With their bulging red eyes and their alien-like mating sound, periodical cicadas can seem scary and weird enough.
The head of a cicada sits on a table after West Virginia University mycology professor Matt Kasson cut the head and thorax from a live periodical cicada infected with the Massospora cicadina fungus during field processing at Morton Arboretum on Thursday, June 6, 2024, in Lisle, Ill. The fungus is the only one on Earth that makes amphetamine. It takes control over the cicada, making them hypersexual, looking to spread the parasite as a sexually transmitted disease.
“This was a mycological oddity for a long time,” Kasson said. “It's got the biggest genome. It produces wild compounds. It keeps the host active — all these quirks to it.” Some cicada experts have estimated maybe one in 1,000 of the periodical cicadas are infected with this fungus, but it's not much more than a guess. Mount St. Joseph University's Gene Kritsky, a biologist who wrote the book onThis year “the fungus is about how it always is,” Cooley said in an email. “It's not super common.”
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