Consider the Fungus: Mycologists Talk the Realities of ‘The Last of Us’ - The Ringer

One proclaims—to laughter, and then to a chill as the audience comprehends what he’s saying—that he fears neither viruses nor bacteria, but fungi, which alone could have the power to create “billions of puppets with poisoned minds permanently fixed on one unifying goal: to spread the infection to every last human alive by any means necessary.”

Called in to a government facility in Jakarta to consult on the corpse of one of the first infected victims, a mycology professor from the University of Indonesia (a stirring cameo by Christine Hakim) slowly discerns the threat posed by the newly emerged, human-hosted ophiocordyceps fungus.

To nurse my nascent mycophobia, I turned to Jonathan Cale, an assistant professor at the University of Northern British Columbia who studies fungus-tree interactions in forests, and Matthew Kasson, an assistant professor of mycology at West Virginia University whose work has focused on Massospora cicadina, a parasitic fungus that—gulp—infects cicadas, alters their behavior to spread itself, and eventually seals their doom.

The opening scene of The Last of Us features the second epidemiologist attempting to wave off the first’s concerns about a fungal pandemic by reminding his colleague that fungus can’t survive in temperatures above 94 degrees—leaving us toasty humans safe from their spongy clutches.

A cordyceps infection will indeed turn an ant into the fungus’s puppet, prompting it to climb to a high location, affix itself to a leaf or twig, and die.

It’s just that people are becoming more aware of them because maybe a larger portion of the population will be immunocompromised due to things like COVID-19 and other viruses that may predispose us to subsequent invasion by these generally pervasive fungi.”