SCIENCE LAB SCARES : PLAY ACTING

A SPIDER that seems to be undead turns out to be merely crafty : Alexander Bentley, a herpetologist, often leads regular tour groups through a stretch of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador.

He spots lizards, vipers and frogs, and he especially enjoys pointing out cordyceps - a parasitic fungus that kills the insect host and is the inspiration for the postapocalyptic franchise. '' The Last of Us. ''

But on a rainy night last August, he found something he had never seen before. After flipping a leaf to show his group some cordyceps, he poked the fungal growth - the hairy, yellowish tendril-like-stalks that are usually sign that the cordyceps has killed its host.

The fungal mass suddenly moved. Mr. Bentlêy was shocked : Had he found a cordyceps that figured out how to force its host to move around after its tendrils had pierced through the creature's exoskeleton?

Mr. Bentley, a founder of Waska Amazonia, a conservation foundation, collected the specimen and posted the discovery to iNaturalist, a citizen-science platform.

The site's users said that it was not fungus, but a spider pretending to be infected by one. The fungus the spider was mimicking was gibellula - a genus of parasitic fungi that belongs to the same family as cordyceps.

Users in iNaturalist helped identify the spider's group, which was a rarely seen genus known as Taczanowskia.

Mr. Bentley's colleague, David Ricardo Diaz-Guevara, an arachnid curator at the National Institute of Biodiversity in Ecuador, studied the specimen and was '' stunned '' to identify the spider as a new species : Taczanowskia waska.

Parasitic fungi depend on invertebrates to spread their reproductive units, known as spores. Their life cycle starts when spores land on a creature, such as a spider, and begins to grow inside it.

The fungi can digest the creature's insides, interfere with its nervous system and manipulate its behavior to facilitate spore dispersal, eventually killing the host. This is why they are compared to zombies.

After studying the spider, Dr. Diaz-Guevara said that effectively, '' over time, a spider has evolved to realize that if it mimics something that is dead, the chances of being hunted are low. ''

Researchers eventually found similar mimicry in spiders all over the world.

!WOW! thanks Alexa Robles-Gil.