(CNN) — The zombies are identifiable by the fungi bursting from their bodies: a thicket of spiky tendrils, a miniature garden of mushroom-like fruiting bodies. These fungal parasites act as puppeteers, commanding, and positioning the zombies to infect entire communities.
It’s the premise of “The Last of Us,” a video game series and now a show on HBO, which shares parent company Warner Bros. Discovery with CNN, but it’s also a scene that plays out in real life every day around the world.
Are zombie fungi real?
The creators of “The Last of Us” have said they were inspired by a sequence in BBC’s “Planet Earth” documentary series depicting an ant infected with a fungus that hijacks its brain, forcing it to climb a tree and dangle above the forest floor. There, the fungus digests the ant’s body from the inside out and unleashes a shower of spores to create more zombies.
When “Planet Earth” came out in 2006, the zombie ant fungus was believed to be part of the group Cordyceps, but genetic studies have since placed it in another insect-parasitizing fungus group, Ophiocordyceps.
There are well over 100 known Ophiocordyceps species 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 35, but our estimates range to more than 600 species, waiting to be described,” said João Araújo, an assistant curator of mycology at the Institute of Systematic Botany of the New York Botanical Garden.
Can fungi infect and control humans?
While zombie fungi are real and numerous, Araújo and others aren’t worried about Ophiocordyceps infecting people.
“They’re super species-specific,” said Charissa de Bekker, an assistant professor in the biology department at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
Each of the known Ophiocordyceps species preys upon a particular insect, and that specificity is a double-edged sword. “They have very refined machinery to interact with their hosts…
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