LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Under the shadow of Pinnacle Mountain, Jay Justice has been heading off the beaten path— in search of his lifelong fascination.
"Here they is! Right here," Justice said, as he pointed to a mushroom off a trail at Pinnacle Mountain State Park's Arboretum. "It's a big thrill for me to find something I have never found before."
Justice has been keeping an eye out for anything that catches his attention, like mushrooms and fungi.
"I'm just looking for splashes of color," he said, as he walked the trail. "White, red, something like that."
Now there's another fungi that has been catching his attention— and it has recently been featured in a hit TV show.
Cordyceps is an insect-infesting parasitic fungus that's at the heart of the cause of the HBO show "The Last of Us," and it is something he and millions of others have been thinking of.
"That was meant to be the boogeyman part of the show," Justice said. "The threat and everything."
In the TV series, you can become infected by being bitten by someone who is infected, meanwhile, the game the show is based on uses spores to transmit the infection.
That's similar to real-life Cordyceps.
"Oh, look, it's sporulating!" Justice explained as he showed us some of the fungi he's collected.
Though it's an interesting concept for the show, it is not entirely plausible in real life.
"The Cordyceps on the human heads and everything was a little bit grotesque to me," he said. "I don't think it would, it would actually, you know, even if it did affect humans, I don't think it would do that."
Justice showed us beetle larvae that were infected by Cordyceps. The fungus feeds off of the larvae and drains them from the inside, eventually leaving them hollow.
Once it runs out of biomass, it grows long stalks that can spread spores, ready to infect the next unlucky insect.
It's a scary concept if you're a bug, but could it happen to humans?
In short— no, it's not likely.
According to Dr. Scott Roberts, an assistant professor at Yale's School of Medicine, most fungi can't survive in temperatures higher than 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, right around the average human body temperature.
Not to mention, your body is also significantly more complex than an insect's body, which would make it much more difficult for any fungal infection to spread.
"I don't see that happening, yeah, I worry more about another, you know, virus similar to COVID or something like that, pathogenic virus like that," Justice explained.
So while it may be a great basis for a show, it's likely not something you or I will have to worry about.
"It's not that they take over our body or anything like that," Justice said. "It's just another fungus of a foreign organism, and they're just had to treat at times."