The smell hit me before I even saw it \u2014 a heavy, rotten stench that made the back of my throat tighten and my stomach twist. I\u2019d only stepped outside to water the flowers and check if the cats had knocked things over again, but the moment I opened the gate, something felt wrong. The air was too still. The odor was too strong. And then I noticed movement near the flowerbed, just subtle enough to make my skin crawl. When I looked closer, I froze completely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lying in the grass was something round, slimy, and bulging, as if it had been turned inside out. A reddish mass pulsed from a tear in its surface, wrapped in a thick, jellylike membrane that looked disturbingly alive. The smell was like rotting meat mixed with something chemical, sharp enough to make my eyes water. For a moment, I was convinced it was something dying\u2026 or something that shouldn\u2019t<\/em> exist at all. My mind raced through every terrible possibility \u2014 an injured animal, an infestation, some bizarre parasite, or even something out of a horror movie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I backed away, grabbed my phone, and snapped a photo, barely able to breathe through the odor. The whole time, the thing just sat there \u2014 glistening, swollen, and somehow looking as though it was about to hatch. Panic built in my chest as I typed the symptoms into the search bar: \u201cred slimy sphere rotten smell moving.\u201d The search results made my stomach drop. Dozens of photos popped up that looked exactly like the thing in my yard \u2014 and the explanation was far worse than anything I imagined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What I had found wasn\u2019t an animal at all. It was a fungus known as Clathrus archeri<\/strong>, often called the Devil\u2019s Finger Mushroom<\/em>. It begins as a fleshy, egg-like sac before splitting open to reveal red, tentacle-like arms coated in a foul-smelling slime meant to attract flies. That stench \u2014 the one that made me think something was decomposing \u2014 was completely intentional. The fungus mimics the smell of death so insects carry its spores away. I hadn\u2019t stumbled on a creature\u2026 just one of nature\u2019s most disturbing illusions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Standing there in my yard, staring at that grotesque little \u201cegg,\u201d I felt equal parts disgusted and relieved. It wasn\u2019t alive, it wasn\u2019t dangerous, and it wasn\u2019t from another planet \u2014 just one of the strangest fungi on Earth doing what it does best: horrifying anyone unlucky enough to find it freshly hatched.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The smell hit me before I even saw it \u2014 a heavy, rotten stench that made the back of my throat tighten and my stomach twist. I\u2019d… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3087,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6924"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6925,"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6924\/revisions\/6925"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}