A fungus that infects cicadas and pushes their mating into hyperdrive

Post by pmoriarty » Thu, May 20, 2021, 10:13 PM UTC

tastyfreeze wrote: post #16

vmception wrote: post #9

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 wi…

What we consider lower forms of life have been around a lot longer than us. Fungus predate plants and originally ate minerals. They created the soil for plants to even evolve. Plants evolved in an environment created and controlled by fungus. Many plants have a symbiotic relationship with fungus. Entire ecosystems are connected and communicate by a mycorrhizal network. We owe our entire existence to fungus.

Post by hinkley » Thu, May 20, 2021, 10:55 PM UTC

GauntletWizard wrote: post #20

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...

Psilocybin is the active ingredient (a psychedelic prodrug, or drug precursor that's metabolized into a drug) in Magic Mushrooms. The fungus generates psilocybin and sheds it into the cicada, causing them to become hypersexual.

Post by samatman » Thu, May 20, 2021, 11:47 PM UTC

js2 wrote: post #52

samatman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 figh…

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/S00033...

Post by rvbissell » Fri, May 21, 2021, 2:08 AM UTC

malshe wrote: post #56

berberous wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was RadioLab and it was probably the scariest thing I’ve heard about global warming yet.

By any chance do you know the name of the episode or the episode number? Thanks!