Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. If you found the famous HBO series The Last of Us to be a ...

A parasitic fungus that controls the behaviour of fruit flies has, for the first time, been studied in the lab. In a fascinating preprint posted on Biorxiv, researchers Carolyn Elya et al. report how ...

In 2023, researchers uncovered new insights into the eerie world of fungi that transform insects into "zombies." Carolyn Elya, a molecular biologist at Harvard, along with her coworkers, demonstrated ...

houseflies with deadly spores. The fungus uses the corpse of a female housefly to seduce a male housefly, but the longer it takes for a female housefly to become a corpse, the more attractive the ...

Sunset is famously one of the most beautiful and peaceful times of day, unless you're a fly infected by the fungus Entomophthora muscae. It sends out spores or progranules which land on a host. The ...

In a new study published in eLife, lead author Carolyn Elya, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, reveals the molecular and cellular ...

A fly is going about its day, buzzing here, buzzing there—but then, it starts behaving weirdly. Its movements become sluggish; its abdomen swells. Its body sprouts white fuzz. Around sunset, there’s a ...

This is the gruesome moment a bizarre zombie fungus eats a fly from inside the insect's body. The entomophthora muscae eats its host, and then attracts healthy flies over to have necrophilic ...

For decades, a grisly mystery has buzzed around one fly-killing fungi. No matter when the fungus infects a fly, it always dies at the same time of day. Death always comes at sunset. When molecular ...