Chapter 8 The Plague and the Locusts

"Roll, dodge quickly."

Seeing the berserk ceratopsian group rushing towards them, the head worm rolled continuously behind a stone, and the little flying dragon immediately followed it and ran over. It seemed quite sticky head worm.

But Lin thinks there is no need for them to hide.

Looking at the leader of the horned dragon rushing forward, Leviathan aimed at it with a cannon and shot a tiny needle.

After being shot by the needle, the berserk leader of the horned dragon stopped immediately, and his mood returned to calm. At the same time, his group also stopped.

They seemed to follow the leader completely, and they didn't go berserk.

Seeing the situation in front of her, Lin confirmed one thing. It seems that some creatures in the jungle are acting abnormally, and they are all related to the skeletal dragon. They probably use some kind of excitatory toxin to cause the violent reaction of these creatures. The monitor lizard That's it, maybe the little flying dragon's abnormality has something to do with them.

However, Lin still remembered the liquid that excites the creature. Lin had already made Leviathan create a liquid with the opposite effect, which could neutralize the effect of the exciting liquid and calm the creature down again.

Seeing this, Skeletal Dragon, who was hiding in the bushes, slowly backed away. After retreating to a place it thought was safe, it immediately turned around and fled.

But before that, Leviathan also "positioned" it, and a small needle pricked its back, but it didn't notice it at all.

Next, Lin continued to send the head worm to the edge of the jungle, where Lin began to help the head worm build a lair similar to its twisted jungle rock mountain, until it produced troops in it.

The little flying dragon lived in with the head worm as a matter of course, and it seemed to like the head worm very much. And the brainworms don't pay much attention to it.

The two of them should have no problem staying together. When the brain worm lives here. Leviathan continued to explore the jungle.

Leviathan flew into the jungle again, and Lin asked Leviathan to check the red tree directly. When Leviathan peeled off the bark, the needles inside burst out again, and they hit Leviathan's carapace. It bounces all over the place.

This time, Leviathan grabbed the bark and refused to close it. Lin carefully observed the inside of the trunk and found a spherical structure inside. There are many small holes in the sphere, and Lin found many seeds in these small holes.

Lin basically guessed what was going on.

There are many small hooks growing on the seeds of this tree.

It should be that every time a creature passes by, it will shoot out these seeds and stick to other creatures to help spread them. Many plants can spread seeds in this way.

And those needles coated with stimulating liquid... were obviously stuffed in by other creatures, and that creature was... Skeletal Dragon.

The purpose of their doing this is indeed to cause some large creatures to fight, and then wait for them to lose both.

In an interesting way, this creature is worth investigating.

After that, several days and nights passed. Lin first observed many dinosaur-like creatures in the jungle, and at the same time found the location of the skeletal dragon. Lin found that it didn't seem to have a group. It hunted some small creatures in the jungle by itself, and then kept heading south. It seemed to be going somewhere.

Lin asked Leviathan to release a flyer to follow it. Leviathan itself is too big to follow. Moreover, Leviathan has to return to the Rift Valley to do other things...

Lin has other things to deal with, so she turned her attention. Although Lin can handle many things at the same time, she doesn't like to do this. Lin prefers to deal with one by one, unless these things are of the same importance.

However, the importance of this matter may be higher than anything else, and it can even be said that a new threat has been encountered.

Lynn's "Fungus Sweeping Unit", Bomber and Behemoth discovered something special about the plague fungus at sea...

Bechymos discovered the 'Locust Lord' and its locust swarm in the ocean two hundred kilometers east of the mainland.

In fact, Lin didn't see any creatures like locusts in the recent fungus cleaning activities, but the locusts she saw now seemed to have nothing to do with fungi.

The body of this kind of locust is generally yellow, and their blood and body are not infected with the fungus, while the locust infected with the fungus is purple, and the same is true for the locust lord, because their blood is full of fungus and change color.

Lin followed and observed them, and later found that these locusts were not used for combat. The locust lord used them to devour the plants of the islands in the sea, and then transported them back to himself. Basically, it would not cause any devastating disasters.

They are not as crazy as those infected with fungi, and they will only leave after eating a certain amount of nutrients. After being infected with fungi, they completely change their appearance, so Lin has a special idea about plague fungi...

Perhaps the fungus can affect biological behavior by infecting the brain.

But generally speaking, plague fungi will devour all living things, and it is unlikely that they just infect the brain. Maybe they are selective, so Lin caught some locusts and used them to experiment with some plague fungus dust obtained.

Lin discovered a wonderful place. When the fungus dust landed on various parts of the locust's body several times, they would grow rapidly and devour the whole locust, exactly the same as other creatures.

But at some point, as the hyphae spread through the locust's body, they touch the locust's nerve cord, at which point the hyphae climb up their nerve cord and eventually reach the brain.

The hyphae will invade the brain, but they will not eat the brain cells, and generally seem to be mixed with the brain.

At this time, the behavior of the creature will be abnormal, and the behavior of this infected locust becomes weird. According to the original, the purpose of life of this division-type species is to collect nutrients for the lord of the locust swarm, but now its purpose of life becomes Let the fungus spread.

The fungus will spread the dust into the blood in its body, and then the locust will try to infect some uninfected locusts in Lin's experiment first. At this time, the fungus will directly infect the brain instead of devouring them. After infecting them, the locusts will find a way to infect other things.

The way they spread is very crazy. Sometimes they directly commit suicide to spread, and sometimes they spread by contact. When the fungus infects the target and grows a large number of structures such as mushrooms, they will eat these structures. In fact, Lynn found that they did not digest The fungus that is eaten and swallowed by the locust will grow in the stomach and penetrate into the blood again, and the fungus in the blood will directly secrete some nutrients to maintain the life of the locust.

In other words, they are not in a symbiotic relationship at all. It might be better to say that the fungi enslaved the locusts. This situation is... quite weird.

Generally speaking, fungi have no brains, but they can control creatures with brains, and after infecting the brains of locusts, the surrounding fungi seem to become... smarter.

The fungus will react according to what the locusts see. For example, when the locusts see fire, they will secrete fire-resistant mucus. When the locusts see plants in the distance, they will grow structures like 'gun barrels', The fungus dust is launched, and even when the locust sees flying fish in the sea, the fungus reacts immediately and releases a smell to attract the fish to fly up.

Without the locusts, the fungus would not do these reactions, or would react rather slowly, like a mindless plant...

How is this going? Can fungi 'think' with the help of locust brains?

Is such a thing possible? Because fungi have no brains themselves, they 'borrow' the brains of other creatures. Their way of life is not just eating like a plague. This is a very special creature.

They bear some resemblance to the original parasitic Inca swarms and can control the species being parasitized.

Lin has experimented with placing the infected locusts with units such as hallucinogens or brain readers, but this has caused the locusts to die of massive brain bleeding.

It seems that because the brain is affected by information conflicts, the locust brain is small, but it can provide fungi with a lot of basic information, even vision, etc., but there is no way to give fungi any intelligence.

The same is true for the locust lord, the brain is not very big, but what if the fungus infects some kind of creature with high intelligence? What will happen then?

It may be that fungi are not necessarily capable of infecting creatures with larger brains. Simple-brained locusts are easy to control, but the larger the brain, the greater the complexity.

Next, Lin used fungi to experiment with some creatures, such as fish commonly found in the sea, etc. The fungus will not respond to these fish, even if the fungus dust is directly placed in the brain, it will not react Its control is instead devoured as usual.

Next, Lin experimented with some arthropods, and found that the control seemed to be a very accidental behavior, and most of the time, the fungus directly devoured the creatures.

Even when locusts are infected, it is not certain that the locusts will be controlled, unless the locusts are infecting each other. If the locusts are directly exposed to the fungal infection, most of the locusts will be swallowed by the fungus, and one in a hundred may be infected. Brain control.

In this way, the behavior of the control brain of the fungus is very random, but if they are successfully controlled, the creature becomes a living creature that spreads the fungus...

In general, fungi have two infection methods. One is very simple, which is to slowly grow hyphae and swallow the whole organism, and the other is to allow the mycelium to crawl to the brain and affect the brain of the organism.

Later, in Lin's experiments, it was discovered that the fungus infected a small reptile. As long as they infect one creature, they may infect all of its kind in a controlled manner. There must be bodily fluid contact between the infected and the uninfected. Only by touching can it spread.

All in all, this characteristic of fungi made them more dangerous, and made it harder for Lynn to know how far they had spread.

And recently, Bechymos also discovered that fungi seem to be able to infect some creatures with large brains. On an island, Lin saw a large purple creature infected by fungi. (to be continued...)