On the subject of speculative biology and bringing back into the discussion the food situation for /meat/, I was thinking of a mushroom that could solve that problem. The idea is that there is a parasitic mushroom or fungus that grows in the bodies of living things that eat it that causes its host to feel excruciating pain, causing the release of chemicals such as adrenaline that would make meat taste bad, which the fungus consumes, and uses to grow out of any orifice that the living organism has, including eyes. This doesn't kill them, but it makes living harder for them and also makes them feel like they are really intoxicated, which effects their judgement and survival instincts.
The mushroom causes the flesh to take on a more savory, addictive flavor that is somewhat intoxicating in hopes that prey will eat it and continue it's life cycle. If cooked at a certain temperature, it is harmless, but otherwise it can only spread naturally through consumption. I was thinking /meat/ could surgically attach some mushrooms to the chest of the humans they plan to eat, near the heart so as to be as close to the circulatory system as possible. Ideally, this would not only solve the problem we discussed, but reverse it, making the flesh more savory and intoxicating the more pain the host receives.
Allowing the mushrooms time to spread through the body before sacrifice is the ideal method of growing it. During this time, the mushrooms will bear fruit that can be used to infect other hosts. while the mushroom can survive for a while on a dead host, it requires a host to survive for long periods of time. The mushroom can infect most kinds of animals.
Any thoughts?
This is neat! The mushroom's takeover of the host's nervous system while the host is still alive in order to make the host more appetizing to potential predators reminds me a lot of the way green-banded broodsacs take over snails. Perhaps you could take some inspiration from that, and have the mushrooms also noticeably alter the host's behavior in some way? In the case of green-banded broodsacs, they cause snails to sit out on high leaves beneath the sun, to better attract the attention of birds. Since the mushroom's goal is to be eaten, likely hosts' survival instincts will be more or less completely overridden. Perhaps when the host is harmed, the mushroom causes the host's body to produce oxytocin, the hormone responsible for trust and affection. This makes the host more likely to stick around potential predators.
well, my thoughts were that, since mushrooms are the chemists of nature, they would release a chemical into the body that would stimulate the nervous system to feel a constant, sharp pain, and that a combination of the mushrooms growing out of every orifice and the fact that they are intoxicated and likely blind, that they would just sort of stumble around, with some of the mushrooms falling off from the wiggling and writhing of the host. i like your ideas too, though.
keep in mind, it being intoxicating means it probably does some of that, anyways, but maybe not a complete overhaul of the survival instincts unless it's more complex. my idea was for it to be applicable to most forms of life, partially because i want it to effect demihuman types, but also because it just makes sense from a survival perspective.
My issue with this is that if the mushrooms can also just casually grow on the ground then, from an evolutionary standpoint, just spreading spores normally is way easier and less risky than the parasitic takeover route. The mushroom must absolutely need the host, and therefore to be consumed by a predator so its spores can infect a new host, as part of its reproductive cycle, or it being parasitic at all doesn't make a ton of sense. In the first place, mushrooms are already capable of creating their own airflows in order to spread spores. A writhing host may be able to spread the spores further, but is it enough of an advantage for the mushroom to have evolved that way over staying a normal mushroom? Now, on the other hand, if the host is in fact absolutely vital to the mushroom's reproductive process because it can only grow in flesh for whatever reason, it becomes more important for the host to be consumed, thus the altering of behavior through the increase of bonding hormones when near potential predators. There's no particular reason this should only work on humans, by the way -- oxytocin is found in all mammals, and some other animals besides.
Of course, all this being said, this is a fantasy world. You could very well have a parasitic flesh mushroom that also spreads normally and just kind of developed this way for whatever reason. It could even be that these mushrooms originally worked the way I described, but when /meat/ realized they made host flesh taste better, they specially bread new cultivars that cause intense pain, since that's of interest to them, and then further refined them so that they could be grown normally, so that it would be easy to keep up their supplies of the mushrooms without having to jump through complicated hoops to spread it from host to host.
that is true. i was imagining having cool looking mushrooms fruit out from the body that could be gathered and put in another body, but i wasn't sure if there would be a point to it, maybe just to make it more visible or something, but then i thought evolution would get things to avoid it. i suppose it makes more sense to have it rely on a host, but i figure it should be able to survive on a dead host for a while as it returns to soil.
since it doesn't kill the host, all /meat/ needs to do is use mushrooms from any of the infected to infect others before they sacrifice them, which would probably be better for the meat, giving the mushroom ample time to spread and make sure every part of the host's flesh is affected. it might not be too difficult to just keep it reliant on a host, so that's what i think is better. ty for helping me flesh it out.
tell me if there is anything you would change. also, i was thinking about the possibility of a cure. looking it up, it looks like a reliable way of dealing with internal fungal infections is with antibiotics, which /meat/ chuubanite might be able to stimulate, so i was wondering if there should be a way to make it get around that, since our sacrifices will be expected to have a lot of chuubanite in them for ritualistic purposes.
Even in real life, fungi can quickly become resistant to anti-fungal treatments when exposed to them constantly. So long as the mushrooms are native to /meat/, I don't think you really need some complicated explanation for why /meat/ chuubanite doesn't do anything to them. Having evolved in an environment abundant with it, they will have naturally gained immunity to that specific type of "antibiotic."