12 ms·

A fungus that infects cicadas and pushes their mating into hyperdrive

57 points by cwan 5y ago

bambax 5y ago
> The fungus takes over their bodies, causing them to lose their lower abdomen and genitals. And it pushes their mating into hyperdrive. Unclear. How do they mate, or even attempt to mate, without genitals?
- adoxyz 5y ago
  "It's a failed mating attempt, of course, because there's no genitalia back there."
  - bambax 5y ago
    Yes I read this but it still needs some explanation. I can maybe understand that the infected insect still wants to mate even without genitalia, but why do the sane ones fall for it? I guess I need to learn more about cicada mating habits.
    - samatman 5y ago
      Consent to mate is in fact fairly distinctive to human beings. It's certainly not a concept which applies to insects such as cicadas, which just jump on each other and do the business.
      - scarmig 5y ago
        Bedbugs are a particularly interesting species, in that they practice traumatic insemination[0]. The male, in order to overcome female resistance, rips through her abdomen to deposit his sperm. Large, confined bedbug colonies often go extinct for this reason: all the females end up dead from repeated traumatic insemination. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_insemination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_insemination
        samatman 5y ago
        Yep. Bedbugs are one of those species where I would have no objection at all to gene-driving them into oblivion.
      - js2 5y ago
        > Consent to mate is in fact fairly distinctive to human beings. What? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtship_display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtship_display
        samatman 5y ago
        Sure, I said fairly distinctive rather than unique. It's interesting that monogamy and mostly-consensual sex are mostly found in some birds (not you ducks), rather than our closest relatives. There are a lot of mammalian paradigms for sex, for placental mammals in our weight class there's rather a lot of intramale competition, and estrus; the female being willing to be mounted by whatever male happens to win the fight is pretty much orthogonal to consent as we humans understand it. It seems like a pedantic objection given that both the parent and myself were talking about insects, where the concept makes very little sense.
        js2 5y ago
        Fair enough. I read “fairly distinctive” as “virtually unique”. Mantis are an insect with a mating ritual, right? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003347287800246 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00033...
        samatman 5y ago
        > The courtship displays of the male and female may play the role of reducing intraspecific aggression during courtship and thus reducing the likelihood of cannibalism. Whew! I think this also has relatively little to do with consent as humans understand it!
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        Other mating models: - Millipedes generally work on a model where males leave packets of sperm on the ground and females find them and pick them up. Mating does not take place. - Fish may just release sperm / unfertilized eggs into the ocean and hope they find each other. - Some mayflies have just four legs, the first pair having developed into "arms" whose only use is restraining a struggling female. - Male anglerfish drift around until they find a (much larger) female, at which point they burrow into her skin, attach permanently, and live as a parasite that occasionally releases sperm. Cicadas may not worry about consent, but insects and other crawly things in general do, as you can tell by the fact that they put on mating displays.
    - at_a_remove 5y ago
      Well, remember, what you are dealing with are basically very small robots with limited programming and a few specialized sensors. "Oh, it is flicking its wings at a certain rate; it must be a female waiting to mate." And so you have a subroutine where you target the basic shape, go in for a landing, clamp on, and start prodding about with your nethers. They're like state machines in many ways. Consider that you can put a single chemical on a live ant that makes other ants think that it is dead. They pick it up and take it to the graveyard. Now it can thrash around and wiggle during this but -- nah, smells dead, is dead. Therefore, pick up and carry to designated graveyard location.
- robotnikman 5y ago
  Maybe only the fungus mates
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  "[The fungus] is sexually transmissible," Kasson tells NPR. "It's a failed mating attempt, of course, because there's no genitalia back there."
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
vmception 5y ago
Sometimes I feel like we are sharing the world with fungus. As in, fungus consciously doesn't generate spores on us because it figured out that we will just grow it and put it in drinks and spread it any way. So using our mental processing power just let fungus realize it didn't have to try to use all its energy on the host capture and spore release routine. And of course, the observation that it has nothing to do with us humans.
- jschwartzi 5y ago
  Have you ever had athlete's foot or jock itch?
  - vmception 5y ago
    From what we can tell they don’t take us over and obviously change our behavior. Someone has to tell us they are on psychadelic mushrooms or took a cordyceps energy drink. Skin infections occur.
- rvbissell 5y ago
  Some podcast -- RadioLab I think -- did an episode on how climate change (specifically, warming) has been putting selective pressure on fungi to make them hardier towards infecting warm-blooded animals... at the very same time that the average human body temperature has been trending down. Not a good thing.
  - berberous 5y ago
    It was RadioLab and it was probably the scariest thing I’ve heard about global warming yet.
    - malshe 5y ago
      By any chance do you know the name of the episode or the episode number? Thanks!
      - 5y ago
chrisco255 5y ago
And this is why I don't do shrooms.
- bdamm 5y ago
  Right. Eating shrooms might fix your brain, and enslave you to think about forests and shrooms with some affection for the rest of your life. It is a tragic outcome for those who prefer to be isolated from nature.
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    My brain is just fine, thank you for looking out though.
neom 5y ago
"In yearly cicadas, the fungus makes them instead become hypersexual from psilocybin — the same chemical found in psychedelic mushrooms." I don't understand what's being said here. The fungus causes them to eat magic mushrooms? Edit: This is a better article: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/massospora-parasite-drugs-its-hosts/566324/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/massospo...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hinkley 5y ago
  Mushrooms are just the fruiting body. Fungal cells don't differentiate, so odds are good that if the mushroom gets you high, eating the dirt under the mushroom - where most of the fungus is - will also do the same thing. If you were somehow infected by one of these mushrooms, you'd be tripping all the time, not unlike the people who have beer yeast in their GI tract are slightly inebriated every time they eat simple sugars.
  - neom 5y ago
    That makes so much sense now. Thank you kindly for clarifying.
  - tastyfreeze 5y ago
    Injecting spores into your blood stream can infect your body with mushrooms. DO NOT DO THIS, it can be fatal. https://www.insider.com/man-injected-with-mushrooms-grew-in-blood-caused-organ-failure-2021-1 https://www.insider.com/man-injected-with-mushrooms-grew-in-...
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      Looks like he had bipolar disorder. Manic episodes can produce imprudent behavior such as this.
    - hinkley 5y ago
ignoramous 5y ago
Reminds me of this NatGeo Hostile Planet video on Cordyceps, a fungi that infects ants [0] It drugs the ant, takes control of its muscles, and forces it to climb up to a spot where there's just enough sunlight and humidity for the fungi to grow some more. 3 weeks in, the ant is all but a breeding ground of Cordyceps ready to unleash on other ants, with enough reach to wipe out entire ant colonies. Here's the kicker, there are over 600 species of Cordyceps that infect a variety of insects. May be the fiction writers have it wrong... It could very well be a Fungus that likely causes a zombie apocalypse, having evolved from lack of rain forests and crawlers to infest... [0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vijGdWn5-h8 https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vijGdWn5-h8
- zeta0134 5y ago
  Indeed, this is the central plot point driving the narrative in The Last of Us. [0] https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/Cordyceps_Brain_Infection https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/Cordyceps_Brain_Infectio...
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > It drugs the ant, takes control of its muscles, and forces it to climb Really? Is the climbing caused by muscular movements provoked by the fungus, or is it caused by the fungus causing the ant to desire to climb up to such a spot, and letting the ant move its own muscles?
- sandworm101 5y ago
  They grow in animals, insects, with 'open' circulatory systems. Something that large growing in our 'closed' circulatory system (blood vessels/tubes) would quickly kill us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulatory_system#Open_circulatory_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulatory_system#Open_circul...
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > It could very well be a Fungus that likely causes a zombie apocalypse This is the plot of The Last of Us.
_tom_ 5y ago
The real question is “how many types of parasites ALREADY modify human behavior”. We know toxoplasmosis does it, but how many have we not yet detected?
- kadoban 5y ago
  We know our gut biome in general has a huge effect on our behavior as well (most obviously around food choices), though I don't think those are technically "parasites". Less interesting but still worth noting, many infections cause us to sneeze and cough in ways that increase the spread of the infection to others. Ain't evolution grand. Another one, I remember that late stage Syphilis in at least some cases causes sexual promiscuity.
  - joaomacp 5y ago
    I've also read that the cold or flu virus makes us seek more human contact and feel more affectionate, supposedly overriding our mind in order to propagate the virus.
    - geoduck14 5y ago
      That explains a lot of bad decisions with the Corona Virus
- everdrive 5y ago
  With toxoplasmosis in particular, people cite that old study over and over. I always wonder to what degree that's been replicated, or to what degree the study's claims have been exaggerated because of their controversial nature. Please bear in mind, I have no particular expertise about this issue, and so it's possible that my doubts here are not well founded.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    This paper, right? https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/33/3/757/1882426 https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/33/3/... The only valid conclusion here is that further study is needed.
Jun8 5y ago
The Screwfly Solution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution) comes to mind, great story by Alice Sheldon.
karaterobot 5y ago
I'm keenly aware that I know next to nothing about biology, but I was wondering about something: If I understand this article correctly, the cicadas that were infected during the last cycle can't impregnate or get impregnated (because, as the article puts it, their butts fall off). However, they can and do infect other cicadas. Shouldn't this this result in every cicada that can get infected getting infected eventually, at which point the population dies off after the next cycle produces no baby cicadas? If so, is the ideas that this is a new fungus, or new behavior, not something that's been around and been at some kind of equilibrium for 1000 years or something?

57 points by cwan 5y ago

> The fungus takes over their bodies, causing them to lose their lower abdomen and genitals. And it pushes their mating into hyperdrive. Unclear. How do they mate, or even attempt to mate, without genitals?

adoxyz 5y ago
"It's a failed mating attempt, of course, because there's no genitalia back there."
- bambax 5y ago
  Yes I read this but it still needs some explanation. I can maybe understand that the infected insect still wants to mate even without genitalia, but why do the sane ones fall for it? I guess I need to learn more about cicada mating habits.
  - samatman 5y ago
    Consent to mate is in fact fairly distinctive to human beings. It's certainly not a concept which applies to insects such as cicadas, which just jump on each other and do the business.
    - scarmig 5y ago
      Bedbugs are a particularly interesting species, in that they practice traumatic insemination[0]. The male, in order to overcome female resistance, rips through her abdomen to deposit his sperm. Large, confined bedbug colonies often go extinct for this reason: all the females end up dead from repeated traumatic insemination. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_insemination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_insemination
      - samatman 5y ago
        Yep. Bedbugs are one of those species where I would have no objection at all to gene-driving them into oblivion.
    - js2 5y ago
      > Consent to mate is in fact fairly distinctive to human beings. What? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtship_display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtship_display
      - samatman 5y ago
        Sure, I said fairly distinctive rather than unique. It's interesting that monogamy and mostly-consensual sex are mostly found in some birds (not you ducks), rather than our closest relatives. There are a lot of mammalian paradigms for sex, for placental mammals in our weight class there's rather a lot of intramale competition, and estrus; the female being willing to be mounted by whatever male happens to win the fight is pretty much orthogonal to consent as we humans understand it. It seems like a pedantic objection given that both the parent and myself were talking about insects, where the concept makes very little sense.
        js2 5y ago
        Fair enough. I read “fairly distinctive” as “virtually unique”. Mantis are an insect with a mating ritual, right? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003347287800246 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00033...
        samatman 5y ago
        > The courtship displays of the male and female may play the role of reducing intraspecific aggression during courtship and thus reducing the likelihood of cannibalism. Whew! I think this also has relatively little to do with consent as humans understand it!
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      Other mating models: - Millipedes generally work on a model where males leave packets of sperm on the ground and females find them and pick them up. Mating does not take place. - Fish may just release sperm / unfertilized eggs into the ocean and hope they find each other. - Some mayflies have just four legs, the first pair having developed into "arms" whose only use is restraining a struggling female. - Male anglerfish drift around until they find a (much larger) female, at which point they burrow into her skin, attach permanently, and live as a parasite that occasionally releases sperm. Cicadas may not worry about consent, but insects and other crawly things in general do, as you can tell by the fact that they put on mating displays.
  - at_a_remove 5y ago
    Well, remember, what you are dealing with are basically very small robots with limited programming and a few specialized sensors. "Oh, it is flicking its wings at a certain rate; it must be a female waiting to mate." And so you have a subroutine where you target the basic shape, go in for a landing, clamp on, and start prodding about with your nethers. They're like state machines in many ways. Consider that you can put a single chemical on a live ant that makes other ants think that it is dead. They pick it up and take it to the graveyard. Now it can thrash around and wiggle during this but -- nah, smells dead, is dead. Therefore, pick up and carry to designated graveyard location.
robotnikman 5y ago
Maybe only the fungus mates
jvanderbot 5y ago
"[The fungus] is sexually transmissible," Kasson tells NPR. "It's a failed mating attempt, of course, because there's no genitalia back there."
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

vmception 5y ago

Sometimes I feel like we are sharing the world with fungus. As in, fungus consciously doesn't generate spores on us because it figured out that we will just grow it and put it in drinks and spread it any way. So using our mental processing power just let fungus realize it didn't have to try to use all its energy on the host capture and spore release routine. And of course, the observation that it has nothing to do with us humans.

jschwartzi 5y ago
Have you ever had athlete's foot or jock itch?
- vmception 5y ago
  From what we can tell they don’t take us over and obviously change our behavior. Someone has to tell us they are on psychadelic mushrooms or took a cordyceps energy drink. Skin infections occur.
rvbissell 5y ago
Some podcast -- RadioLab I think -- did an episode on how climate change (specifically, warming) has been putting selective pressure on fungi to make them hardier towards infecting warm-blooded animals... at the very same time that the average human body temperature has been trending down. Not a good thing.
- berberous 5y ago
  It was RadioLab and it was probably the scariest thing I’ve heard about global warming yet.
  - malshe 5y ago
    By any chance do you know the name of the episode or the episode number? Thanks!
    - 5y ago

chrisco255 5y ago

And this is why I don't do shrooms.

bdamm 5y ago
Right. Eating shrooms might fix your brain, and enslave you to think about forests and shrooms with some affection for the rest of your life. It is a tragic outcome for those who prefer to be isolated from nature.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  My brain is just fine, thank you for looking out though.

neom 5y ago

"In yearly cicadas, the fungus makes them instead become hypersexual from psilocybin — the same chemical found in psychedelic mushrooms." I don't understand what's being said here. The fungus causes them to eat magic mushrooms? Edit: This is a better article: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/massospora-parasite-drugs-its-hosts/566324/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/massospo...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hinkley 5y ago
Mushrooms are just the fruiting body. Fungal cells don't differentiate, so odds are good that if the mushroom gets you high, eating the dirt under the mushroom - where most of the fungus is - will also do the same thing. If you were somehow infected by one of these mushrooms, you'd be tripping all the time, not unlike the people who have beer yeast in their GI tract are slightly inebriated every time they eat simple sugars.
- neom 5y ago
  That makes so much sense now. Thank you kindly for clarifying.
- tastyfreeze 5y ago
  Injecting spores into your blood stream can infect your body with mushrooms. DO NOT DO THIS, it can be fatal. https://www.insider.com/man-injected-with-mushrooms-grew-in-blood-caused-organ-failure-2021-1 https://www.insider.com/man-injected-with-mushrooms-grew-in-...
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Looks like he had bipolar disorder. Manic episodes can produce imprudent behavior such as this.
  - hinkley 5y ago

ignoramous 5y ago

Reminds me of this NatGeo Hostile Planet video on Cordyceps, a fungi that infects ants [0] It drugs the ant, takes control of its muscles, and forces it to climb up to a spot where there's just enough sunlight and humidity for the fungi to grow some more. 3 weeks in, the ant is all but a breeding ground of Cordyceps ready to unleash on other ants, with enough reach to wipe out entire ant colonies. Here's the kicker, there are over 600 species of Cordyceps that infect a variety of insects. May be the fiction writers have it wrong... It could very well be a Fungus that likely causes a zombie apocalypse, having evolved from lack of rain forests and crawlers to infest... [0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vijGdWn5-h8 https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vijGdWn5-h8

zeta0134 5y ago
Indeed, this is the central plot point driving the narrative in The Last of Us. [0] https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/Cordyceps_Brain_Infection https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/Cordyceps_Brain_Infectio...
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> It drugs the ant, takes control of its muscles, and forces it to climb Really? Is the climbing caused by muscular movements provoked by the fungus, or is it caused by the fungus causing the ant to desire to climb up to such a spot, and letting the ant move its own muscles?
sandworm101 5y ago
They grow in animals, insects, with 'open' circulatory systems. Something that large growing in our 'closed' circulatory system (blood vessels/tubes) would quickly kill us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulatory_system#Open_circulatory_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulatory_system#Open_circul...
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> It could very well be a Fungus that likely causes a zombie apocalypse This is the plot of The Last of Us.

_tom_ 5y ago

The real question is “how many types of parasites ALREADY modify human behavior”. We know toxoplasmosis does it, but how many have we not yet detected?

kadoban 5y ago
We know our gut biome in general has a huge effect on our behavior as well (most obviously around food choices), though I don't think those are technically "parasites". Less interesting but still worth noting, many infections cause us to sneeze and cough in ways that increase the spread of the infection to others. Ain't evolution grand. Another one, I remember that late stage Syphilis in at least some cases causes sexual promiscuity.
- joaomacp 5y ago
  I've also read that the cold or flu virus makes us seek more human contact and feel more affectionate, supposedly overriding our mind in order to propagate the virus.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    That explains a lot of bad decisions with the Corona Virus
everdrive 5y ago
With toxoplasmosis in particular, people cite that old study over and over. I always wonder to what degree that's been replicated, or to what degree the study's claims have been exaggerated because of their controversial nature. Please bear in mind, I have no particular expertise about this issue, and so it's possible that my doubts here are not well founded.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  This paper, right? https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/33/3/757/1882426 https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/33/3/... The only valid conclusion here is that further study is needed.

Jun8 5y ago

The Screwfly Solution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution) comes to mind, great story by Alice Sheldon.

karaterobot 5y ago

I'm keenly aware that I know next to nothing about biology, but I was wondering about something: If I understand this article correctly, the cicadas that were infected during the last cycle can't impregnate or get impregnated (because, as the article puts it, their butts fall off). However, they can and do infect other cicadas. Shouldn't this this result in every cicada that can get infected getting infected eventually, at which point the population dies off after the next cycle produces no baby cicadas? If so, is the ideas that this is a new fungus, or new behavior, not something that's been around and been at some kind of equilibrium for 1000 years or something?