With their bulging red eyes and their alien-like mating sound, periodical cicadas can seem scary and weird enough. But some of them really are sex-crazed zombies on speed, hijacked by a super-sized fungus.
An intact female periodical cicada infected with the Massospora cicadina fungus is visible at Morton Arboretum on Thursday, June 6, 2024, in Lisle, Ill. West Virginia University mycology professor Matt Kasson is tracking the fungus, the only one on Earth that makes amphetamine. It takes control over the cicada, makes them hypersexual, looking to spread the parasite as a sexually transmitted disease.
This particular fungus has the largest known genome of any fungus. It has about 1.5 billion base pairs, about 30 times longer than many of the more common fungi we know, Kasson said. And when these periodical cicadas live underground for 17 years , the spores generally stay down there with them. Kasson and his small team collected 36 infected cicadas in his brief Chicago area jaunt with people sending him another 200 or so from all over. He's still waiting for an RNA analysis of the fungus.
The cousin to this fungus which infects annual cicadas out west also makes a psychoactive compound in the cicadas but it is more akin to psychedelics like magic mushrooms, Kasson said. So sometimes people, even experts, mix up the amphetamine that the infected 17- and 13-year cicadas produce with the more trippy compounds of the annual bugs, he said.
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