By KATE GOLEMBIEWSKI New York Times
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An abandoned gunpowder storage shed pokes out from a small mound of earth in what’s now a nature preserve in Northern Ireland. It is the perfect place for a spider: semisubterranean, cool and dark. But in 2021, a crew working on a BBC nature program found more than an average arachnid lurking there. They spotted a dead spider with a lacy white fungus erupting from its body.

The fungus, scientists announced in the journal Fungal Systematics and Evolution, is a newly discovered species that spreads its spore by hijacking a spider and turning the unlucky arachnid into a zombie. This evolutionary strategy has been made famous by the zombie ant fungus Ophiocordyceps, which inspired the video game and HBO show “The Last of Us.” This spider version is only distantly related to that fungus.

Volunteers at the Castle Espie Wetland Centre near Belfast were assisting the BBC filmmakers when they noticed the infected spider. Pictures made their way to Harry Evans, an emeritus fellow at CAB International, a nonprofit organization focusing on agricultural and environmental research. “I posited that it was an unknown or unusual species and requested the specimen once the filming had finished,” said Evans, an author of the paper.

When the BBC program aired, Tim Fogg, a cave explorer, reached out to Evans to say that he had observed a similar fungus in Irish caves. Each of the five infected spiders that Fogg collected was engulfed by a tiny, tangled thicket of fungi.

João Araújo, an author of the paper and a curator of mycology at the Denmark Natural History Museum, said he and his colleagues believed that when a spore landed on a spider, the fungus sprouted a structure called a germ tube that drilled into the arachnid’s exoskeleton. Once inside, the fungus buds and multiplies, “taking over basically almost the entire body of the spider.”

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