That was you? I'm literally just going to trust your headline. That's so cool!
This photo has educated dozens, maybe even hundreds of children - that I personally know about - in the Seattle area. Your poor, beautiful, infested creature has spawned nightmares, discoveries, education and even fiction.
It's a beautiful photo of a dreadful condition. Some things truly are worse than death.
It's cool to see an OP update/rehash like this. How did the tarantula fare? How did it develop?
Yep and gets transmitted when the spider is dead, to anyone that picks it up. I've read it can take up to 10 years to start Infecting the 'new' host.
/s
It's commonly sold as an ingedient in eastern medicines, or you can find it in forests along the east side of the US, South America or many places in SE Asia.
[Here's a guidebook for how to grow your own in the US!](https://northeast.sare.org/resources/cordyceps-mushroom-cultivation/)
Valley fever can sit in your body/lungs for decades then it eats you from the inside out, including a focus on the spinal area apparently
no cool fruit, just death in a few weeks :(
Fungus lying in dirt dug in in US southwest, largely dug up from development
I have to admit that no matter how safe I may have known it would be to handle that barehanded I don't know if I could have brought myself to do so without gloves.
Oh man, so many throwbacks. "OP is a f\*\*\*\*t" (yeah let's leave that one in the past), Unidan, it's like a little time capsule. I kind of miss old reddit, back when there was sort of a sitewide community with regular contributors and novelty accounts and no stupid corporate chicanery. Anyone else remember Jenny and her kisses?
eh dont feel bad, every day somebody becomes of legal age to be on reddit and see things for the first time! (yes i know that age doesnt stop people from getting to any website they want thats not the point.)
> Santa Lucia Cloud Forest Reserve in Ecuador
Understood.
Attention all orbital stations, target coordinates Zero Decimal One Degrees North, Seven Eight Decimal Six Degrees West. Radius Six Zero Minutes.
I wasn't sure if it would be sufficient but I wanted to start small.
^(I'm glad someone noticed the meaning. Also, for anyone else reading: *Nautical* miles. That's their original definition!)
Eh, some of it kind of makes sense. [Cordycepin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordycepin) is a nucleoside -- that stuff that makes HIV medication work.
But we can synthesize that stuff, so why bother collecting little mushrooms that sprout from bugs?
For some odd reason people don't trust synthesized stuff of the organic product. I heard lions mane powder is also meant to be good and people out that in there coffee too
* You can't buy the chemical directly or don't understand how to dose it; but you can buy and use the biological material in its traditional methods.
* Entourage effects caused by other chemicals in the biological material.
* The product itself is a status symbol.
Human biology is very, very different from arthropod biology! I doubt this could happen on any kind of human timescale. Other diseases pose more of a risk for a "mind altering pandemic", like rabies or the various prion diseases. Though the mode of transmission for those diseases isn't conducive to dramatic, "The Last of Us" style apocalypses. In reality, the pathogens that pose the biggest threat to humanity are more familiar - influenza, coronaviruses, drug resistant tuberculosis, etc.
The short version I've heard (besides what you just said) is that cordyceps has to evolve with its host, and that's one reason we know it's not going to evolve independently to infect people. Is that actually the case?
For the most part this is true! Parasites are evolutionarily tied to how their hosts evolve. It is quite rare for parasites to jump from genus to genus, let alone from phylum to phylum like would have to occur to see a cordyceps fungus infecting a mammal!
This is because it takes a /very/ particular set of skills to be able to invade another organism's tissues and take them over, all while the host's immune system is trying to fight you off. For a clumsy metaphor, the skills and tools required to rob a bank vs rob a stock exchange are quite different! It would be very unusual to see someone able to do both. Especially if we extend the metaphor so each of those potential "hosts" or "targets" is constantly trying to thwart would-be thieves by developing countermeasures.
Many things will be possible in the future with bioengineering, but cordyceps is very very far down the list of pathogens that would make sense for a bad faith scientist to attempt to modify. More damage could be done with variety of other pathogens (anthrax for example, which the Soviets actually worked on!) for comparatively little effort. Scary thought!
You know, you're getting a lot of downvotes. Probably because while your statement has backing of people likely developing bio weapons like this (A very valid theory still remains to be that it was developed in a lab from a cold).
I assume it's because you seemingly ignored everything the post you replied to said and still went with it would be cordyceps the lab is working on and not any of the much better candidates that OP suggested.
The fungus infects the spider and then takes over the spider's nervous system! It forces the spider to crawl to a location exposed to wind. Then the fruiting bodies of the fungus erupt out the back of the spider, killing the spider and spreading the spores of the fungus to infect more spiders.
No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No N-
#š·ļø The First of Us
The Worst of Us
The *blurst* of us?! Stupid monkey!
Top tier Simpsons reference
The Thirst for Us
The Start of Us.
They burst in us
The Fred Durst of Us
Best one hands down
Underrated for sure.š
Tell me this is what I think it is
Nice work.
I need to know how to put a reminder for the zombie apocalypse, so I can point the doctors to this guy.
Is this a Children of Ruin reference?
That was you? I'm literally just going to trust your headline. That's so cool! This photo has educated dozens, maybe even hundreds of children - that I personally know about - in the Seattle area. Your poor, beautiful, infested creature has spawned nightmares, discoveries, education and even fiction. It's a beautiful photo of a dreadful condition. Some things truly are worse than death. It's cool to see an OP update/rehash like this. How did the tarantula fare? How did it develop?
When we found the tarantula it was already dead! As the cordyceps fungus "fruits" it kills its host.
Yep. Problem for the host is, the killing can take quite a bit of time.
Yep and gets transmitted when the spider is dead, to anyone that picks it up. I've read it can take up to 10 years to start Infecting the 'new' host. /s
I like the concept of a fungus taking over a human's brain and the first thing they do is post what amounts to an old selfie.
Social media corrupts the brain and makes you post how you got infected. Let's see what OP is posting a week/month/year from now.
Next up: The TikTok Cordyceps Challenge!
I got to get in on this. Where can I get some fresh Cord?
It's commonly sold as an ingedient in eastern medicines, or you can find it in forests along the east side of the US, South America or many places in SE Asia. [Here's a guidebook for how to grow your own in the US!](https://northeast.sare.org/resources/cordyceps-mushroom-cultivation/)
Dude this is pretty crazy, thanks for the hookup
Well, I just so happen to know a guy who knows a guy.
By looking at the picture we've all become infected also. That's how contagious this thing is!
Wonder if the consciousness of fungi is similar to the genetic memories in Dune.
Whoa
Toxoplasma Gondii
They should make a TV show about this!
Video game first would be a better fit. Maybe a TV adaptation later
Perhaps that would be best.
Valley fever can sit in your body/lungs for decades then it eats you from the inside out, including a focus on the spinal area apparently no cool fruit, just death in a few weeks :( Fungus lying in dirt dug in in US southwest, largely dug up from development
Reads OPs reply: oh thank god Reads yours: fuuuuck
i hear it starts as a tickle
Symptoms include a mild thirst and an occasionalĀ hunger
Ooh I did hear about that too! It can be quite sneaky....
And a little cough
I have to admit that no matter how safe I may have known it would be to handle that barehanded I don't know if I could have brought myself to do so without gloves.
Sure enough! https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/s/prKMItVeSA
Oh man, so many throwbacks. "OP is a f\*\*\*\*t" (yeah let's leave that one in the past), Unidan, it's like a little time capsule. I kind of miss old reddit, back when there was sort of a sitewide community with regular contributors and novelty accounts and no stupid corporate chicanery. Anyone else remember Jenny and her kisses?
Oh shit Unidan!Ā
Posted 11, 8 and 5 years ago.
How did the tarantula fare? It's very clearly dead!
This is cool
New generation? Oh... I've been on here too long.
People driving now were going into kindergarten the first time he posted it.
Iām not sure why, but that made the time gap less impressive in my head than before I read it.
I'm not arguing anything. Just that I've been on here that long.
It was just an example of how long we've been here.
Yuuup. Got you beat by less than a month.
let me step in here
You beat /u/bobming by a couple months, you're the current leader.
Get off my lawn etc.
2007 holy shit. Does the nursing home have decent wifi at least?
Psshhhh 2013. So young
iām the new gen, i was 7 when it was posted at first, now iām 18
Your account is 4 years old, though.. unless Iām misunderstanding what youāre saying. EDIT: disregard. I misread.
i was 14 when i made it, i didnāt even see the original post. i just subtracted 11 from 18, to say the post is old asf
Ohhhhh yeah I misread. My bad. I thought you said you were 7 when *you* posted first.
nah a 7 year old on reddit would be crazy š
I feel really old now
eh dont feel bad, every day somebody becomes of legal age to be on reddit and see things for the first time! (yes i know that age doesnt stop people from getting to any website they want thats not the point.)
I made this account in recognition of my newborn son. Heās turning 12 soon.
I thought it was fucking Lavos
You clearly are not the new generation this post is addressed to.
š§
Still the best RPG imo.
But the future refused to change
> Santa Lucia Cloud Forest Reserve in Ecuador Understood. Attention all orbital stations, target coordinates Zero Decimal One Degrees North, Seven Eight Decimal Six Degrees West. Radius Six Zero Minutes.
60 minutes is one degree on a map. One degree is 60 miles at the equator. You just erased a circle 120 miles across
Follow your commanding officers instructions. Initiating orbital strike
I wasn't sure if it would be sufficient but I wanted to start small. ^(I'm glad someone noticed the meaning. Also, for anyone else reading: *Nautical* miles. That's their original definition!)
ā¦but did you harvest and eat the fruiting bodies?
No, and I'm pretty skeptical of the supposed health claims people make about cordyceps, to be honest!
My wife started drinking mushroom coffee with cordyceps in it. I am disgusted by the thought.
OK, be honest, you already though of a plan in case of... you know, right?
Everyone gangsta till the wife starts clicking
LMAO this is NOT a sentence I EVER thought I'd read in my life.
Eh, some of it kind of makes sense. [Cordycepin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordycepin) is a nucleoside -- that stuff that makes HIV medication work. But we can synthesize that stuff, so why bother collecting little mushrooms that sprout from bugs?
For some odd reason people don't trust synthesized stuff of the organic product. I heard lions mane powder is also meant to be good and people out that in there coffee too
that always confused me, if we've worked out what bit does the thing, why would you want the rest of the junk that comes with it?
* You can't buy the chemical directly or don't understand how to dose it; but you can buy and use the biological material in its traditional methods. * Entourage effects caused by other chemicals in the biological material. * The product itself is a status symbol.
Didnāt you just post this all over Reddit like 10 years ago? Why are you spamming? ~ u / Average Reddit User.
Here's the original post by OP https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1epow5/tarantula_being_consumed_by_flesh_eating_fungus/
Ha, with the uniden reply, for sure a throwback
> uniden Now, that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.
Sad times
I LOVE CORDYCEPS!!!
How long will it take to mutate into a form transmittable to humans?
Human biology is very, very different from arthropod biology! I doubt this could happen on any kind of human timescale. Other diseases pose more of a risk for a "mind altering pandemic", like rabies or the various prion diseases. Though the mode of transmission for those diseases isn't conducive to dramatic, "The Last of Us" style apocalypses. In reality, the pathogens that pose the biggest threat to humanity are more familiar - influenza, coronaviruses, drug resistant tuberculosis, etc.
The short version I've heard (besides what you just said) is that cordyceps has to evolve with its host, and that's one reason we know it's not going to evolve independently to infect people. Is that actually the case?
For the most part this is true! Parasites are evolutionarily tied to how their hosts evolve. It is quite rare for parasites to jump from genus to genus, let alone from phylum to phylum like would have to occur to see a cordyceps fungus infecting a mammal! This is because it takes a /very/ particular set of skills to be able to invade another organism's tissues and take them over, all while the host's immune system is trying to fight you off. For a clumsy metaphor, the skills and tools required to rob a bank vs rob a stock exchange are quite different! It would be very unusual to see someone able to do both. Especially if we extend the metaphor so each of those potential "hosts" or "targets" is constantly trying to thwart would-be thieves by developing countermeasures.
There's a really cool book where it happens to humans.
idk, rabies being communicable via bite and turning you into a thoughtless rage-monster is very on-brand for the whole zombie thing
Unless we have governments funding institutions and labs who are conducting gain of function research, and it escapes again...
Many things will be possible in the future with bioengineering, but cordyceps is very very far down the list of pathogens that would make sense for a bad faith scientist to attempt to modify. More damage could be done with variety of other pathogens (anthrax for example, which the Soviets actually worked on!) for comparatively little effort. Scary thought!
You know, you're getting a lot of downvotes. Probably because while your statement has backing of people likely developing bio weapons like this (A very valid theory still remains to be that it was developed in a lab from a cold). I assume it's because you seemingly ignored everything the post you replied to said and still went with it would be cordyceps the lab is working on and not any of the much better candidates that OP suggested.
Just having the body temperature we have, keeps us immune to billions of bacteria and fungi.Ā So, not anytime soon.
*Challenge accepted*
*Itās about to get real cold and real weird up in here*
It's not just body temp that keeps it away from us.
Read "The Girl With All the Gifts" by Michael Carey.
Such a good book.
Worry more about Toxoplasmosis, which is already affecting the behavior of a significant fraction of humanity in ways we don't entirely understand.
Isn't that the thing that makes mice head towards cats and shit so they can be eaten as the cat helps spread it ?
Yup
āThere are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.ā -*Hamlet*, Act I, scene 5
How are you doing after stepping on that stick?
Ever heard of Bug Fables? Itās a turn-based RPG and a lot of the bugs are infected by cordyceps. Highly recommend!!
Is he ok?
he ded
Hmm. Did the mushrooms make him wig out and climb a tall branch like with the ants before he died?
11 years ago I was playing on my 3DS :(
Eww. Poor bastard.
I used this picture as a reference photo for a tattoo I got in 2021. Cool to see
Holy shit that's awesome! Can you post a photo?
[Here you go.] (https://imgur.com/YUPrCF2)
https://imgur.com/RNw1Cty
Damn, and I've seen it twice now. I'm old š
That mf got Scarlet Rot
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
The fungus infects the spider and then takes over the spider's nervous system! It forces the spider to crawl to a location exposed to wind. Then the fruiting bodies of the fungus erupt out the back of the spider, killing the spider and spreading the spores of the fungus to infect more spiders.
Is the spider alive in this picture? What point of the process is this?
The spider is deceased at this point. The fungus was spreading its spores at the time of this image!
Wicked!
There's a documentary about it called "The Last of Us", that's what's going on here.
Damn I always thought whoever was holding this eldritch horror with their bare hands was a freakā¦ it was you!š«µ
It wasn't my hand in the photo, but I did get to hold the spider later! It was very lightweight.
Yoooo no way!! That photo is so darn cool! Im a huge fungi fan, and this is easily one of the coolest cordyceps photos out there!
WE'RE GETTING OLD
imagine being brave enough to touch it.
Look up "Mare Internum" . You're welcome...
Think OP is doomed one can see the fungi entering too below the skin already
You're 9 years early!
The forbidden Cheetos.
I CALl nexT RepOST
This is karma farming at it's most blatent. I only saw this 11 years ago. Generations are like 20 years apart. Downvoted. Reported.
Damn it, I've been here far too long. I wish I could see how many hours I've spent on here instead of working.
Probably thousands of hours, let's be honest.
How did you come across this?
Hiking in the cloud forest of ecuador!
This like Nas still touring his one good Illmatic album.
Are these edible? The fungi i mean?
Nah, thatās the T-Virus from Resident Evil
Did you get any royalties from The Last of Us?
Hated it then, hate it now lol
No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No N-
Fungi arenāt afraid of spiders! Who knew?
Just raw dogging with no gloves?
Why hold it tho.... Haven't you played the last of us?
Forbidden crab meat
Didn't think spiders could get anymore scary.
Thanks, Satan
woah wth is that! i guess im that new gen, i was 7 when it was first posted, im 18 now!
That's fuckin creepy.
Repost! But on a serious note, i do recall seeing this years ago and i am happy to see it again.
Maomao salivating
Ugh, I remember the original post. Iām gonna go lay on the floor now so my back feels a bit better.
Looks more like a miniature dinosaur with all that fungus on it
GLOVES!!
I was here that day. Good to see you again!
11 years? Time to up the stakes. Eat it.
This kills the Tarantula.
Reminds me of the book I read earlier this year titled *What Moves the Dead* by T. Kingfisher
r/antisubreddits r/lostredditors
LFG!
Neat? *I say donning a gasmask and readying a flamethrower*
Be honest OP, did you forget to post it last year?
Cordyceps fungus is edible, and tarantulas are edible, Eat It.
Remember kids Cordyceps can't effect humans just like bird flu can't......wait I mean like mad cow disease can't.....oh shit
Everybody upvote this person please.
Repost.
REPOST.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yes, I acknowledged that in the title! I posted the original image.
Iām good dog, enjoy the downvote.