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. 2020 Apr 14;10:6428. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-63400-1

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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(A–C) The secure attachment of the ant to the plants occurs not only through the grip of the ant’s mandibles on major leaf veins along their abaxial surface but also by the fungal rhizoid/mycelial mat fastening the ant’s abdominal segments, mandibles, and legs to the surface of the leaf (arrowheads). (D) The eight ant species in this study all express death grip behavior to secure their place, leaving characteristic dumbbell-shaped marks on the plants. (E) The histological cross sections (dash lines in D) indicated that the fungus does not actually invade the leaf tissue. This shows that the fungus only attaches to the plants.