Bug Facts - Tumblr Posts
Footnote: Seen this before? Feel like seeing more? This is my new blog! Due to some technical issues with the old one, I will be rblging the original MMM and CFF posts on this account, as well as continuing both lil series! Another reason to bring this back was because since I let this particular write-up one rip, one of y'all @poor-reconstruction off-handedly mentioned something in the tags and I haven't been able to go more than a week or two since without thinking about it. So I have no choice but to subject more people to the horrors of knowledge now.
Creacher Feature Friday 3: Mushrooms that Turn the Fricken’ BUGS Gay!!
Let’s have a bit of real talk for a second. The fungi kingdom is… weird. Really, really weird. Borderline alien weird, to me, least, relative to the rest of this planet. People kind of slot them in their minds somewhere next to plants as the default for the superficial resemblance, but in a lot of fundamental ways they’re actually way closer of a comparison to bacteria or animals.
I collect parasitoid wasps as a hobby, and the concept of fungi, especially the more microscopic sorts, still personally freaks me out, in that kind of “this feels like a far fetched sci-fi idea but somehow is just casually a part of the mundane world” way. And know, I’m glad it seems that modern writers and media seem are catching up and agreeing with that sentiment. Resident Evil 7 and Discover My Body both tapped into the horror potential of mycelium with amazing results, and cordyceps (the infamous “ant zombie” mushrooms) straight up inspired the entire premise of the Last of Us.
And as interesting as the cordyceps group is, i think by now enough people have given their own 2 cents and reaction to what they do and how they hijack host behavior in order to propagate; well, how’d you feel if I instead stepped in to tell you they actually aren’t quite so special, exotic, or even a fluke? What if there was another, even more stranger-than-fiction, parasitic spore potentially prowling temperate backyards, and you never even knew it?
Strap in, and get ready to get learnt all about the bane of periodical cicadas, and appropriately named Massospora cicadina!
Graphic sourced by Wikipedia
So in breaking some of this down, I need to let you know something neat about cicadas themselves first.
There’s thousands of individual species and they are broadly categorized into one of two groups: the annual cicadas, which emerge and reproduce along a unsynchronized yearly cycle, being spotted each spring-summer in parts of North America, and then there’s the periodical cicadas. This handful developmentally synchronizes within their own species and live a surprisingly long time, spending most of their lives as underground nymphs and then emerging only once in over a decade! 13/17 years about, depending on the variety. Now there’s a cool bug fact.
Since they line up their development to have effectively the entire population emerge and breed at the same time, it follows that they make massive swarms when the occasion arrives. It’s a reproductive strategy formally called Predator satiation and it works like this: “well they can’t eat all of us!” I.e. Safety in overwhelming numbers without giving their predators a large enough window to accommodate the boom by also reproducing and swelling their own population in turn. While this few and so far in between baby-boom strategy is fantastic at outpacing predation, you know what it’s vulnerable to?
Sexually transmitted fungus. Massospora cicadina happens to be a very picky pathogen, and so it specializes to only target these periodical cicadas rather than annual ones.
My mutuals might have already caught on that this is a bit of a sequel to my first Creacher Feature piece I wrote up, about promiscuous ladybugs and their own relationship with a similar, mostly cosmetic, but not that detrimental “STF”.
That benign organism doesn’t have shit on Massospora cicadina. This stuff almost makes cordyceps look tame by comparison.
Once a cicada contracts these spores, either through the act of mating or by contact with contaminated soil as unlucky nymph, it’s game set and match for that bug. Situated inside the abdomen of an adult specimen, the pathogen gets straight to work just underneath the surface, quietly hollowing out the insect’s abdomen and replacing once healthy organs and reproductive equipment with little more than a big, chalky mass of nothing but more fungus. The cicada’s own genitals and terminal body segments, useless to the infection’s goals, will fall off entirely, which means that the host is rendered completely sterile.
Though, this won’t stop them from still trying to mate with healthy cicadas, in fact, more than the opposite. Once pieces of the abdomen begin to fall away they will reveal the fungal “plug” to be able to spread spores in the cicada’s wake as it drags along the ground, looking something like this
^ As I call ‘em, Nature’s Forbidden salt shaker✨
To help encourage even further reach, Massospora cicadina will also crank up the host’s drive to breed even higher, with a creative twist that makes males particularly effective spore spreaders. In typical courtship, a male cicada uses his singing as a way of attracting females, who then signal their receptiveness by doing a flicking sort of gesture with their wings. Males infected with a parasitic fungus will actually mimic this behavior, actively inviting other male cicadas to mount them, even while they themselves are also still seeking to copulate with any available females. Eventually, this host is basically left a shambling husk, only serving to pass along the contagion to both members of either sex, all while its own innards are still sloughing and flaking out of its underside. Indeed, it will continue to be this up until it finally succumbs and dies. Cicadina’s evolution seriously decided “what if we did Syphilis, but also zombies?”
Now I’d like to see a screenwriter with some balls give a crack at getting a THAT concept greenlit for a large production, but also not really that sounds… EuGH, if you know what I’m saying. But also hilarious.
“Witness the terror of the living dead as you never have before! Horny Rabies, swarming into theaters this summer! Rated PG-13“
If there’s any further thoughts I have aside from the potential jokes, it’s that this is really another one of those fascinating things to rather be respected than only feared at the end of the day (unless you’re a cicada which, sucks for you I guess). Even for a strategy as crafty and potentially destructive as an insect’s 17-year periodic spawns, nature does find a way, no matter how bizarre, to keep its systems in check from being overwhelmed. But damn if I’m not glad there’s no equivalent pathogen specialized for our neck of the evolutionary tree.
Until next week, don’t be afraid to offer up some suggestions for future rambling!
Have any of you ever heard of the hummingbird moths we get in Britain?
So, I thought I saw a hummingbird last year. It was much bigger than a bug could be, I thought, and it hovered around flowers and looked like it had feathers.
I got pretty close but it was never still enough to see clearly. Then, when I told my parents they said "oh! it was probably a moth!" and I was baffled for a long time. Like, how could a moth look like and act so much like a hummingbird?
Until I googled "hummingbirds in the UK" and this fucker comes up:
Everyone, meet the hummingbird hawk-moth; one of the weirdest and coolest cases of convergent evolution on this planet.
This is the kinda thing I'd see in fiction and go "oooh cool, bug hummingbird! Wish we had those on earth!" But we do. We really do have them on earth!! Isn't that nuts?!?!?
ok guys. i like moths so here's a bunch of moth facts about these beautiful things!
the females have wingspans up to seven or more inches (THAT'S WILD GUYS)!! and they can lay up to one hundred eggs!
the caterpillars change color from black, to yellow-green, to blue-green!!!
they're also univoltine species, meaning they have one generation per year!
they're also mainly found near maple trees, and range from nova scocia, to maine, to florida! and they can be found as far west as washington!!
thank you for listening to my rambles.
hese Hyalophora cecropia are the largest moths found in North America
Anyway while we're on the subject of public misconception towards living things (which is completely understandable because have you SEEN living things? There's like dozens of them!) here's a fresh rundown of some common mistakes about bugs!
Arachnids aren't just spiders! They're also scorpions, mites, ticks and some real weirdos out there
Insects with wings are always finished growing! Wings are the last new thing they ever develop! There can never be a "baby bee" that's just a smaller bee flying around.
That said, not all insects have larvae! Many older insect groups do look like little versions of adults....but the wings rule still applies.
Insects do have brains! Lobes and everything!
Only the Hymenoptera (bees, ants and wasps) have stingers like that.
Not all bees and wasps live in colonies with queens
The only non-hymenoptera with queens are termites, which is convergent evolution, because termites are a type of cockroach!
There are still other insects with colonial lifestyles to various degrees which can include special reproductive castes, just not the whole "queen" setup.
Even ants still deviate from that; there are multi-queen ant species, some species where the whole colony is just females who clone themselves and other outliers
There is no "hive mind;" social insects coordinate no differently from schools of fish, flocks of birds, or for that matter crowds of humans! They're just following the same signals together and communicating to each other!
Not all mosquito species carry disease, and not all of them bite people
Mosquitoes ARE ecologically very important and nobody in science ever actually said otherwise
The bite of a black widow is so rarely deadly that the United States doesn't bother stocking antivenin despite hundreds of reported bites per year. It just feels really really bad and they give you painkillers.
Recluse venom does damage skin, but only in the tiny area surrounding the bite. More serious cases are due to this dead skin inviting bacterial infection, and in fact our hospitals don't carry recluse antivenin either; they just prescribe powerful antibiotics, which has been fully effective at treating confirmed bites.
Bed bugs are real actual specific insects
"Cooties" basically are, too; it's old slang for lice
Crane flies aren't "mosquito hawks;" they actually don't eat at all!
Hobo spiders aren't really found to have a dangerous bite, leaving only widows and recluses as North America's "medically significant" spiders
Domestic honeybees actually kill far more people than hornets, including everywhere the giant "murder" hornet naturally occurs.
Wasps are only "less efficient" pollinators in that less pollen sticks to them per wasp. They are still absolutely critical pollinators and many flowers are pollinated by wasps exclusively.
Flies are also as important or more important to pollination than bees.
For "per insect" pollination efficiency it's now believed that moths also beat bees
Honeybees are non-native to most of the world and not great for the local ecosystem, they're just essential to us and our food industry
Getting a botfly is unpleasant and can become painful, but they aren't actually dangerous and they don't eat your flesh; they essentially push the flesh out of the way to create a chamber and they feed on fluids your immune system keeps making in response to the intrusion. They also keep this chamber free of bacterial infection because that would harm them too!
Botflies also exist in most parts of the world, but only one species specializes partially in humans (and primates in general, but can make do with a few other hosts)
"Kissing bugs" are a group of a couple unusual species of assassin bug. Only the kissing bugs evolved to feed on blood; other assassin bugs just eat other insects.