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A fungus that infects cicadas and pushes their mating into hyperdrive

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Re: A fungus that infects cicadas and pushes their mating into hyperdrive

#41

Post by samatman »

js2 wrote: post #31
samatman wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Consent to mate is in fact fairly distinctive to human beings. What? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtship_display

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.

Re: A fungus that infects cicadas and pushes their mating into hyperdrive

#42

Post by at_a_remove »

bambax wrote: post #7
adoxyz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's a failed mating attempt, of course, because there's no genitalia back there."

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.

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.

Re: A fungus that infects cicadas and pushes their mating into hyperdrive

#43

Post by karaterobot »

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?

Re: A fungus that infects cicadas and pushes their mating into hyperdrive

#44

Post by joaomacp »

kadoban wrote: post #34
_tom_ wrote: post #25

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?

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 se…

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.

Re: A fungus that infects cicadas and pushes their mating into hyperdrive

#45

Post by chrisco255 »

bdamm wrote: post #40
chrisco255 wrote: post #12

And this is why I don't do shrooms.

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.

My brain is just fine, thank you for looking out though.

Re: A fungus that infects cicadas and pushes their mating into hyperdrive

#46

Post by matheusmoreira »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #24
hinkley wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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-...

Looks like he had bipolar disorder. Manic episodes can produce imprudent behavior such as this.

Re: A fungus that infects cicadas and pushes their mating into hyperdrive

#47

Post by matheusmoreira »

ignoramous wrote: post #23

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,…

> It could very well be a Fungus that likely causes a zombie apocalypse

This is the plot of The Last of Us.

Re: A fungus that infects cicadas and pushes their mating into hyperdrive

#48

Post by pmoriarty »

neom wrote: post #13

"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/massospo...

This reminds me of the film that kicked off David Cronenberg's career (and also one of the first films in the body horror genre): Shivers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shivers_(film)

Re: A fungus that infects cicadas and pushes their mating into hyperdrive

#49

Post by matheusmoreira »

everdrive wrote: post #35
_tom_ wrote: post #25

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?

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.

This paper, right?

https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/33/3/...

The only valid conclusion here is that further study is needed.

Re: A fungus that infects cicadas and pushes their mating into hyperdrive

#50

Post by geoduck14 »

joaomacp wrote: post #44
kadoban wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

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.

That explains a lot of bad decisions with the Corona Virus
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