Scientists Reveal Mysteries About Real-Life “Zombie” Fungi That Inspired The Last of Us

Zombies can be identified by the fungus that sprouts from their bodies: a tangle of sharp spikes, a miniature garden of mushroom-like fruiting bodies.

These fungal parasites act like puppeteers, commanding and positioning zombies to infect entire communities.

It’s the premise of “The Last of Us,” a series of video games and now an HBO show, which splits parent company Warner Bros.

Scientists consulted by CNN reveal that this is a scene that happens in real life every day all over the world.

Are zombie fungi real?

The creators of “The Last of Us” said they were inspired by a sequence from the BBC’s “Planet Earth” documentary series, which shows an ant infected with a fungus that hijacks its brain, forcing it to climb a tree and hang up above the forest floor. There, the fungus digests the ant’s body from the inside out and releases a shower of spores to create more zombies.

When “Planet Earth” was released in 2006, the zombie ant fungus was believed to be part of the group Cordyceps but genetic studies have since placed it in another group of insect-parasitic fungi, Ophiocordyceps .

There are over 100 known species of Ophiocordyceps that infect a wide variety of insects, including butterflies, moths and beetles, and at least 35 that perform “mind control” on their hosts.

“We only know of 35, but our estimates go to more than 600 species, waiting to be described,” said João Araújo, assistant curator of mycology at the Institute of Systematic Botany at the New York Botanical Garden.

Can fungi infect and control humans?

Although zombie fungi are real and numerous, Araújo et al are not worried about the possibility of Ophiocordyceps infect people .

“They are super species-specific,” said Charissa de Bekker, an assistant professor in the department of biology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Each of the known species of Ophiocordyceps attacks a particular insect, and this specificity is a double-edged sword. “They have very refined machinery for interacting with their hosts and doing really interesting things like changing behavior, but they can’t even jump from one species to another,” much less to an organism as distant as a human being, Charissa explained.

Human immunity to Ophiocordyceps is evident in how many interactions with the fungi have so far proved harmless. People in parts of Asia use a type (Ophiocordyceps sinensis) in traditional medicines, and scientists studying the fungi were not infected.

“I breathe in Ophiocordyceps spores all the time because I work with them up close,” said Araújo, who remains a non-zombie.

While we may be safe from Ophiocordyceps, David Hughes, one of the scientists who consulted on the video game, said there’s a lesson to be learned from “The Last of Us,” which is essentially a story about existential threats to humanity.

“The biggest global threat is climate change,” said Hughes, who has shifted his research focus away from zombie ants and is now an expert in Global Food Security at Pennsylvania State University.

Fungal disease and climate change

“The Last of Us” raises the question that climate change might spur fungal adaptations to warmer habitats. It is the case of the infectious fungus candida auris discovered in 2009 and since then found in over 30 countries.

“In a warming world, fungi also need to adapt to a warmer climate,” said Charissa.

And you can imagine then, if their ideal growing temperatures become higher and closer to our body temperatures, it may be more likely that in the future we will have more fungal infections in humans than we see now.

Charissa de Bekker, professor in the department of biology at the University of Utrecht

A widespread fungal pandemic is unlikely based on how fungal infections tend to spread in humans, according to Dimitrios Kontoyiannis, deputy chief of the division of internal medicine at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and leader of its Center for Research in Medical Mycology.

However, Kontoyiannis noted that fungal diseases are more difficult to treat than bacterial infections because fungi, like humans, are made of eukaryotic cells and share the same basic cellular structures. That makes it very difficult to find a treatment “that targets the fungus and not the humans,” he said.

A warmer future with more fungal infections would especially put people with weakened immune systems at risk, Kontoyiannis added.

Hughes said he hopes people who engage with “The Last of Us” will see the parallels to the real-life challenges facing our world, including climate change and the new health threats that will accompany it.

“The whole thing is a real-time study of what we pay attention to and what we act on,” he said.