‘Last of Us’ Spider Pretends to Be a Zombie Fungus—and It’s Bizarrely Brilliant

A newly discovered species of spider has been found working pretty hard to convince prospective prey in the Amazon that it’s already safely dead. The result is a creature that looks a lot like the fungi that inspired all those zombies in The Last of Us games and spin-off HBO series. Alexander Bentley, a founder of the conservation group Waska Amazonía, first noticed this very goth spider while leading a guided tour at night through a study site in Mera, Ecuador. Bentley had trained as a herpetologist in the U.S. before relocating to apply those skills in the study and preservation of reptiles and amphibians at Waska. On this tour, the researcher had thought he’d simply found a fun, spooky example of cordyceps: a genus of parasitic fungus that feasts off the brains of insects, like ants, and arachnids, like spiders. (Cordyceps served as the real-world inspiration for the zombie apocalypse in The Last of Us.) To Bentley’s shock, however, this infected spider—which looked to be just a nutritious corpse for the fuzzy, yellow, fungal growths sprouting from it—suddenly started moving. Very much undead. David Ricardo Díaz-Guevara, a biologist who curates the national arachnid collection f