Worm, fungi or enhancement drug? All about the ‘Himalayan Viagra’ and why it’s endangered
At the beginning of the Himalayan summer, when the snows start to melt, all the schools close for the season and Nepali parents and children move to the grasslands with enough food for a month-long journey on a quest for a herb more valuable than gold. To find yarsagumba , families crawl through muddy fields hoping to spot a yellowish-green mummified caterpillar that resembles a disproportionate unicorn, with a dark-coloured elongated fungus growing out of a larva’s head. In Chinese, the two-faced creature is called dong chong xia cao , which translates as “winter worm, summer grass”. During the winter, yarsagumba is worm-like, but by the summer, invaded by fungus, it looks more like a plant. Mature yarsagumba resembles nothing so much as a matchstick, thin and slender, projecting two to three centimetres above the ground across the alpine meadows of the Himalayas. (A) The stroma and sclerotium sections; (B, C) The complex of mycelial corti...