Some people inhale fungal spores. They feel strange. They can be a bit of a bite. Possibly a little dead. And then… POP! Something horrible happens and the horror spreads.
Such is the fate of many i Cold storagea new film in which a trio of unlikely heroes try to save the world from the apocalypse. Your enemy? A mutated one Cordyceps fungus that, due to some lousy solar radiation, now infects warm-blooded animals instead of its usual prey. But haven’t we seen this before?
Cordyceps exist, and many of them have actually adapted to a spectacularly cinematic form of parasitism: spores invade the body of an unfortunate invertebrate; the fungus grows and eats the insides of the host while infiltrating the nervous system and muscles; the host’s behavior changes, perhaps searching for platforms for optimal spore dispersal until its fungus-filled corpse eventually sprouts tendril-like growths, releasing hundreds of thousands of spores into the air, whereupon the whole macabre dance begins again.
Because Cordyceps lacking the ability to survive in the hothouses that are mammalian bodies, it is incredibly unlikely that anyone could ever transfer their attention to humans. But the nightmare persists. It provided nourishment The girl with all the giftsunleash a zombie apocalypse on cinemas in 2016. Last year saw the second series of HBO’s The last of us continued to use the same bioterror as an antagonist. In November radio drama Spores found a famous mushroom that transformed people in rural Wales. And now, even more.
This obsession with Cordyceps misrepresents the kingdom of fungi. At just a few hundred species, they are a vanishingly small fraction of the staggering diversity of fungi, and while I will admit that there is a UK National Collection of Pathogenic Fungi that houses more than 4,500 “potentially lethal fungi”, there is so much more to celebrate about fungi than to fear.
Let’s start with the superlatives. Fungi are the largest: a single individual of Armillaria ostoyae in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest is, with nearly 10 square kilometers of underground fiber, the largest known organism on Earth. Fungi are the oldest ecosystem engineers: research last year suggested that fungi migrated to land hundreds of millions of years before modern land plants, helping to build the first soils. Fungi are the most sexually flexible: the divided gill fungus (Schizophyllum municipality) relies on over 23,000 “mating types” (similar to sex) to guarantee mating success.
We could list the ways fungi benefit all life, from their relentless removal of dead organic matter that would otherwise suffocate the planet, to their symbiosis with 90 percent of plants, releasing essential nutrients and keeping the earth green. Or we can consider what our own species has to thank them for: penicillin, immunosuppressants, anticoagulants, and psilocybin compounds for the treatment of depression. Sourdough! Beer!
All this from a branch on the tree of life, we estimate that only 10 percent is described. Yet what we do know contains a universe of inspiration for the science-fiction writer: ancient survivors living off radioactivity; decomposers who enjoy plastic; predators that actively hunt their prey with microscopic lassos. If you want a real fungal apocalypse to keep you awake at night, how about the devastating impact climate change will have by increasing fungal destruction of crops?
But these extraordinary creative avenues are largely ignored—and our fictional horizons are all the narrower for it. the dependence on Cordyceps terror helps maintain the reduction of a kaleidoscope of diversity to a narrative trope. So I’m asking the writers out there: watch the mold! The Kingdom of Weird surrounds you and is ready to be your muse.
Nick Crumpton works at the Natural History Museum, London, and is a children’s author
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