The bullet ant (Paraponera clavata) has fallen victim to parasitic fungi of the genus Cordyceps, which manipulate the behaviour of their host in order to increase their own chances of reproducing.
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by Andres, on April 18 2007:
whoa...I had no idea these fungi existed!
"This has a positive effect on the jungle diversity, since parasite like these stops one group of animals from getting the upper hand, the more numerous a species the more likely it'll be attacked by its nemesis."
While you can't fully draw a parallel between the two,..somewhere in the beginning of the documentary I started to think of this in digital terms. Eventually digital virus came to mind. In the land of the operative systems (OS), the more popular the OS becomes and the more it tries to dominate, the more parasites (malware, viruses, spyware) that adapt and evolve to attack it. The inability for the system to adapt, helps drive diversity.
The same is happening with all sorts of web services and software.
The redesign (/evolution) of OS seems to be largely driven by security as of late.
A static defense system that stays with a specific individual / system through out its life, no longer works. Like its biological counter-part, digital parasites evolve. Selection favors those systems that survive due to having immune systems that are able to evolve quickly and constantly (anti-virus, network monitoring and filter systems, anti-spyware). Passed down from one generation to another, not by genes, but by ones and zeroes, through a distributed network of a global and clustered systems.
Inheriting immunity is as in biology, from one system to the next. But unlike (most) of biology (except for human medicine and vaccines), machines are being designed to share immunities at any given moment.
Im just rambling, but thinking about artificially intelligent virii, one would have to evolve or spread incredibly fast in order to potentially infect massive ammounts of systems.
Then again...not all machines are updated frequently... so there might be room for spreading. In the case of this biological fungi, it doesn't need a thousand ants infected, just one is enough to give chance to a next generation of fungii.
Anyway...your video had me thinking a lot. Thanks for the video, great addition.
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