Periodic cicadas are named because of their timely appearance on land. These don’t often arise – but when they do, it’s certainly not done by half. In 2020, with the debut of Brood XI, millions of people were expected to rise from the ground in zombie style.
In 2021, the side is even bigger with estimates of the presence of Brood X with billions of people present. This curiosity critics transfer to the ground for once in their lifetime, as they spend weeks reproducing. True orthodoxy is short-lived compared to the almost seventeen-year-old underground edge of the cicadas.
A fungus called Massospora cicadina is well known in the scientific community, an opportunistic fungus that spreads insects through sexual contact and destroys cicada orgy. Effectively an STI, the fungus can spread from an infected woman to another cicada when they try to synthesize. “It’s a sexually transmitted fungus,” said John Lille, chair of biology at George University of Washington and chair of the industry’s biology department. Instead, trying counts spreads more fungi.”
Interestingly, the fungus has behavior-changing effects on men. Typically, they sing to attract a female to breed – but if infected by M. cicadina they will also press their wings, which also attract males. As the fungus feeds on the reproductive organs of the cicada, the insect will send it to every other cicada that encounters them. Eventually, the eating becomes so deadly that the butcher’s butt actually falls off. Scientists have tried to investigate the fungus, but the time it takes for infected people to gain access is not so simple that they have to hang on to stay in the right place at the right time.
Matt Kasson, a fungus student at the University of West Virginia, stabbed it in 2016 and discovered curiosity about wing-flapping male Cicadas infected with M. cicadina. In the analysis of fungal samples it contains the plant amphetamine cathinone, it is also found in man-eating plants in the Horn region of the Middle East and Africa that chew on the human body. “I thought: Oh crap. The DEA will come here, chase me, and seize my flying saltshakers,” Kasson told the Atlantic.
