Infection occurs when carpenter ants marching around on the forest floor, searching for food will step on a fungal spores on the ground. Once attached to the ant's exoskeleton, the spores use enzymes to penetrate inside the ant's body, but there's an incubation period where infected ants look perfectly normal, but as the fungus grows, it starts to manipulate the ant's behavior.
The fungus is only able to successfully develop an infectious stage if the infected ant is away from its canopy nest, considering that social insects, like ants possesses defense mechanism, called social immunity that protects them from any form of danger. Thus, before the infected ant gets detected by its fellow members, the fungus compels the ant to leave their nest for forest floors.
Ants start to manifest unusual actions, they behave in zombie-like manner, like crawling clumsily, marching away from their trails, convulsing from time to time causing them to fall into the ground, can't no longer find their way home. This time the fungus drives ants upward, to the leaf above at about one foot from the ground, a zone where temperature and humidity is favourable for the fungus to grow. Here the infected ant will bite the twig or the underside major vien of the leaf, and as they bite, the muscles of their mandibles deteriorate, causing a permanent lockjaw or death grip. The infected ant anchors to the plant still alive and kicking, but after a few hours, the ant stops moving, as the fungus kills the ants. The fungus devour the ant's nutrients while releasing chemicals to protect the remains from microbial and scavenger attack.
The position where the ant is fixed in place is ideal for fungus' reproductive stage, as the infection advances, at about two to three days later a fruiting body will start to emerge. Then a bulbous capsule full of spores burst on the ends of mycelia, over the course of week, the stalk's head will shoot spores onto the soil below, to infect more unwary ants.
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