Here's the kicker, there are over 600 species of Cordyceps that infect a variety of insects.
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...
https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/Cordyceps_Brain_Infectio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulatory_system#Open_circul...
Really? Is the climbing caused by muscular movements provoked by the fungus, or is it caused by the fungus causing the ant to desire to climb up to such a spot, and letting the ant move its own muscles?
This is the plot of The Last of Us.
We know toxoplasmosis does it, but how many have we not yet detected?
Please bear in mind, I have no particular expertise about this issue, and so it's possible that my doubts here are not well founded.
https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/33/3/...
The only valid conclusion here is that further study is needed.
Less interesting but still worth noting, many infections cause us to sneeze and cough in ways that increase the spread of the infection to others. Ain't evolution grand.
Another one, I remember that late stage Syphilis in at least some cases causes sexual promiscuity.
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?
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?
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...
Unclear. How do they mate, or even attempt to mate, without genitals?
I guess I need to learn more about cicada mating habits.
And of course, the observation that it has nothing to do with us humans.
We, as cousins to fungi, get to enjoy the literal and figurative fruits of their labor.
Not a good thing.
If you were somehow infected by one of these mushrooms, you'd be tripping all the time, not unlike the people who have beer yeast in their GI tract are slightly inebriated every time they eat simple sugars.
https://www.insider.com/man-injected-with-mushrooms-grew-in-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin_mushroom
So what's weird is that Massopora isn't even in the same division as Agaricales. They're both fungi. So what does that mean? That the classification is wrong, convergeant evolution, or fungi have been making drugs for an insanely long time?
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/10/02/when-the-yogurt-took-...
Skin infections occur.
And so you have a subroutine where you target the basic shape, go in for a landing, clamp on, and start prodding about with your nethers. They're like state machines in many ways.
Consider that you can put a single chemical on a live ant that makes other ants think that it is dead. They pick it up and take it to the graveyard. Now it can thrash around and wiggle during this but -- nah, smells dead, is dead. Therefore, pick up and carry to designated graveyard location.
- Millipedes generally work on a model where males leave packets of sperm on the ground and females find them and pick them up. Mating does not take place.
- Fish may just release sperm / unfertilized eggs into the ocean and hope they find each other.
- Some mayflies have just four legs, the first pair having developed into "arms" whose only use is restraining a struggling female.
- Male anglerfish drift around until they find a (much larger) female, at which point they burrow into her skin, attach permanently, and live as a parasite that occasionally releases sperm.
Cicadas may not worry about consent, but insects and other crawly things in general do, as you can tell by the fact that they put on mating displays.
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 fight is pretty much orthogonal to consent as we humans understand it.
It seems like a pedantic objection given that both the parent and myself were talking about insects, where the concept makes very little sense.
Mantis are an insect with a mating ritual, right?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00033...
Whew! I think this also has relatively little to do with consent as humans understand it!