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Scientists think hagfish slime could be the next eco-friendly, high-performance material.

Would You Wear Clothing Made of Slime?

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 Butt-less Cicadas
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 Posted: July 2, 2015


 Imagine if after a lifetime underground, you only had a few glorious weeks to live in the sun, eat, and mate… and then your butt fell off.


 I’m Anna Rothschild, and this is Gross Science.


 If you’ve ever been to the countryside in the eastern half of the US, you might have heard the buzz of cicadas in the air. And if you’ve seen my buddy Joe’s video over at It’s OK To Be Smart, you know that some of these gossamer-winged, singing insects called periodical cicadas are elusive—they only appear every 13 or 17 years, depending on the species.


 Baby cicadas spend their long childhoods deep underground. If they’re lucky, they emerge after 13 or 17 years to spend their month-long adult lives drinking sap and procreating. But if they’re unlucky, they could spend those precious days sharing their body with a fungus that eats them from the inside out.


 The fungus is called
 
 Massospora cicadina
 
 , and it specifically infects periodical cicadas. Its spores lie dormant near the surface of the soil, waiting for cicadas to start tunneling out of the ground. Then the spores invade the emerging cicadas’ abdomens and begin replicating. And when the insects start looking for love a few days later, they spread the fungus from cicada to cicada during their hour-long copulation sessions. Eventually, the fungus expands to such an extent that it splits the cicada’s abdomen open, causing its butt to fall right off.


 Surprisingly, the cicadas don’t seem to mind. They carry on as they were, flying around and attempting to mate—which allows them to spread the fungus far and wide. One student who wrote a great article about this called these
 
 Massospora
 
 -infected cicadas “flying salt shakers of death.” Wherever they go, they sprinkle the soil underneath them with infected spores. And there, the fungus lies dormant—waiting for the next brood to emerge, 13 or 17 years later.


 Now, just to be clear, there isn’t a rampant butt-exploding epidemic killing off periodical cicadas. Far more of them die from predation, and habitat disruption is a much bigger concern for these species. But every time these elusive creatures emerge, some of them fly around butt-less.


 Ew.

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