Scientists track a gigantic fungus that kidnaps cicadas

(LISLE, ILL.) – With their bulging red eyes and alien-like mating sound, periodic cicadas can seem scary and strange enough. But some of them are actually high-speed sex-crazed zombies, kidnapped by a gigantic fungus.

West Virginia University mycology professor Matt Kasson, his 9-year-old son Oliver and student Angie Macias are tracking the nasty fungus, called Massospora cicadina. It is the only one on Earth that produces amphetamine – the drug called speed – in a creature when it takes control. And yes, the fungus takes control of the cicada, making it hypersexual, seeking to spread the parasite like a sexually transmitted disease.

“They are zombies, completely at the mercy of the fungus,” said University of Connecticut cicada researcher John Cooley.

This particular fungus has the largest known genome of any fungus. It has about 1.5 billion base pairs, about 30 times more than many of the most common fungi we know of, Kasson said. And when these periodic cicadas live underground for 17 years (or 13 years in the southern US), the spores usually stay down there with them.

“This has been a mycological oddity for a long time,” Kasson said. “It has the largest genome. Produces wild compounds. It keeps the host active – all those quirks.”

Kasson decided to ask people across the country to send in infected cicadas this year. And despite an injured leg, Kasson, his son and Macias traveled from West Virginia to the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago, where others have reported the fungus taking over a cicada’s underparts, discarding the genitalia and replacing it with a white, sticky but flaky substance. plug which is quite noticeable. The spores fall like salt from a shaker.

Infected cicadas are assumed to be difficult to find.

Ten seconds after she jumps out of the golf cart, Macias is in the trees, watching. She emerges victorious, her hand in the air with a cicada, shouting “I got one.”

“That was just luck,” Oliver laments.

“Lucky, huh? Let’s see if you can get one,” Macias responds.

Ten seconds later, in a neighboring bush, Oliver finds another. And shortly after that, a photographer meets a third.

Kasson and his small team collected 36 infected cicadas on their brief tour of the Chicago area, with people sending him another 200 or so from all over. He is still awaiting an RNA analysis of the fungus.

Some cicada experts estimate that perhaps one in every 1,000 periodic cicadas is infected with this fungus, but that’s not much more than a guess. Gene Kritsky of Mount St. Joseph University, a biologist who wrote the book on this year’s unique double emergencesaid it may be distorted because healthy cicadas stay high in trees.

See more information: See photos of the rare appearance of the cicada

This year, “the fungus is as it always was,” Cooley said in an email. “It’s not very common.”

There is debate among scientists whether the fungus infects more cicadas deep underground, emerging from the soil after 13 or 17 years, or whether it infects newly hatched nymphs on its way underground for more than a decade.

This fungus isn’t the type of parasite that kills its host, but it needs to keep it alive, Kasson said. Then the infected cicadas try to mate with others, spreading the spores to their mate/victim. Males even pretend to be females in their hypersexualized state to attract and infect other males, he said.

The cousin of this fungus that infects annual cicadas in the West also produces a psychoactive compound in cicadas, but it is more similar to psychedelics like magic mushrooms, Kasson said. So sometimes people, even experts, mix the amphetamine that infected 17- and 13-year-old cicadas produce with the more trippy compounds in annual insects, he said.

Either way, don’t try this at home. Although the cicadas themselves are edible, not so much the infected ones.

In the interest of science, Kasson tried one during this emergence, making sure they were from a woman’s insides, therefore more antiseptic.

“Man, it was so bitter,” Kasson said, explaining that he immediately rinsed his mouth. “It tasted like something you would consider poisonous.”