A fungus, which is believed to give anyone who eats it sexual prowess and which grows out of the bodies of ground-burrowing ghost moth caterpillars, can fetch more than gold in markets in China.
Two Tibetan villages have been swamped by demand for the mysterious fungus.
People have been killed in fights over the fungus, and foreign speculators have flooded in to make their fortunes from the pink fungal growth, the metro.co.uk. reported.
One village has begun to hold roll-calls four times a day to stop villagers sneaking off to harvest illegal supplies of the coveted fungus, which is used widely as an aphrodisiac, and is nicknamed 'the Himalayan Viagra', the report said.
In early spring, pinky-sized spores of the fungus emerge from the caterpillars' mummified bodies and pop up in remote grassland pastures across the Tibetan Plateau.
Located high in the Himalayan foothills along Nepal's northern border with China's Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), the tiny rural communities of Nubri and Tsum have been ignored by economic developers for decades, but with yartsa gunbu fetching more per ounce than gold in some Chinese markets, many villagers now reap as much as 80% of their annual income during the caterpillar fungus spring harvest season.
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