Weird and wonderful fungi should be so much more than sci-fi villains

Someone inhales fungal spores. They feel strange. They might get a little biting. Maybe a little dead. And then… POP! Something horrible happens and the horror spreads.

This is the fate of many people Cold storagea new film in which a trio of unlikely heroes attempt to save the world from the apocalypse. Their enemy? A transferee Cordyceps fungus which, due to vile solar radiation, now infects warm-blooded animals rather than their usual prey. But haven’t we seen this before?

Cordyceps exist, and many of them have indeed adapted to a spectacularly cinematic form of parasitism: spores invade the body of an unlucky invertebrate; the fungus grows, devouring its host’s interior while infiltrating its nervous system and muscles; the host’s behavior changes, perhaps seeking out platforms for optimal spore dispersal until, finally, its fungus-riddled corpse sprouts tendril-like growths, releasing hundreds of thousands of spores into the air, after which the whole dance of death begins again.

Because Cordyceps Lacking the ability to survive in the greenhouses of mammalian bodies, it is incredibly unlikely that anyone will ever be able to translate their focus to humans. But the nightmare persists. This fueled The girl with all the giftstriggering a zombie apocalypse in cinemas in 2016. Last year, HBO’s second series The last of us continued to use the same bioterror as an antagonist. In November, radio fiction Spores discovered a familiar fungus transforming humans in rural Wales. And now, even more.

This obsession with Cordyceps distorts the mushroom kingdom. With only a few hundred species, they represent only a tiny fraction of the dizzying diversity of fungi, and while I accept that there is a UK National Collection of Pathogenic Fungi housing over 4,500 ‘life-threatening fungi’, there is much more to celebrate about fungi than to fear.

Let’s start with the superlatives. The mushrooms are the largest: a single individual of Armillaria ostoyae in the Malheur National Forest, Oregon, is, with nearly 10 square kilometers of underground fiber, the largest known organism on Earth. Fungi are the oldest ecosystem engineers: research last year suggested that fungi arrived on earth hundreds of millions of years before modern land plants, helping to build the first soils. Mushrooms are the most sexually flexible: the split-gill mushroom (Schizophyllum commune) relies on more than 23,000 “mating types” (similar to sexes) to ensure mating success.

We could list the ways in which fungi benefit all life, from overwhelmingly eliminating dead organic matter that would otherwise choke the planet, to their symbiosis with 90% of plants, releasing essential nutrients and keeping the Earth green. Or we might consider what our own species has them to thank: penicillin, immunosuppressants, blood thinners, and psilocybin compounds to treat depression. Leaven! Beer!

All of this coming from one branch of the tree of life, we estimate is only 10 percent described. Yet what we do know contains a universe of inspiration for the science fiction author: ancient survivors who feed on radioactivity; decomposers who feast on plastic; predators that actively hunt their prey with microscopic lassos. If you want a full-blown fungal apocalypse to keep you up at night, how about the devastating impact climate change will have by increasing fungal destruction of crops?

But these extraordinary creative avenues are largely ignored – and our fictional horizons are even more restricted. The dependence on Cordyceps terror helps perpetuate the reduction of a kaleidoscope of diversity to a narrative trope. So, I implore writers: this is the mold! The realm of the bizarre surrounds you and is ready to be your muse.

Nick Crumpton works at the Natural History Museum in London and is a children’s author