Someone inhales mold spores. It feels weird. They could take a bit of a bite. Maybe a little dead. And then… POP! Something terrible happens and the horror spreads.
Such is the fate of many in Cold storagea new movie in which a trio of unlikely heroes try to save the world from the apocalypse. Their enemy? And mutated Cordyceps a fungus that, due to some cowardly solar radiation, now infects warm-blooded animals rather than its usual prey. But haven’t we seen it before?
Cordyceps they exist, and many of them have indeed adapted to the spectacular cinematic form of parasitism: spores invade the body of an unfortunate invertebrate; the fungus grows, consuming the insides of its host while penetrating its nervous system and muscles; the host’s behavior changes, perhaps seeking platforms for optimal spore dispersal, until finally its fungus-strewn corpse sprouts tendrils, releasing hundreds of thousands of spores into the air, where the whole terrifying dance begins again.
Because Cordyceps lacking the ability to survive in the greenhouse that are mammalian bodies, it is incredibly unlikely that one could ever transfer its attention to humans. But the nightmare persists. It powered it Girl With All Giftsunleashing the zombie apocalypse in theaters in 2016. HBO’s second season last year The last of us they continued to use the same bioterror as the antagonists. Radio drama in November Scanty they found a well-known human-transforming mushroom in rural Wales. And now even more.
This obsession Cordyceps misrepresents the mushroom kingdom. With only a few hundred species, they make up a vanishingly small fraction of the dizzying diversity of fungi, and even though I grant there is a British National Collection of Pathogenic Fungi that contains over 4,500″potentially deadly fungi”, there is much more to celebrate than to fear about mushrooms.
Let’s start with superlatives. Mushrooms are the largest: one individual Armillaria ostoyae in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest, at nearly 10 square kilometers of underground filaments, it is the largest known organism on Earth. Fungi are the oldest ecosystem engineers: research last year he proposed 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: split gill mushroom (Schizophyllum commune) relies on more than 23,000 “mating types” (similar sexes) to guarantee successful mating.
We could list the ways in which fungi benefit all life, from their irrepressible 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 might consider what our species has to thank them for: penicillin, immunosuppressants, anticoagulants, and psilocybin compounds for the treatment of depression. Leaven! Beer!
All of this from a branch on the tree of life, we estimate, is only 10 percent described. Yet what we do know contains a universe of inspiration for a science fiction writer: ancient survivors who feed on radioactivity; decomposers that feast on plastic; predators that actively hunt their prey with microscopic lassos. If you don’t want to be kept up at night by a veritable fungal apocalypse, how about the devastating impact climate change will have by promoting fungal crop destruction?
But these extraordinary creative avenues are largely ignored—and our fictional horizons are narrowed all the more. Reliance on Cordyceps terror helps maintain the reduction of a kaleidoscope of diversity to a narrative trope. So please writers out there: look, mold! A kingdom of wonder surrounds you and is ready to become your muse.
Nick Crumpton works at the Natural History Museum in London and is a children’s author
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