Welcome to the Kotke Ride Home for Friday, May 21st, 2021. I'm Jackson Bird.

The Brood X cicadas have re-emerged and are losing their butts due to a zombie-inducing fungus.

Bald eagles are re-emerging from the brink of extinction, causing a new trend in puppy fashion.

Incredibly punk, spiky vests.

And one of the best fictional bands, Mouse Rat, has re-emerged from The Pit to produce an actual real album coming later this summer.

Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

We need to talk about the cicadas. They're not okay. I've talked about Brood X, the currently emerging group of periodical cicadas,

a number of times on this show in preparation for their return across the eastern U.S.,

but now that they're here, things have gotten even weirder than some of us expected.

Quoting NPR, a fungus called massospora, which can produce compounds of cathanone and amphetamine,

infects a small number of cicadas and makes them lose control. The fungus takes over their

bodies, causing them to lose their lower abdomen and genitals, and it pushes their mating into

hyperdrive, end quote. Or as reported Tara Galshan described it on

Twitter, cicadas, they're tripping on shrooms, losing their genitals, and have a rampant

STD problem. Incredible stuff, end quote. Tripping on shrooms, you say? Well, not exactly,

although there is apparently another type of fungi called opiochordyceps,

which attacks cicadas while they're underground, pushing them to emerge onto the forest floor early,

where they then die, and the fungus sprouts out of the cicada's body into a mushroom.

Yeah, it's wild. But this other one, Massispora, which is infecting about

10% of brood-X cicadas right now, it causes symptoms that are making some scientists

refer to the infected cicadas as zombies and flying salt shakers of death. Here's a bit more

on how it all goes down, quoting the Washington Post.

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