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.
