Nature’s weirdos are invading – and an STD can turn them into zombies

The cicadas that are about to infest large parts of the United States aren't just plentiful, they're downright weird.

The largest geographic brood in the nation, called Brood XIX and coming out every 13 years, is about to march through the Southeast, having already created countless boreholes in the red Georgia clay. It’s a sure sign of the coming cicada occupation. They emerge when the ground warms to 64 degrees (17.8 degrees Celsius), which is happening earlier than it used to because of climate change, entomologists said. The bugs are brown at first but darken as they mature.

The last time these two broods came out together in 1803 Thomas Jefferson, who wrote about cicadas in his Garden Book but mistakenly called them locusts, was president.

These insects are the strongest urinators in the animal kingdom with flows that put humans and elephants to shame. They have pumps in their heads that pull moisture from the roots of trees, allowing them to feed for more than a decade underground. They are rescuers of caterpillars.

And they are being ravaged by a sexually transmitted disease that turns them into zombies.

Inside trees are sugary, nutrient-heavy saps that flow through tissue called phloem. Most insects love the sap. But not cicadas — they go for tissue called xylem, which carries mostly water and a bit of nutrients.

And it's not easy to get into the xylem, which doesn't just flow out when a bug taps into it because it's under negative pressure. The cicada can get the fluid because its outsized head has a pump, said University of Alabama Huntsville entomologist Carrie Deans.

They use their proboscis like a tiny straw — about the width of a hair — with the pump sucking out the liquid, said Georgia Tech biophysics professor Saad Bhamla. They spend nearly their entire lives drinking, year after year.

“It's a hard way to make a living,” Deans said.

All that watery fluid has to come out the other end. And boy does it.

Bhamla in March published a study of the urination flow rates of animals across the world. Cicadas were clearly king, peeing two to three times stronger and faster than elephants and humans. He couldn't look at the periodical cicadas that mostly feed and pee underground, but he used video to record and measure the flow rate of their Amazon cousins, which topped out around 10 feet per second (3 meters per second).

They have a muscle that pushes the waste through a tiny hole like a jet, Bhamla said. He said he learned this when in the Amazon he happened on a tree the locals called a “weeping tree” because liquid was flowing down, like the plant was crying. It was cicada pee.

“You walk around in a forest where they're actively chorusing on a hot sunny day. It feels like it's raining,” said University of Connecticut entomologist John Cooley. That's their honeydew or waste product coming out the back end ... It's called cicada rain."

In the years and areas where cicadas come out, caterpillars enjoy a cicada reprieve.

University of Maryland entomologist Dan Gruner studied caterpillars after the 2021 cicada emergence in the mid-Atlantic. He found that the bugs that turn into moths survived the spring in bigger numbers because the birds that usually eat them were too busy getting cicadas.

Periodical cicadas are “lazy, fat and slow,” Gruner said. “They're extraordinarily easy to capture for us and for their predators.”

There's a deadly sexually transmitted disease, a fungus, that turns cicadas into zombies and causes their private parts to fall off, Cooley said.

It's a real problem that “is even stranger than science fiction,” Cooley said. “This is a sexually transmitted zombie disease.”

Cooley has seen areas in the Midwest where up to 10% of the individuals were infected.

The fungus is also the type that has hallucinatory effects on birds that would eat them, Cooley said.

This white fungus takes over the male, their gonads are torn from their body and chalky spores are spread around to nearby other cicadas, he said. The insects are sterilized, not killed. This way the fungus uses the cicadas to spread to others.