#massospora

Thank you @consentual-insanity for submitting via IM this cicada that was found in Indiana infected with the Massospora fungus that causes them to try to mate with everything in sight and eventually makes their abdomen fall off! Yikes :)

These articles are just line after line of the most insane things?! Like okay, the fungus makes the bugs "hypersexual" and gives them "prolonged stamina?" Sure. Whatever.

The fungus makes their butts fall off? And replaces them with a "white plug of fungus?"

The fungus makes male cicadas bisexual?

And it's not just that the bugs just start mating with anything that looks cicada-like, regardless of sex. No.

The infected males will literally. take on female mating behaviors. to seduce other male cicadas.

"Gender-bending, death-zombie fungus" was a literal quote that I had to read with my own two eyes from the Department Chair of Biology at George Washington University.

Read this in David Attenborough’s voice

UConn researchers recently documented in Nature Scientific Reports a gory and fascinating relationship between periodical cicadas and a fungus that infects them, hijacks their behavior, and causes a scene straight out of a zombie movie. “It’s a fun story for us, not for the cicadas,” says UConn ecology and evolutionary biology researcher and adjunct faculty member John Cooley. Though…