If you hear screaming in the trees this month, don’t panic. It’s not the apocalypse (probably)—it’s Brood XIV, the latest wave of periodical cicadas rising from the dirt like horny little undead. After 17 years underground, billions of them are emerging across the eastern U.S. for one brief, insane mission: climb, molt, scream, mate, die.
But for a significant number, the story takes a darker turn. Massospora cicadina, a parasitic fungus, infects their bodies and rewires their behavior in the most grotesque way possible. Basically, The Last of Us in real life.
“It’s sex, drugs and zombies,” says John Cooley, evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut. “Nature is stranger than any science fiction that’s ever been written.”
Here’s how it works. The fungus infects the cicada, devours its abdomen—including its genitals—and replaces everything with a chalky plug of spores. But instead of lying down and rotting, the cicada keeps trying to mate. Even more disturbing: infected males start flicking their wings like females to lure in healthy males, who then get infected too. It’s fungus as STI, weaponized through deception.
And the drugs? Real. M. cicadina floods its hosts with cathinone, a stimulant found in khat—a plant chewed recreationally in some parts of the world. In cicadas, it likely helps keep the infected bug active and desperate to spread its fungal payload.
A Fungus Is Turning Cicadas Into Horny Zombies
Massospora has been perfecting this madness for over 100 million years. “When you’re dealing with something that spends 16.9 years underground, there’s a lot of uncertainty there,” says Matt Kasson, a mycologist at West Virginia University. Scientists still don’t fully understand how the fungus times its attack or how many types of spores it can produce, but they do know this: when Brood XIV shows up, the zombies come with it.
This year, the emergence will stretch from Georgia to Massachusetts, with heavy activity in Kentucky and Tennessee. That’s also where the highest zombie counts are expected. “I would expect to see a lot more Massospora in Kentucky and Tennessee this year than in some places like Pennsylvania or Massachusetts,” entomologist Chris Alice Kratzer told Scientific American.
If you’re into citizen science (or just morbid curiosity), uploading zombie sightings to platforms like iNaturalist actually helps researchers map the infection. “Anyone with a camera or a microphone can contribute,” Kratzer says.
At peak density, there can be up to 1.5 million cicadas per acre. So if you miss the zombies, you’ll at least catch the spectacle. “Everybody loves a spectacle,” Cooley says. “And if these aren’t a spectacle, I don’t know what is.”
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