The Fungus That Runs An Economy | Keystone

A fungus takes over an ant's brain, marches it to a specific leaf, kills it, and grows a stalk out of its head. That is not the strange part. The strange part is that a cousin of this fungus sells for twenty thousand dollars a pound, and entire communities on the Tibetan Plateau survive on digging it up every spring. Kaito explains how seven hundred and fifty species of Cordyceps all parasitize insects, why a caterpillar fungus from the Tibetan Plateau became the most expensive biological product on Earth, and what happens when overharvesting and climate change collapse the meadow. → Why the zombie ant fungus has the best opening in all of biology → How yartsa gunbu runs an eleven billion dollar industry from a caterpillar's head → Why Tibetan herder families depend on one spring harvest for up to ninety percent of their income → The regulatory failure that addresses consumer arsenic but not harvest collapse → What provisioning services are and why the term matters SOURCES: Winkler (2009), Caterpillar Fungus (Ophiocordyceps sinensis) Production and Sustainability on the Tibetan Plateau Shrestha & Bawa (2014), Impact of Climate Change on Himalayan Caterpillar Fungus and Livelihoods Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Research Station harvest yield monitoring data 🔔 Subscribe for more ecosystem services: every species we cover answers what does this do for us? #cordyceps #ecosystemservices #provisioning #ecology #nature #science #yarsagunbu #fungi #tibet #zombieant Kaito also hosts Catalyst, a chemistry channel.    / @catalyst-chemicalsubstances   Episodes on the molecules and materials that built the modern world.