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Collecting sex-crazed zombie cicadas on speed: Scientists track a bug-controlling super-sized fungus

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Published 7:30 AM

By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer

LISLE, Illinois (AP) — With their bulging red eyes and their alien-like mating sound, periodical cicadas can seem scary and weird enough. But some of them really are sex-crazed zombies on speed, hijacked by a super-sized fungus. West Virginia University mycology professor Matt Kasson, his 9-year-old son Oliver, and graduate student Angie Macias are tracking the nasty fungus, called Massospora cicadina. It is the only fungus on Earth that makes amphetamine — the drug called speed — in a critter when it takes over. The fungus takes control over the cicada, makes them hypersexual, looking to spread the parasite as a sexually transmitted disease.

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