The Independent

Collecting sex-crazed zombie cicadas on speed: Scientists track a bug-controlling super-sized fungus

Source: Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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.

mycology professor Matt Kasson, his 9-year-old son , and graduate student Angie Macias are tracking the nasty fungus, called Massospora cicadina. It is the only one on Earth that makes amphetamine — the drug called speed — in a critter when it takes over. And yes, the fungus

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