![]() A mushroom then pops out of the back of that little ant’s head, and spores are then dispersed over the colony. ![]() The Cordyceps causes the ant to climb an area of a tree that is roughly 10” off the ground, clamp onto a leaf with its jaw, and die. It takes time for the fungus to colonize its host, and this makes for a particularly nefarious parasitic infection here.īut if we return to the ant kingdom once more, we find that once this infection has reached a critical threshold, the behavior of the ant changes. In The Last of Us, this means that somebody can “turn” in the midst of a room full of their friends and family without anybody being any the wiser that they’ve been infected throughout this entire time. It gradually colonizes more and more of its host without causing any signs or symptoms that anybody else can tell until it’s too late. However, for reasons we still don’t understand, Cordyceps doesn’t seem to raise any alarms within the colony. This alone is strange as ants have a very strict quarantine policy in place.Īnytime that an ant is sick, it is rapidly kicked out of the colony, much like a leper. This happens during the incubation period of the infection, a time during which the ant goes about its daily business as if life is normal. When this strain of Cordyceps infects an ant, it soon colonizes its host, building a system of fungal tubes around the ant's muscles throughout its entire body. This strain only infects ants, and ants being in a highly structured social society akin to human beings, I think there are some interesting things that we can derive from this and apply to The Last of Us. This is my personal favorite Cordyceps fungi for the simple reason that it’s so fascinating. ![]() Take Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, for example. ![]() ( Image courtesy of Ian Suzuki at Wikimedia Commons.) ![]()
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