[neom]

"In yearly cicadas, the fungus makes them instead become hypersexual from psilocybin — the same chemical found in psychedelic mushrooms."

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...

[hinkley]

Mushrooms are just the fruiting body. Fungal cells don't differentiate, so odds are good that if the mushroom gets you high, eating the dirt under the mushroom - where most of the fungus is - will also do the same 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.

[tastyfreeze]

Injecting spores into your blood stream can infect your body with mushrooms. DO NOT DO THIS, it can be fatal.

https://www.insider.com/man-injected-with-mushrooms-grew-in-...

[hinkley]

Wait. If he boiled the mushrooms, how did get spores? Does that mean Agaricales spores can survive 100ºC? Yikes.

[matheusmoreira]

Looks like he had bipolar disorder. Manic episodes can produce imprudent behavior such as this.

[neom]

That makes so much sense now. Thank you kindly for clarifying.

[GauntletWizard]

Psilocybin is the active ingredient (a psychedelic prodrug, or drug precursor that's metabolized into a drug) in Magic Mushrooms. The fungus generates psilocybin and sheds it into the cicada, causing them to become hypersexual.

[hinkley]

I did not realize just how many different kind of mushrooms produce that chemical. All over order Agaricales.

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?

[neom]

I wonder how the fungus knew how to make psilocybin, and that psilocybin was the right thing to make? Nature is pretty intense.

[bdamm]

Presumably this is an outcome of selective breeding. The symbiotic interaction results in more offspring for both species. The invisible hand of mother gaia "knows".

[besnn00]

But the cicadas have no genitalia at that point.

[happytoexplain]

I don't totally follow your confusion - it's "the same chemical found in magic mushrooms". It's not implying they consume magic mushrooms.

[pmoriarty]

This reminds me of the film that kicked off David Cronenberg's career (and also one of the first films in the body horror genre): Shivers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shivers_(film)