This Parasite Drugs Its Hosts With the Psychedelic Chemical in Shrooms
It also makes their butts fall off.
Imagine emerging into the sun after 17 long years spent lying underground, only for your butt to fall off.
That ignominious fate regularly befalls America’s cicadas. These bugs spend their youth underground, feeding on roots. After 13 or 17 years of this, they synchronously erupt from the soil in plagues of biblical proportions for a few weeks of song and sex. But on their way out, some of them encounter the spores of a fungus called Massospora.
A week after these encounters, the hard panels of the cicadas’ abdomens slough off, revealing a strange white “plug.” That’s the fungus, which has grown throughout the insect, consumed its, who studies fungi at West Virginia University.
