Wait, Scotland has a rainforest? That’s right, there’s a temperate rainforest on the West Coast of Scotland, boasting a unique habitat and ecosystem. A spider fungus resembling candyfloss has officially been found in said temperate rainforest, and it’s the same one as from the show ‘The Last Of Us’. So, let’s have a look if we should start preparing for a zombie apocalypse anytime soon.
A Gibellula fungus, from the same family as the Cordyceps fungus from the famous show, was found by amateur naturalist Ben Mitchell, as part of The West Cowal Habitat Restoration Project. The fungus attacks its host through erupting spores, consuming spiders from the inside out and only leaving the exoskeleton behind.
Ben Mitchell told The Herald: “The entire thing was covered in just this candy floss-shaped structure, but there were four toes sticking out in the front that were very spider-shaped. The fruiting body, I saw, was producing a terrifying amount of spores. It was huge. They were dripping off it.”
He had been walking back to his car when a gust of wind blew the leaf over on a foxglove and he spotted the structure stuck to it. “I couldn’t see it very clearly, so I picked a leaf and rolled it up and took it home for a closer look, and when I did, I saw that it was obviously a kind of Cordyceps-like fungus.”
What could the discovery mean for Scotland?
Findings of these kinds of fungus are extremely rare in Scotland, and only ten have been discovered in the last seventy years. So, there’s no need to panic just yet! So far, it is only worth celebrating the magnificent biodiversity of Scotland’s rainforests, which are intertwined with mosses, lichens and liverworts, all in perfect harmony with the trees. And not to mention the rare plants and animals!
Could the fungus infect humans?
In short, no. Scientists claim the Cordyceps fungus cannot take over a human, and has been a figment of imagination for ‘The Last Of Us’, based on infected zombie-like insects in nature.
Ben Mitchell further commented on the matter: “I suppose humans have this cult of the individual. We think of human beings as being separate things both from each other and the rest of the universe. And so we do tend to get very disturbed by anything which involves individuals not being discrete.”