A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1341 entries
cordyceps
Cordyceps is a group of fungi that grow in insects. The spore germinates on a host, the fungus consumes it from the inside, and then a club-shaped fruiting body pushes out through the body wall and releases spores. Some species alter the host’s behavior first, steering an ant to a leaf at a particular height and humidity and making it lock its jaws onto the vein before it dies, which puts the spores exactly where they need to be.
Etymology
The name is Latin and Greek for club-head, from the shape of the fruiting body that emerges. The best-known species has a much older name than its scientific one: In Tibetan, it is yartsa gunbu, summer grass winter worm, because it looks like a caterpillar in the cold months and a blade of grass on the high pasture in the warm ones. That name is a piece of field observation of the whole life cycle, recorded centuries before anyone had a microscope.
Notes
Ophiocordyceps sinensis, the caterpillar fungus of the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau, is among the most valuable biological products in the world by weight, and its collection is the main summer income for many households across the plateau. The ant-steering species were described by Alfred Russel Wallace in the 1850s and have been studied intensively since.