Reminds me of this NatGeo <i>Hostile Planet</i> 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.<p>Here's the kicker, there are over 600 species of Cordyceps that infect a variety of insects.<p>May be the fiction writers have it wrong... It could very well be a Fungus that likely causes a zombie apocalypse, having evolved from lack of rain forests and crawlers to infest...<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vijGdWn5-h8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vijGdWn5-h8</a>
The real question is “how many types of parasites ALREADY modify human behavior”.<p>We know toxoplasmosis does it, but how many have we not yet detected?
I'm keenly aware that I know next to nothing about biology, but I was wondering about something:<p>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?<p>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?
"In yearly cicadas, the fungus makes them instead become hypersexual from psilocybin — the same chemical found in psychedelic mushrooms."<p>I don't understand what's being said here. The fungus causes them to eat magic mushrooms?<p>Edit: This is a better article: <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/massospora-parasite-drugs-its-hosts/566324/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/massospo...</a>
The <i>Screwfly Solution</i> (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution</a>) comes to mind, great story by Alice Sheldon.
> <i>The fungus takes over their bodies, causing them to lose their lower abdomen and genitals. And it pushes their mating into hyperdrive.</i><p>Unclear. How do they mate, or even attempt to mate, without genitals?
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.<p>And of course, the observation that it has nothing to do with us humans.