Tibet’s prized parasitic fungus faces paradox of falling prices and shrinking harvests

Every year around April, the brown-tipped stalks of Yartsa gunbu start to sprout from the countless corpses of golden ghost moth caterpillars barely buried in the topsoil of the Tibetan Plateau. As summer warmth creeps west, more stalks of this parasitic fungus, Ophiocordyceps sinensis, worm their way up from their host of dead hosts to the surface, whence they bulge and pop. So spreads another swarm of caterpillar-killing spores, beginning the process anew.
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