"This really has all the elements of a science fiction horror story," said a mycologist.

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Under the soil, cicadas will wait—up to 17 years—until the right temperature summons them to the surface. They appear immediately, like zombies rising from the grave. They greet the sun, prepare to morph into adults in the next few weeks, and then fly to mate.

This is the simple life of a cicada—unless it is infected.

Massospora, a parasitic fungus, lurks beneath the surface, waiting for the cicada to leave. When the nymph digs in the infected soil, the fungal spores will attach to its body. As the cicada matures, the masspora multiplies, digests the insect's interior, castrates it and replaces its back end with a pink spore plug.

The cicada was buzzing, seemingly unaware that it was the moving servant of the mushroom. It flies, trying to mate with unusual vigor. Some males even imitate females to attract and spread their spores to their male partners-the more infections the better. When their hijacked bodies mate, the spores are scattered on the earth and the megaspore bacteria spread.

"This really has all the elements of a science fiction horror story," said Matthew Carson, a mycologist at West Virginia University. "Even if two-thirds of the body no longer belongs to them, how does the organism work?"

Perhaps, he thinks, the fungus has mixed it with psychoactive drugs.

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As reported last year in a paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed and in the Atlantic Ocean, Dr. Carson and his colleagues discovered that the plug of the infected cicada contained an amphetamine called cathinone, which is only found in Africa. The Arabian tea plant in the Horn neutralizes the Arabian Peninsula, as well as psilocybin, a hallucinogen that makes magic mushrooms magical.

At the time, his team assumed that Massospora would synthesize these drugs in Arabic tea and magic mushrooms according to the same formula. But a follow-up genome analysis recently published in Fungal Ecology showed that masospora does not have the correct composition. Its drug laboratory is independently developed. It also shows that for prospectors seeking drug advancement in nature, more drugs can be found in unexpected places.

We think that the fruiting bodies of most fungi rise from the soil like an umbrella. But massospora does not. To transport the spores, it uses the living body of the cicada to spread the fungus during mating, just like a venereal disease.

But how does the fungus allow the cicadas to continue mating regardless of the harm to the body?

Dr. Kasson and his team collected the cicadas and measured the quality of their spore plugs and compared them with known chemicals.

He was shocked to find psilocybin and cathinone, both of which are Schedule 1 drugs, and even notified the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which allowed the team to continue.

These drugs used as psychotropic or stimulant pastimes are also appetite suppressants. Psilocybin can relieve depression and anxiety in cancer patients, and cathinone in ADHD drugs can improve concentration. Dr. Carson suspects that they might respond similarly to cicadas.

The results proved that the number of infected cicadas that increased year by year was under the influence of psilocybin, while the infected cicadas that appeared more than ten years later were drugged by cathinone.

Compared to the less active cicadas that they infect during mating as adults, the cicadas that are infected when they wake up from a dirt nap contain significantly more anesthetic in their plugs. Drug-powered attention to mating can maximize the critical spore transmission of those cicadas infected as nymphs.

The team has found the drugs. But they want to know what makes them.

When they sequenced the genome of the Massospora fungal species that infects cicadas, they hope to find the genes that magic mushrooms or khat are used to produce narcotic substances. But those genes are missing. One possible explanation is that fungi and cicadas, which may include microorganisms living in their intestines, have jointly evolved a unique interaction to produce these substances.

But what can cicadas get from it?

Dr. Carson can only speculate. Maybe the drug makes predators dislike cicadas. Maybe they make the cicadas fearless. "Maybe Cicada just wants to be numb," he said.