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This phenomenon has also been observed in the stink ant of the Cameroon.

It's a museum for people who enjoy thinking about museums.

http://www.mjt.org/

The longer you're there, the more you'll realize that what's on display isn't the point, but HOW it's displayed. Also, they have a tea room upstairs that serves "real" tea, cookies, and occasionally live accordion music.

Selected Collections from Los Angeles Area Mobile Home and Trailer Parks

When in Los Angeles, visit the Museum of Jurassic Technology. See their model of Noah's Ark.

http://www.mjt.org/exhibits/stinkant.html

real?

unreal?

Charles Fort would have been proud.

The ant so affected seems to be Megaloponera Foetens , the "Stink Ant" of the Cameroon. From the article I linked, it is "one of the very few to produce a cry audible to the human ear."

An ant that cries audibly and is enslaved by fungus. And some people say science fiction is implausible.

[EDITORS: IMPROVED VERSION! CLICK THE LINKS! Possibly the most inspired post ever ...] There's a history of pranks and hacks in the year-end issue of the Economist, including MIT hacks, the Bonsai Kitten, and the Pentagon hack by my favorite, Abbie Hoffman. They end with an invitation: "... we invite readers to nominate their contender for the finest prank in history, explaining in 750 words why it deserves the title." Slashdot readers, can you hack the contest?

Interesting. For reference, here is the original text and links (from before the article "went live", as seen by subscribers):

Luther Blissett writes "There's a history of pranks and hacks in the year-end issue of the Economist, including MIT hacks, the Bonsai Kitten, and the Pentagon hack by my favorite, Abbie Hoffman." From the article: "At Harvard's neighbour, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 'hacks', as the MIT crowd calls them, are more serious. So serious, in fact, that in 2003 the institute's best hacks were assembled in a 178-page book, 'Nightwork'. The pranks at MIT tend to be feats of engineering. They are positively encouraged, because they teach students to work in teams, solve complex problems and, sometimes, get a message across. Mr Peterson's book includes an 11-point code for pranksters: leave no damage, do not steal, do not drop things off a building without a ground crew, and so on. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, at least, student pranks have become an establishment activity."

http://www.mememachinego.com/archives/001484.html

  "On occasion one of these ants, while looking for food is infected by inhaling a microscopic spore from a fungus of the genus Tomentella. After being inhaled, the spore seats in the ant's tiny brain and begins to grow, causing changes in the ant's patterns of behavior. The Ant appears troubled and confused; for the first time in its life the ant leaves the forest floor and begins to climb.

        Driven on by the growth of the fungus, the ant embarks on a long and exhaustive climb. Completely spent and having reached a prescribed height, the ant impales the plant with its mandibles. Thus affixed, the ant waits to die. Ants that have met their ends in this fashion are quite common in some sections of the forest.

        The fungus continues to consume first the nerve cells and finally all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks a spike appears from what had been the head of the ant. This spike is about an inch and a half in length and has a bright orange tip heavy with spores which rain down onto the rain forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale. "

If you go looking for the Megaloponera foetens, you'll find that the information all seems to trace back to a single source, the Museum of Jurassic Technology : http://www.mjt.org/index.html

In a field study trip in Ecuador, we learned about a fugus that, as a spore, infects an insect and corrupts their nervous system, causing them to crawl to the top of whatever plant/tree they are on top of.

I think you are lying. See this page and the regarding Wikipedia talk page.

I saw it in a BBC documentary once(where else?). The mushroom grew right out of the ant's head. And apparently the ant can scream so loud even humans can hear it.
Here's one description(source:
http://www.mjt.org/exhibits/stinkant.htm)

Our planet's rain forests - rich matrices of life which exist primarily in tropical regions - provide us with unique opportunity to observe life in all of its manifold and perplexing beauty. Most rain forests date back some two to three hundred million years. This extreme age has allowed many unusual and complex relationships to develop among the inhabitants of these tropical ecosystems.
In the rain forest of the Cameroon in West Central Africa lives a floor dwelling ant known as Megaloponera foetens, or more commonly, the stink ant. This large ant - one of the very few to produce a cry audible to the human ear - lives by foraging for food among the fallen leaves and undergrowth of the extraordinarily rich rain forest floor.

On occasion one of these ants, while looking for food is infected by inhaling a microscopic spore from a fungus of the genus Tomentella. After being inhaled, the spore seats in the ant's tiny brain and begins to grow, causing changes in the ant's patterns of behavior. The Ant appears troubled and confused; for the first time in its life the ant leaves the forest floor and begins to climb.

Driven on by the growth of the fungus, the ant embarks on a long and exhaustive climb. Completely spent and having reached a prescribed height, the ant impales the plant with its mandibles. Thus affixed, the ant waits to die. Ants that have met their ends in this fashion are quite common in some sections of the forest.

The fungus continues to consume first the nerve cells and finally all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks a spike appears from what had been the head of the ant. This spike is about an inch and a half in length and has a bright orange tip heavy with spores which rain down onto the rain forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale.

In his three volume work Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter, Geoffrey Sonnabend departed from all previous memory research with the premise that memory is an illusion. Forgetting, he believed, not remembering is the inevitable outcome of all experience. From this perspective,

In his three volume work Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter, Geoffrey Sonnabend departed from all previous memory research with the premise that memory is an illusion. Forgetting, he believed, not remembering is the inevitable outcome of all experience. From this perspective,

You get some idea from Lawrence Weschler Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders, a Pulitzer Prize finalist (and for sale via the museum's website).

Amen to that. The Mutter is by far the coolest museum in the country.
It may not seem like much now but removing Grover Cleveland's Secret Tumor on a boat on the Long Island was high tech - for the time (1893).

While you are at it, check out the Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA, another bastion of the scientific and bizarre.

I thought this guy was a crackpot (and he may be), but he came to the same conclusion from a psychological perspective at the turn of the century. Memory is an illusion created by the mind. Check it out.