Cicadas | #funnyemails

Read this in David Attenborough’s voice

Posted on April 3, 2021 by Pradeep

UConn researchers recently documented in Nature Scientific Reports a gory and fascinating relationship between periodical cicadas and a fungus that infects them, hijacks their behavior, and causes a scene straight out of a zombie movie.

“It’s a fun story for us, not for the cicadas,” says UConn ecology and evolutionary biology researcher and adjunct faculty member John Cooley.

Though researchers have known about the fungus for around 100 years, Cooley and his colleagues David Marshall, a postdoc, and lab technician Kathy Hill have published new findings about the infection.

The story starts with the cicadas’ emergence, when around 2 to 5 percent are infected with spores of a fungus called Massospora cicadina. Though the fungus infects both male and female cicadas, the researchers discovered that early in the emergence, the infection — at this point called a Stage I infection — causes curious behavioral changes in males where, in addition to their normal mating behaviors, they will exhibit wing flicking that is typically seen only in female cicadas.

The infected male cicadas put on a ruse, much like the Sirens of Greek myths; they flick their wings like a female, and lure in healthy unsuspecting males, who get close enough to be exposed to the spores, leading to their doom. The diseased males will also attempt to copulate with the uninfected females, exposing them to even more spores….

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