Did you grow up on Mars? We used to catch those things by the firstful as kids. You would also see their empty shells on leaves or trees. They talk about them hibernating, but they were always around where I grew up. I think they are kind of cool. If you've ever gone out on a summer evening and heard a kind of loud buzzing it was probably a cicada. We called them locusts though...although I know some people call grasshoppers locusts.
Something else that scares me is driving next to fully loaded car carriers. They always look like the vehicles on the top are about to fall off onto the cars next to them on the road.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/scien...-cicadas-2021/
Quinn-Farber and tens of thousands of others have signed up to take part in an unprecedented crowdsourcing effort in the coming weeks to track the largest emergence of cicadas in the country. Using Cicada Safari, an app developed by researchers at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, their contributions will potentially offer the most comprehensive look at the cicada tsunami — and help scientists better understand how urban development may contribute to cicadas’ decline and why the insects emerge in 13- and 17-year intervals, a strange mating schedule that still puzzles entomologists.
After 17 years underground, the Brood X periodical cicadas are slowly emerging in 15 states across the East Coast and Midwest.
They'll shed their skins and spend four to six weeks mating before the females lay eggs and they all die.
But some of them are getting wilder in their short lives above ground.
A fungus called Massospora, which can produce compounds of cathinone ? an amphetamine ? infects a small number of them and makes them lose control.
The fungus takes over their bodies, causing them to lose their lower abdomen and genitals. And it pushes their mating into hyperdrive.
"This is stranger than fiction," Matt Kasson, an associate professor of forest pathology and mycology at West Virginia University, tells NPR's All Things Considered. "To have something that's being manipulated by a fungus, to be hypersexual and to have prolonged stamina and just mate like crazy."
Kasson, who has been studying Massospora for about five years, says just before the cicadas rise from the ground, the spores of the fungus start to infect the bug. Once it's above ground and starts to shed its skin to become an adult, its butt falls off.
Then a "white plug of fungus" starts to grow in its place.
"It looks as if the backside of the cicada is being replaced either by chalk or by like one of those nubby middle school erasers," Kasson says.
The insects have no idea what's happening. The fungus, however, is "pulling the strings" and making the cicadas want to mate with everyone.
Males that are infected will continue to mate with females, but they'll also pretend to be females so they can spread the fungus to even more partners.
"It's sexually transmissible," Kasson tells NPR. "It's a failed mating attempt, of course, because there's no genitalia back there."
The fungus causes different reactions in different types of cicadas. Periodical cicadas, which take more than a decade between appearances, get sex crazy from cathinone. In yearly cicadas, the fungus makes them instead become hypersexual from psilocybin ? the same chemical found in psychedelic mushrooms.
Kasson estimates Massospora probably infects fewer than 5% of cicadas. And as far as he knows, the bugs are not in any pain.
"Everybody's having a good time while they're infected," he says. "So I don't imagine there's much pain ? maybe a desire to listen to the Grateful Dead or something like that, but no pain."
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/99799...adas-sex-crazy
Ive been forewarned about the cicada situation. They are in full effect in Ohio. Im on my way home now.
Does anyone remember the pics of various body parts with the lotus flower pods superimposed on them to look like some kinda worm infestation? The stories were always about people with worms that had burrowed into their body parts. The grossest one was the worm boob. That shit still creeps me out even though I knew exactly what it was when I saw it but to this day I can't look at lotus pods without my skin crawling.
"Theoretical physics can prove that an elephant can hang from a cliff with its tail tied to a daisy. But use your eyes, your common sense".... JIM GARRISON
That's called trypophobia, and apparently it's fairly common.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trypophobia
Yep! They didn't bother me as much, but there's an actual name for people that can't handle pores or openings like that. It's called Trypophobia.
*warning, photos of such at link*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trypophobia
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