The fungus in 'The Last of Us' is real—and it's very, very expensive

Qinghai, China — Ma Beng sprawls on his stomach, his nose nearly touching the dry, brown grass. He army-crawls slowly across the mountain, inspecting the ground inch by methodical inch. Nearby, friends and family likewise creep along, carefully studying the tangles of grass and shrub. At 16,400 feet above sea-level, close to the height of Everest’s Base Camp, exertion in the oxygen-deprived air seems to phase no one. Chatting as they crawl, the group trades idle gossip, but their eyes never leave the ground.

They’re all searching for the same thing. It’s a prize often worth more than its weight in gold: ophiocordyceps sinensis, or more simply, caterpillar fungus.

From a distance, another man cries out in excitement. A short fungal stalk just barely pokes out of the grass, marginally thicker than the vegetation that surrounds it, and he carefully begins excavating around it. Onlookers gather, pulling out their smartphones to take photos; one woman begins a livestream on Douyin (China’s version of TikTok). A few painstaking moments later and he has freed his bounty—a small caterpillar perhaps an inch long, caked in earth with a reddish tendril of fungus sprouting from its head. He produces a tobacco tin, gingerly wraps his find in plastic, and secures it inside as the crowd disperses again, resuming their hunt with renewed enthusiasm.

Called yartsa gunbu in Tibetan, the literal translation becomes “winter worm, summer grass”. It’s an apt, if scientifically inaccurate, name for a macabre instance of symbiosis that begins when the underground larvae of the ghost moth are infected by ophiocordyceps spores. Scientists think the fungus takes control of the caterpillar’s nervous system, forcing its host to dig upwards, then ­killing it just before breaking the surface. Dormant through winter, the fungus reawakens in spring, consumes the corpse’s interior for nutrients, and sprouts out of caterpillar’s head into the sunshine.

Cordyceps have long been a local folk remedy, but within the last few decades Chinese demand has mushroomed, driving up prices. Since the early 1970s the cost of a kilogram of high quality cordyceps has increased up to forty thousand-fold—fetching as much as $110,000 per kilogram. The result has been an annual “wormrush” on the margins of the Himalaya, what is historically one of the poorest regions on the Asian continent.

For many pickers, the cordyceps harvest represents their only income for the entire year; so, every May and June, the plateau fragments into thousands of hyper-localities where only residents are permitted to enter.

Regardless of how or by whom the worms get dug up, there’s one alarming thing everyone on the plateau has noticed: there are fewer to find every year.

Locals and scientists alike offer the one-two punch of overharvesting and climate change as means of explanation. With hundreds of distinct sets of regulations governing their harvest, there remains no cohesive system, or incentives, to ensure a sustainable harvest. Simultaneously, new sprouts require a specific range of temperature, moisture, and snow cover. Those variables are no longer so predictable, and the fungus today cannot be found at the lower elevations where they were once plentiful.

The world’s most expensive fungus

Roughly sixty miles away in the city of Yushu, it’s barely 8 a.m. in the cordyceps market, but already it has the frenetic energy of a stock market trading floor. Hands are grasped beneath towels in the traditional means of bartering, whispers circulate the crowds, and prices fluctuate from shop-to-shop, minute-to-minute as every node in this supply web tries to eek out a couple more yuan per worm.

Middlemen purchase worms from the pickers for approximately $5 and will sell them to established shops in Yushu and other urban centers for a 10-20 percent markup. From there, they enter a well-oiled machine. The cordyceps are cleaned, counted, sorted, and packaged in vacuum-sealed bags before being shipped off that same afternoon. During peak season, a single worm broker can buy over 1,500 pounds of product per day, spending tens of millions of dollars in the process.

By the time they reach the gleaming shops of Beijing and Shanghai, the price of a caterpillar fungus has at least doubled. They’re more likely to be found in a luxury shopping mall than a pharmacy. The perceived value of the resource is now so high that it’s a fashionable gift or party favor among China’s elite. Counterintuitively, demand for cordyceps doesn’t remain high in spite of high prices, it remains high because of them.

(Fungi are key to our survival. Are we doing enough to protect them?)

One saleswoman in Beijing’s high-end Wang Fu Jing district suggests buyers are primarily interested in the social status the worms provide rather than any purported health effects. She points at the different ornate boxes of dead caterpillars, secured behind glass.

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“High-quality” cordyceps are priced based on a fungus’s size, color, symmetry, ratio of stalk-to-body, freshness, and any other variables that makes them more uncommon or visually appealing, and therefore more desirable. The very best are priced in excess of six figures per kilogram; their uglier counterparts are more likely to sell for around $40,000 per kilogram. The least aesthetic will be ground to powder for supplements and additives in other products.

A growing interest in alternative medicine from Western markets also suggests demand will continue rising.

The product appeals to a diverse cross-section people: it has been sold by celebrity Gwyneth Paltrow on her controversial Goop website, as well as by right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Info Wars. Recently, the hit HBO series The Last of Us put a spotlight on the fungus, introducing it to new audiences.

(Learn more about the real science behind the show.)

A moral tradeoff

Escalating demand means more pressure on an already fragile ecosystem, but a company from Guangdong province, Sunshine Lake Pharma, might have a solution. For decades, many have tried to cultivate cordyceps artificially, and until recently, the complex life cycle, interactions, and environment had proven too difficult to simulate. But in 2014, Sunshine Lake made a breakthrough, producing lab-grown cordyceps with a highly secret procedure, for the first time. Studies indicate that the medicinal components of cultivated cordyceps were equivalent to wild ones, and better yet, lack the heavy metal pollutants often found in the natural variety.

Since the discovery, Sunshine Lake has been growing, and by their own estimate, project their production could make up 20 percent of the entire market. Lab-grown cordyceps should reduce pressure on wild fungus, giving populations a chance to recover. However, that environmental win jeopardizes what’s now a lucrative resource for some of China’s poorest citizens.

Many pickers have responded by using social media to create a distinct “natural” brand identity. Scroll any number of Chinese social media apps in May and June and you’re likely to find livestreams of these businesses picking, processing, and packaging their products against dramatic mountain backgrounds, and encouraging you to purchase directly from their online stores.

As the sun approaches the horizon, Ma Beng heads back down the mountain empty-handed. When asked if he’s worried about the cultivated fungus, he just shrugs.

“This is a traditional medicine,” he says. “You can’t replace tradition.”