Cicadas are loud, annoying, and ugly but you can’t call them coy. Nothing says “the warm weather is finally here” like a bunch of male bugs screaming into the abyss in the hopes that it will make a female bug want to have sex with them. And this year we’re extra lucky becausewill be singing for sex this spring. But these aren’t just any cicadas—because some of them will be infected with a fungal STD that turns them into “hyper-sexual” zombie cicadas.
But, Kasson warned, infected cicadas will also exhibit “hyper-sexualized behavior. So, males for example, they’ll continue to try and mate with females—unsuccessfully, because again, their back end is a fungus.” And they won’t be particularly biologically discerning either: “They’ll also pretend to be females to get males to come to them,” Kasson said. “And that doubles the number of cicadas that an infected individual comes in contact with.