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 for Ecuador’s National Institute of Biodiversity, told the New York Times that Bentley’s discovery was “without a doubt super crazy and very surprising.”
The pair ultimately identified the new species thanks to a network of enthusiastic volunteers on the citizen-science platform iNaturalist, where Bentley had posted images of his macabre find late last summer, as yet unaware of what he had really uncovered that night.
Meet the spider, Taczanowskia waska
Bentley and Díaz-Guevara collaborated with iNaturalist’s enthusiasts as well as a third researcher, arachnologist and scientific illustrator Nadine Dupérré, to help gather more information on this seemingly undead spider. Dupérré located another specimen from this same species, first collected in Bolivia back in 1903 and left unidentified ever since, with the specimen gathering dust in a German museum.
While the researchers and their citizen-scientist collaborators found several examples of other spiders that mimic fungi, nearly all of them came from the Araneidae family of orb-weaver spiders. But the Waska site’s novel zombie-like spider doesn’t weave webs at all, orb-like or otherwise. The species, which the researchers named Taczanowskia waska, plays dead and then snatches its prey in the air with its two front legs.
There are only eight known relatives in the new spider’s genus Taczanowskia, out of roughly 53,000 known arachnid species in the World Spider Catalog. And, like T. waska, all of these fellow Taczanowskia are patient hunters who quite literally live off the element of surprise.
Díaz-Guevara observed a living Ecuadorian T. waska specimen in the lab to better verify its hunting behavior and habits for the team’s new study, published last month in the journal Zootaxa. Ultimately, he suspects, the species’ parasitic fungal disguise might be as much for avoiding predators as it is for tricking prey.
“Over time,” as he put it to the New York Times, “[the] spider has evolved to realize that if it mimics something that is dead, the chances of being hunted are low.”
More parasitic fungi
After further probing, iNaturalist users determined that T. waska was not exactly impersonating cordyceps but another genus of parasitic fungi from the same family, the genus Gibellula. “Gibellula are almost always positioned on the underside of a leaf, where they are protected from heavy rain and falling objects,” the researchers wrote in Zootaxa. The newly identified T. waska, they added, “was found in the exact same position.”
The creature’s known current habitat, Waska Amazonía, is a 100-hectare (one-square-kilometer) rainforest bordered by the region’s Tigre and Chico rivers, which Bentley’s conservation group hopes to catalogue and protect.
He and his coauthors called their study “a model for citizen engagement in scientific processes” and hope that work like it might inspire local interest in biodiversity. With any luck, further research will help humans pose as fungi-infected zombies if that time inevitably comes.
