https://youtu.be/vijGdWn5-h8
Don't you just love mother nature? In the beginning of the episode and throughout the show, cordyceps can't live in humans and don't live long in heat. They say that climate change may change all that as extreme heat and cold become more common. The fungi will be forced to adapt to new environments once unsuitable to them. Wonder if it'll be plausible in the future.
And yet they come across them in places where it's really cold in the winter. You think there would be a drop off in the winter.
shareIn the story universe, the problem was not that it was too cold for cordyceps before, the problem was that the human body was too hot, humans being warm-blooded as opposed to ants. With climate change the fungus through natural selection adapted to survive in hotter environments and was then able to survive in the human body. The body of an living human is still 37 degrees even on the south pole, so after the fungus started transferring from human to human, the outside temperature does not matter anymore.
shareI'm sure I read the Imdb goofs months ago. These fungi evolved over millions of years! One of the many reasons I don't watch shitty video game sci-fi.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3581920/goofs/?tab=gf&ref_=tt_trv_gf
As with the game, the series' depiction of the cordyceps fungus has some inaccuracies. Overall, the probability of a fungus of this type evolving the need and capability to infect humans is astronomically small. Human brains contain hundreds of thousands of times more neurons compared to an ant brain, and it would be an extraordinarily rapid evolution for cordyceps to gain the ability to infect and take over one. Even if it did, fungal infections are slow, taking a matter of weeks, and nothing like the near-instant transformation depicted; new filaments take some time and energy to produce. All 600 species of Cordyceps which seize control of insect bodies do so to force the host into a humid place where the fungus can feed on the body and spread its spores, so if an evolved cordyceps infected a human and over the course of many days transformed the body into a shambling host, the fungus' end goal would be much the same. Lastly, while insects do gain some level of aggression when infected, they normally do not attack other insects.