Meet the real zombifying fungus behind the fictional <em>Last of Us</em> outbreak
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Well, there are other mind-altering parasites that affect mammals.
Donald Trump would be another example.
Donald Trump would be another example.
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That planet earth episode is where I first learned of these fungi.. and ever since they have scared the hell out of me.
So this is good, especially in combo with the other fungus article this week.
So this is good, especially in combo with the other fungus article this week.
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Nature... brutally efficient.
Fascinating how this sort of fungus evolved - not enough to just exploit the host for growth medium, no it needs to control the host to ensure optimal growth and survival.
Fascinating how this sort of fungus evolved - not enough to just exploit the host for growth medium, no it needs to control the host to ensure optimal growth and survival.
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I might be misremembering but in Netflix's Fantastic Fungi they had a pretty wild demonstration. Some ant colonies have guards that will escort infected ants returning to the colony to a mass grave type pit. The guards will decapitate the infected worker, and then kill themselves to avoid contaminating the hive. But what is wild is I thought they claimed that cordyceps is somehow advanced enough in certain situations to send a 'decoy' infected ant to remove the guards. Then follow up infected ants will enter the colony because the guards and now dead and infect the queen and colony.
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Well, I wasn't expecting this article to end with the sentence "We are fucked if we don't get our act together and solve climate change."
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I loved the game and I like the show a lot so far. some of the best stories need just enough legitimacy to keep me pretty much fully engaged. And this fungus jumping to humans and just doing what it does is pretty great at locking my attention in.
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I would posit that Marjorie Taylor Greene's election to the house suggests that some sort of parasitic organism, be it fungal or otherwise, already exists in humans.
Watch her sneak in legislation to ban certain kinds of fungicides as part of a pro-Russia funding package. It will receive widespread support among the infected.
Watch her sneak in legislation to ban certain kinds of fungicides as part of a pro-Russia funding package. It will receive widespread support among the infected.
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For another version see “The Girl With All The Gifts”. Both the movie and the novel.
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Scotland is part of the United Kingdom of Britain & Nth. Ireland, so yes, he is still British (even though many Scotts would prefer not to be).
The first episode was excellent, equally terrifying and awesome! I have a PS4Pro but never played the game (married with kids now so hard to dedicate the time) but the show has definitely made me interested.
Between all the fungi, bacteria, viruses and other assorted hostiles out there, you really have to hand it to our immune systems that by and large, keep them at bay for so long. Would be an 'interesting' life though if we ever encounter such a fungi for real...
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Wait, what exactly is wrong? the premise is that the fungi adapt to higher temperatures and mammal hosts become possible . . . but then Hughes says this is wrong because the fungus must adapt to higher temperatures?
i must be missing something, that's exactly what the premise of the show lays out.
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Worked with an infectious disease specialist who always rambled on about when fungus decided it was time to come for us, we would be doomed as a species.
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As I have said a few times now... we only exist on the good graces of Fungi. It one adversary that kinda scares me.
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I think the idea is (somewhat pedantically) that the fungus is adapted to certain environments for certain phases of its life. The phase spent inside the host are adapted to the temperature of that host. The temperature of the host is not tightly related to the temperature of the environment. So, global temps go up 2 degrees, the average human temperature stays the same. Ants also have a normal body temperature range, just not regulated the same way as humans. So no adaptation due to climate change, because climate change doesn't necessarily mean change in average body temperature.
Interestingly enough, though, there is some evidence that the average human temperature has been going DOWN. Sleep tight!
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The show jumped the shark with the mouth tentacles. They don’t seem to move like fast-growing mushrooms and there isn’t much of a mushroom analog to that organ. Kinda disappointing. Seems like they’re going to ignore the airborn spore angle (I think the spores were even omitted from the opening in favor of slime-mold mycelial nets).
How did the old woman get infected in episode one if not by airborne spores? And everyone else, starting to express all at once? Why would the cordyceps zombie go down to the subway to “fruit” if it wasn’t going to also shed spores?
This seems like a dumbass alteration whose only conceivable excuse is if there will be a story reveal about it later on.
Sorry to get all pissed off about a made up zombie virus but this is about as internally inconsistent (so far) as Amber’s characterization in the Invincible animated series, like two versions of a script, one with spores and one without, swapped sections at random and that was the shooting script.
How did the old woman get infected in episode one if not by airborne spores? And everyone else, starting to express all at once? Why would the cordyceps zombie go down to the subway to “fruit” if it wasn’t going to also shed spores?
This seems like a dumbass alteration whose only conceivable excuse is if there will be a story reveal about it later on.
Sorry to get all pissed off about a made up zombie virus but this is about as internally inconsistent (so far) as Amber’s characterization in the Invincible animated series, like two versions of a script, one with spores and one without, swapped sections at random and that was the shooting script.
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The show was misstating the science to simplify an implication about global warming.
In the 60s this is implied to not be on everyone’s radar, and the science is since the earth’s ambient temperature is lower, there’s no global evolutionary imperative for fungus to evolve to thrive at human temperatures. But what if the ambient temperature increased just enough to make that jump possible…
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I remember watching Planet Earth back when it came out and tripping out at the zombie ants. I had no idea the fungus would end up in one of my favorite video game series.
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Is his name Smith question-mark or Smith glottal-stop? That's a damn hard thing to google, and the paper isn't entirely consistent - a glottal stop is a question mark without the dot under it.
In either case, it's pretty weird.
In either case, it's pretty weird.
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Ambient temperature would need to jump by quite a lot though for that to happen. 2 to 4 degrees C isn't going to cut it.
The problem we're seeing at the moment though is the average human body temperature has been going down slowly over the years for a variety of reasons allowing fungi that used to die of the heat to survive.
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Are we sure this isn't a Beth Mole article, and Cordyceps hasn't altered the minds of the editors to make them say it's a Jennifer Ouellette article??
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I don’t imagine they would be very successful even if they could survive in our bodies, at least as spores. Fungi are finicky and fragile, and our internal biome would probably prevent spores getting a foothold, regardless of temperature. And humans with lower temperatures aren’t a significant increase in available habitation for something that can grow on grains and wood, so I don’t know that we would ever play a significant role in the evolution of an entire species.
You kinda have to assume a lot of the exceptional qualities in TLOU cordyceps has something to do with its metabolism finding new ways to use the higher temperature it can tolerate. Grow faster, move faster, those weird mouth tentacles that move so quickly you can see them moving without a stop motion camera…
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Contaminated food supply, in this case infected grain. Remember the muffins the neighbor (her son?) offered Joel and Sarah. They even lingered with a shot of her with pieces of muffin dangling from her mouth.
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The games include substantial risk from concentrations of airborne spores, but they've dropped that angle for the TV show. The games have several sections where the protagonists (except Ellie) have to wear gasmasks in order to avoid infection, such as when travelling through cramped and dark areas underground where hosts like to hang out, making the game even more claustrophobic and frightening. Having the actors mask up for extended periods, and muffling voices and hiding expressions etc was likely deemed detrimental to being able to film it - and not being needed to invoke the appropriate atmosphere - hence dropping spores being substantially airborne as a plot point.
In the game, the cause of the initial widespread infection was due to spores in multiple cereal-based foods - the contaminated cereal coming from South America IIRC. It took weeks before symptoms started, and possibly had to have sufficient exposure to the spores to get past the gut defences.
Ergot is a real-world fungus that can contaminate cereals during growing, leading to dangerous levels of alkaloids, and caused real issues if it was widespread in say a whole town's grain silos. It's screened for today, of course, and mainly is a risk for livestock feed.
Going back to the mutated cordyceps, when hosts did start to 'turn', it had already spread worldwide. Subsequent infections were mostly from hosts biting the uninfected and dumping loads of active fungus into their body right away, so they would show symptoms usually within hours, 2 days at most, leading to those who were initially infected eventually becoming hyper-aggressive and infecting many more once they 'turn', leading to cascading outbreaks particularly in cities. Without any available treatment, small clusters would have rapidly grown, and people fleeing the area would just spread it to new areas.
I believe they're going to keep the spores-spread-by-contaminated-food angle to explain the widespread start of the disaster, rise of FEDRA and quarantine zones etc from an article elsewhere, but the mouth stalks are going to basically be the reason for fast infection when bitten. I don't think it was needed personally, and it looked a bit weird but eh. They also look to be keeping that the longer the host survives, the more mutated it becomes as more and more of their body is replaced; such as the clickers, where fungal growth overtakes the face and head as in the article image, so they have to use echolocation to find new hosts, but are also very strong and tough as hell. The sound of a clicker approaching always scared the shit out of me in the first game!
But eventually, the host dies and we saw the end stage of that in episode 1, just without airborne spores being a major threat from it. It's the ones still moving you've mostly got to worry about. Plus, as in the game, the greatest monsters aren't the cordyceps-driven hosts anyway...
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Apple fanboy 101
Ars Tribunus Militum
The sentence about natural selection is wrong. Ellie didn’t develop her immunity through natural selection. Natural selection would be what makes her immunity dominant, but it doesn’t make mutations appear.
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The article seems to conflate a beneficial mutation with evolution. Given the time scale, Ellie’s immunity is unlikely the result of evolution by natural selection. Her immunity is likely just an accident of genetics. Her greater likelihood of surviving to pass the immunity to children would be an example of evolution by natural selection.
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You are correct of course - but that’s just how we talk about “natural selection” in everyday language - it’s easier to say it creates mutations rather than go into the whole process. Also, the game and the show so far doesn’t touch on it, but it would surely be very risky and problematic to bring children into the infection plagued world, or rather keeping them alive and infection-free - so natural selection would kick in very early.
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Certainly we’re starting to see new and more resistant fungal infections popping up in patients admitted to Intensive Care Units in the UK; they’re an absolute nightmare to clear and are often lethal. In these patients it’s because they’re immunosuppressives by whatever pathology or treatment they have on the ICU but it’s a genuine worry if they start to become more widespread throughout the hospital and community.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
The human body maintains a temperature of 37 degrees celcius. A fungus being able to survive 25-30 degrees rather than 20 degrees won't do much if the very act of trying to infect the human body kills the fungus anyway.
By the time global warming shakes out a cordyceps variant able to threaten us by pressuring that fungus into evolving heat tolerance the heat levels will already be lethal for humans.
A fungal parasite adapting to mammalian hosts is certainly possible - but the selection pressure won't come from global warming. If I had to name a few pandemics likely to flourish courtesy of the planet becoming warmer it would be, well, every last parasite and illness requiring a warmer climate to spread.
Myiasis, Onchocerciasis, Dengue, Malaria....all that good old nightmare fuel.
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One thing not talked about. Ants don’t have a complex immune system. We do. In fact, there is an antibody in you for every possible protein needed to counter a pathogen. Our immune system is adaptive. Ants are not.
Our immune system is a crazy aggressive army, and although not perfect it ain't a great place for a pathogen to be. For the most part our immune system kicks ass all day long.
The book “immune”
Explains this nicely
Our immune system is a crazy aggressive army, and although not perfect it ain't a great place for a pathogen to be. For the most part our immune system kicks ass all day long.
The book “immune”
Explains this nicely
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My understanding is it is more that we’ve finally decided the original study from the 1800s of average body temperature actually didn’t properly calculate average resting body temp. And it depends on make or female too IIRC.I think the idea is (somewhat pedantically) that the fungus is adapted to certain environments for certain phases of its life. The phase spent inside the host are adapted to the temperature of that host. The temperature of the host is not tightly related to the temperature of the environment. So, global temps go up 2 degrees, the average human temperature stays the same. Ants also have a normal body temperature range, just not regulated the same way as humans. So no adaptation due to climate change, because climate change doesn't necessarily mean change in average body temperature.
Interestingly enough, though, there is some evidence that the average human temperature has been going DOWN. Sleep tight!
For instance my average resting body temp is about 97.6F. My teen sons it is about 97.8F. My wife and 10yr old daughter are about 98.2F.
It certainly varies throughout the day with first wake up temp close to a degree less.
That’s how I know I am fighting something when my body temp is high 98F range if I haven’t been recently exercising, even if “99.5F is considered a fever”. Not for me it’s not. 99F would for sure be a fever.
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It didn't just jump, it instantly adapted to completely different biology. Magical fungus.
Even zombification of insects sounds like a far fetched theory designed to look cooler than it is. A fungal infection slowly kills insects, behavior of victims changes in various unpredictable ways. Repeat it over hundreds of millions of years, eventually fungus mutations that cause somewhat beneficial for fungus behavior of the host may emerge and become dominant. There is no intent and no magic, just natural selection. It works, but extremely slowly.
Emergence of similar mutations to "control" human organism would also take millions of years after the jump. That is, if humans completely ignored fungal infections and didn't try to stop or cure them. Humans vastly limited effects of natural selection thousands of years ago, it is true now more than ever.
That's what I am talking about. Somehow each of >400 species chosen exactly one victim. They don't jump even to other insect species even though there are over a million of them. Or, maybe they did millions of years ago and evolved to perfectly fit their victims after.
Also, why people didn't just shoot the zombies? In this scenario they are just slightly more dangerous than rabid dogs. Ok, the initial outbreak would be messy, but mopping it up would take months, not decades.
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