It was tiny and, at first glance, I thought it was one of those madly shaped egg sacks created by sputnik spiders (see The sputnik spider, 6 July 2017), but no. This is my first ever Cordyceps fungus, which is erupting from the body of an insect.

In his publication Fascinated by Fungi, author Pat O’Reilly explains: ‘The Cordyceps mycelium colonises the living insect and mummifies it, keeping it alive just long enough to generate the biomass necessary to produce another Cordyceps … fruitbody.’ I discovered a very similar example to my find, with an excellent detailed explanation of the process, on the Project Noah website here.