HBO recently premiered ‘The Last of Us,’ a show inspired by the video game of the same name dealing with a zombie apocalypse.
The show’s premise finds characters Joel and Ellie trying to survive while cordyceps that can alter humans and turn them into zombies run rampant. While the show is fiction, cordyceps are real parasites. According to New York Botanical Garden parasitic fungi expert Joao Araujo, cordyceps can move with a hostile takeover of insects in a nearby environment. It was noted that out of the 600 types of ophiocordyceps, only 35 could turn their hosts into zombies.
