands, barren lands, deserts, meadows and aquatic lands. They can attack and infect any type of insects such as grasshoppers, butterflies, ants, worms, moths, beetles, bugs and many more. These fungi look like a bunch of minute
these fungi attack insects, which is notably very dramatic. First, they seek their prey until it reaches their premises, recognize it and then attack. Some of these fungi are quite choosy of their target, and
for some, whatever comes on their way becomes their food. Insects get trapped during their search of food, nectar, or even shelter, and carry fungal powdery spores on their body surface. Then, these fungi try to penetrate into the hard covering of the insect body, and they do so by using a wide range of arsenals. They produce many deadly toxins and enzymes, which crack down the insect’s protective shield into pores, making it easier for fungi to penetrate into the insect body. Obviously, you must be thinking, the fungus entering into the body of the insect is too small to kill such a big insect, so how is it possible?
The fungi swim to the
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threads with millions of powdery spores on their body. You can even differentiate them based on colours such as white (Beauveria bassiana), green (Metarhizium anisopliae), pink (Paecilomyces lilacinous), olive green (Nomurea rileyi) and even yellow (Hirsutella thompsonii). So colourful indeed!
Now, what is more exciting is the way
core of the body of the insect and attack their nervous system, which makes it easier for the fungi to control all body parts of the insect. It is like a brainless creature trying to control
the one with a brain; in fact, we can call them brainy. Next, what follows is that the fungi try to manipulate the brain and behaviour of the insect in such a way that they control all the muscular activities and habits of the insect. Now the fungus in actual decides what the insect will eat and where it will go; in short, it turns the insect into walking dead like a zombie. The fungus is utilizing all the essential food sources from the body of the insect to grow itself, slowly reaches every nick of the body of the insect in the form of a thread-like structure, and controls all the body movement of the insect. The death trail does not just end here; the fungus also leads the trapped insect to climb to the top of the
Thanks to Mother Nature, there is an unsung victorious story of legendary fungal microorganisms, which are silently doing the novel job of keeping such enemies under control. To your great surprise and mine too, they do so using the amazingly unique technique of turning insects into zombies and gradually leading to the death of insects that nobody could ever imagine. So, they are popularly known as fungal entomopathogens, which means fungi that kill insects.