As Chinese mountains get hotter, hunt for 'cure-all' fungus gets harder. Read more:
Each spring, Ma travels more than 600 kilometres by road from his impoverished village in Gansu to a jumbled knot of nameless peaks in neighbouring Qinghai province.There, he joins an army of about 80 people hired by a local company to find and pick Ophiocordyceps sinensis, a fungus believed to possess aphrodisiac and medicinal powers.
"The glaciers are gone, and so are the cordyceps," said Ma, 49, who has been picking cordyceps in Qinghai for the past 14 years.Glaciers on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau have shrunk 15% in the past half a century as gains in local temperatures outstripped the global average by three-fold, Chinese state media reported last year.
At the market peak in 2010, the street price of cordyceps was more than $100,000 per kilogramme, launching a craze and enticing herders and farmers like Ma to flock to the mountains. Grass-dwelling caterpillars deliver the fungus when they migrate, arriving as early as summer, after which the fungus lays dormant in its host through the frigid winter months.When spring arrives, the warmer weather awakens the fungus, which kills the caterpillar. It then develops a small brown stem from the desiccated body, poking out of the ground and eventually releasing spores that caterpillars eat, restarting the parasitic process.
Output fell to 41,200 kg in 2018 from 43,500 kg a year earlier, a 5.2% slump, data from the bureau showed.. Qinghai, China. Reuters/Aly Song
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