Do you know the mushroom that turns ants into zombies, the one that makes Cicadas Hypersex or the one that enables the Sauternes production? The Toulouse researcher Audrey Dussutour tells the history of these fascinating parasites in “The Mushrooms of Apocalypse”, a work that mixes science and fiction.
Audrey Dussutour, research director at CNRS at the Animal Cognition Research Center (Crises / CDs Toulouse), specialize in animal behavior and known for his work on ants or The individual body “blob”Published this Wednesday, April 16, a new book. Go to the fascinating world of parasitic mushrooms.
“Apocalypse mushrooms”, what is behind this mysterious title?
I tell the mushrooms that parasitize living things. It all started with a wish by journalist Mathieu Vidard, the director of the Terres et Sciences Collection in Grasset, who had seen the last of us. In this American series, a mushroom, inspired by the cordycepts that attack ants, infected people and turned into zombies.
And they have started a story that mixes science and fiction …
Yes, I tell the development of mushrooms that started their life in the aquatic environment 1.2 billion years ago before conquering the earthly environment. To say it, I wrote a new science fiction news that serves as a common thread and enables them to get complicated words from mycology that can annoy the reader. I was inspired by the last of us by adding scientific credits. The fungus of the book is even more realistic than that of the series! In 2026 the story will play around a mother and daughter, who in a context of the apocalypse of mushrooms to a concert in which an infected individual escaped the control persons. They fled in a small room with the DJ of the concert, inspired by my husband, someone who is curious but not scientific at all, to whom the mycologist will tell the story of mushrooms, parasites of parasitic algae who infect people.
So are these mushrooms not our friends?
Those we eat are our friends, but not the parasites that have developed to infect us and kill between 2 and 3 million people a year. These are opportunists who can develop anywhere. For example, we live pretty well with the candidates that we find in our mucous membranes, but if there is a fault, the Mushroom takes over invasive infections.
They also tell fascinating stories in which mushrooms manipulate insects …
Yes, the craziest case is that of periodic cicadas in the United States. These cicadas stay in the ground between 13 and 17 to develop, then they suddenly appear. They are parasitically parasitic by Massospora, a mushroom that infiltrates the zikade, eats its genitals and creates a kind of small white fluffy cap. Massospora secrets amphetamines that change the behavior of cicadas. They become hyper -like, no longer eat and are constantly looking for men to reproduce. After pairing, the mushroom eats the entire belly, the zikade will be full of a sand castle and balances in the full flight, the spores transferred to the ground in order to infect new cicadas the afterwards.
Are there mushrooms that are useful for human species?
The metarhicon -fungus creates green forms that grow on insects and kill them. It is often used in agriculture, as a powder, as a means of organic control. Conversely, mushrooms grip, trees such as flight trees in the MIDI channel or chestnut trees that no longer exist in the United States, because one day someone brought a Japanese chestnut and parasites to their garden …
The history of the parasites is therefore also a history of globalization, the economy?
All trips have an impact. A European fungus recently met 7 million bats in the United States in ten years. There was also a kind of frog and many salamander died in the Netherlands. The plants around us are rarely endemic, but when we import them, they arrive with their country and their parasites and can trigger ecological disasters.
The mushrooms are also the source of finds, which?
The parasitic mushrooms gave us very important drugs such as statins (cholesterol regulator) or cyclosporin (against the rejection of transplants). Some mushrooms parasitize fruits, this is the case of botrytis, which causes this gray putrefaction on grapes and for whom we have Sauternes!
Do science still give science just as popular?
Yes and I don’t know if the mycologists will like my book! … I take some freedom to make this science accessible to the public without scare it. There is always an attraction for popular scientific books, people still enjoy discovering things.