Bringing scientific light onto a quiet class of organisms, HBO’s “The Last of Us” warned us of an impending epidemic by the apocalyptic fungus: Cordyceps. Zombies have been explained to us by the media as lingering electrical impulses in the brainstem (The Walking Dead), a virus that takes over and consumes the human body (World War Z), and most recently: mushrooms. 

In the original 2013 action-adventure game, “The Last of Us” creatively avoided using the term zombie, opting for the term infected. It refers to a species of fungus, cordyceps, that infect a hosts’ brain and control them. When idle, infected lie still and allow the cordyceps to grow from them in an attempt to connect to other cordyceps. 

“They’re connected, more than you know. The fungus also grows underground, long fibers, like wires, some stretching over a mile. You step on a patch of Cordyceps in one place and you can wake a dozen infected from somewhere else,” Tess, a character in the story, explains to the protagonists. 

Cordyceps have become a very popular topic due to people seeing it manifest in the media, then discovering its roots in our reality. This mushroom disease used in an early 2010s action-adventure game is not made up, but based on a real fungus making its way into scientific study. 

Fungus, classified apart from both plants and animals, are still a scientific conundrum. They are living things, yes, but do not fall under the specific processes that plants use, like photosynthesis to gain energy. In fact, fungi are known as decomposers, and feed and breakdown dead organic matter.

In the context of DNA, fungi share more similarities with humans than they do other plants or animals. 

Cordyceps, a type of fungus, is only capable of infecting insects, most commonly ants. This is because ants and other insects have a very low body temperature and Cordyceps can only strain on things that have a lower temp of 34.5 degrees celsius, which converts to 94.1༠ Fahrenheit. Average body temperature for the human body is 98.6༠ Fahrenheit. 

So we should be safe, right? 

In response to the adaptation and evolution of cordyceps, Dr. Neuman posed the question, “What if, for instance, the world were to get slightly warmer?” 

Would the heat wipe out the organisms that aren’t built for the warm climate in one fell swoop? Or would the pattern of evolution allow cordyceps to adapt and evolve along with the warming of the Earth? 

That’s where the fear lies. As the Earth’s atmosphere warms as a result of emissions and human activity, other living things must adapt to our actions. Cordyceps are no exception. 

This has left viewers speechless and has left them wondering: if global warming is getting worse, can this fungi make its way and take control of our minds like it does in the show?

Ilan Shwartz, doctor of infectious disease at Duke University, said “It’s not outlandish, the argument that global warming has increased the thermal tolerance of a fungus. It hasn’t been proven. It’s a hypothesis, and it’s happening on a fairly slow scale. But it is possible.”

In other words, it’s not impossible. There’s no recorded precedent for science to look at right now, but a growing study could possibly be the evolution of fungus through the changing warmer and colder periods of Earth’s nearly 5 billion years of existence. 

Yale School Of Medicine assures us that there is no need for doomsday-prepping or sanitizer-stocking. Currently, there is only one type of known fungus that can both a) survive higher temperatures and b) spread from human to human, but is relatively harmless for those who are already healthy: Candida auris (C. auris).

Yet for those who are immunocompromised, C. auris can be deadly. With a small subset of the population at risk, drug companies are hesitant to spend the resources on the research and development of antifungals against diseases like this. 

Scott Roberts, MD at Yale School of Medicine, says there’s a sentiment of gratitude in the infectious disease circles towards media like “The Last of Us”, bringing awareness to fungal-type illness.