Scientists have identified a single gene that allows a caterpillar-brainwashing virus to do its dirty work, a new study says.
The virus forces the "zombie" caterpillars to climb trees, where the invader eventually liquifies its hosts' bodies into a dripping goo.
Caterpillars infected with a baculovirus—a type of virus that infects invertebrates—are driven to the treetops and reprogrammed to stay there until they meet a doom worthy of a horror film.
"When they are infected, as they get sicker they stay up in the trees and die up there," Hoover explained.
The virus "ends up using just about all of the caterpillar to make more virus, and there are other genes in the virus that then make the caterpillar melt. So it becomes a pool of millions of virus particles that end up dropping onto the foliage below where it can infect other moths that eat those leaves."
