Breaking News:The Real “Last of Us” Is Happening in the Amazon, and a Spider Is Playing the Fungus– What Just Happened

A newly discovered Amazon spider has evolved one of nature’s most unsettling disguises: it mimics a parasitic fungus that kills and zombifies its hosts. The find, published in the journal Zootaxa, marks the first documented case of an arachnid mimicking a pathogen that infects its own kind.

The discovery began not in a laboratory but on a rainy nighttime hike through Ecuador‘s rainforest, when a herpetologist poked what he thought was a clump of cordyceps fungus, and it moved. That moment of shock has since rippled through the scientific community, opening a window onto an overlooked evolutionary strategy that appears to span continents.

Cordyceps and its relatives are the real-world inspiration behind the HBO franchise The Last of Us. These parasitic fungi infect invertebrates, manipulate their behavior, and ultimately kill them, all to spread reproductive spores. That a spider would evolve to look like the aftermath of such an infection is, by any measure, a remarkable biological twist.

A Discovery Made in the Dark

Alexander Bentley, a herpetologist and founder of the Waska Amazonía conservation foundation, was leading a tour group through the Ecuadorian Amazon last August when he flipped a leaf to show visitors a specimen of cordyceps. He reached out to prod the hairy, yellowish, tendril-like fungal stalks, and they recoiled. Bentley had not found an animated fungus. He had found a spider wearing one as a costume.

After posting the specimen to iNaturalist, a citizen-science platform, users identified it not as a fungus but as a member of Taczanowskia, a rarely seen spider genus first described in 1879. Bentley’s colleague David Ricardo Díaz-Guevara, an arachnid curator at Ecuador’s National Institute of Biodiversity, examined the specimen and confirmed it was an entirely new species, now named Taczanowskia waska. The research, co-authored with Nadine Dupérré of the Museum of Nature Hamburg, was published in Zootaxa in February 2026.

The species epithet honors the Waska Amazonía Foundation and also draws from the Kichwa word waska, meaning root or vine, a nod to the plant where the spider was first encountered.

How the Disguise Actually Works

The spider’s mimicry is anatomical rather than behavioral. According to Díaz-Guevara, T. waska has evolved paired abdominal prolongations  (long, slender, unsclerotized tubercles) that closely replicate the fruiting bodies of Gibellula, a genus of parasitic fungi in the same family as cordyceps. These horn-like structures, combined with dense coverings of white hairs across the spider’s abdomen, create a convincing illusion of a spider that has already been killed and colonized by fungus.

The evolutionary logic, as Díaz-Guevara explained it, is coldly effective: over time, the spider “evolved to realize that if it mimics something that is dead, the chances of being hunted are low.” An animal that looks diseased and dead is of little interest to predators, and potentially invisible to prey.

Gustavo Hormiga, a spider researcher at George Washington University who was not involved in the study, called the resemblance to the pathogenic fungus “striking.” He added that not looking like a spider is “especially” advantageous “if you look like a fungus that nobody is particularly interested or attracted to.” Hormiga also raised the possibility that the disguise serves a hunting function, the spider may simultaneously mimic the pheromones that infected female insects emit, luring male insects close enough to ambush.

A Global Pattern Hidden in Plain Sight

What began as a single unexpected find quickly expanded in scope. After scouring photos submitted by citizen scientists, the research team found spiders displaying similar fungal mimicry across multiple continents in Vietnam, Uganda, Madagascar, and coastal Brazil. All of the spiders belonged to Araneidae, the same family as T. waska, though they represent entirely different genera.

The find highlights the ongoing relevance of citizen science platforms in modern taxonomy. According to the published research, the iNaturalist platform was instrumental not only in identifying the specimen but in surfacing comparable observations from around the world that had gone academically unexamined.

Taczanowskia itself remains one of the least understood spider genera on record. According to the World Spider Catalog, only eight species have ever been formally described, and the genus has been so rarely encountered since its 1879 description that almost all known specimens are female, males, which can be as small as a third of an inch, have proved nearly impossible to find. 

As Hormiga noted, the discovery “gives you a great example of mimicry in a spider group that is very poorly understood,” while also demonstrating how much remains unknown about spiders more broadly. Scientists estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 spider species remain undiscovered worldwide, beyond the roughly 53,000 already catalogued.