How the Zombie Fungus Takes Over Ants’ Bodies to Control Their Minds

The fungus’s skill at colonizing ants is surpassed only by its skill at colonizing popular culture. It’s the organism behind the monsters of the video game The Last of Us and the zombies of the book The Girl With All the Gifts. It’s also an obsession of one David Hughes, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University, who has been studying it for years. He wants to know exactly how this puppet master controls its puppets—and his latest experiments suggest that it’s even more ghoulish than it first appears.