The Cicadas Are Here

A historic double brood is upon us. They’ve waited years for this moment.

Latest May 13, 2024 0 27 Add to Reading List

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For the first time in 221 years, two different groups of cicadas are emerging simultaneously and screaming from the treetops. More after these three stories from The Atlantic:

Spring Awakening

The first thing to know about cicadas is that, not unlike flowers, the insects come in annual and periodical varieties. Among the annual cicadas are the dog-day cicada, that emerald-green bug you might associate with steamy summer evenings on the porch—the type you can always hear but almost never see. Periodical cicadas, on the other hand, are the bugs of legend. They make a synchronized mass appearance either every 13 or every 17 years in various parts of the country. And they are so plentiful and so loud when they come that they cannot be ignored.

Across the country, billions of these periodical cicadas, categorized by region and year as “broods,” are crawling up out of the ground to see the light of day. The first to begin emerging this spring were the members of the Great Southern Brood—the largest of all periodical-cicada groups—which came out in many states across the southeastern United States. Another big group, the Northern Illinois Brood, is now tunneling up not only in Illinois but also in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Indiana. Although the two broods won’t overlap much geographically, such a simultaneous emergence is rare: The previous double brood occurred during Thomas Jefferson’s first term as president.

The cicadas we’re starting to see waited years for this moment. Now they’re here, ready to do what they do best: sing a little, mate, and die. But for humans, their extraordinary showing can provoke deep thoughts about the cycle of life and, well, the meaning of it all. At least, it does for Matt Kasson, an associate professor at West Virginia University who is studying a fungus that infects cicadas.

“So often, there’s these amazing things happening kind of hidden in plain sight, and we take it for granted,” he told me. “When you see the cicadas emerge, you not only are faced with them, but you have to think about all the time that they spent underground and what was happening in your own life. They give you a new perspective.”

The lifestyle of a cicada is a wonder. After a clutch of cicada eggs hatch, inside a small slit in a tree branch, the babies will bravely drop to the ground and delve deep into the earth. A cicada will spend most of its life underground, as a secretive burrow-dweller, sucking sap from maple and oak trees and generally minding its own business. The little nymph knows when to come aboveground only because, according to scientific speculation, she can track the changing sap cycles of a tree.

“A maple tree in the fall loses its leaves and goes dormant, and that changes the sap flow in a tree,” Kasson said. The cicada nymphs clock this. “So they keep a kind of chalkboard in their head where they are able to tally how many years they’ve been down there.” Occasionally, a cicada will make a mistake in that mental arithmetic (relatable!), coming up four years too early or too late. Unfortunately, it’s a fatal error. “They don’t have anybody to mate with,” Kasson said, “so it’s kind of a dead end for them.”

The emergence we’re seeing now goes like this: Billions of nymphs climb out of their holes, attach themselves to a tree or some other structure, and undergo an incomplete metamorphosis process that transforms them into flying adults. The process involves shedding their exuvia, the name of those ghostly brown shells you’ll find stuck to tree bark every spring. Over the next few weeks, adult males will “sing” to attract females, in a sometimes deafening cacophony. After mating, females will lay their eggs in tree branches and then die, and the whole process will start over.

This spring is a very good time to be a bird—or basically any other predator in these cicada hot spots. It’ll be a feeding frenzy out there, which means that the bird population will probably spike, thanks to the increased food source. And animals aren’t the only ones that will benefit. “When all these cicadas die, they are turned back into soil as a huge influx of nitrogen, so they act as a fertilizer for the plants as well,” Kasson said.

Although this year’s double broods mostly aren’t expected to appear in the same place, residents of one particular state should gird themselves for a Big Bug Explosion. Researchers predict that, somewhere in central Illinois, cicadas from both the Great Southern Brood and the Northern Illinois Brood will both be coming up together. It’ll be loud in Springfield this summer.

Even if you’re not lucky enough to experience a Midwestern cicada-geddon, chances are you live somewhere near one of the emerging broods. If you can’t hear them now, you should be able to soon. Go out and listen. Appreciate that new perspective.

Related:

Cicadas could make outdoor dining a nightmare. (From 2021)
Unfortunately, some cicadas taste like nature’s Gushers. (From 2021)

Today’s News

Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, finished his first day of testimony in Trump’s New York criminal trial. Cohen alleged that Trump was concerned about his presidential-election prospects in 2016 and ordered Cohen to pay hush money to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels.
Jury selection began in Senator Bob Menendez’s federal criminal trial. The former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is charged with accepting bribes from businessmen in exchange for political favors aiding the governments of Egypt and Qatar.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced yesterday that he is replacing his minister of defense with Andrei R. Belousov, an economist and one of Putin’s close advisers.

Dispatches

The Trump Trials: The hush-money criminal case against Donald Trump cuts to the core of who he is, George T. Conway III writes.
The Wonder Reader: One thing you quickly learn when speaking with a child: They’re natural philosophers, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

child reading a book alone in their bedroom — Julian Ward / Gallery Stock

Why Do So Many Parents Think Kids Need Their Own Bedroom?

By Annie Midori Atherton

Whenever I contemplate whether to have a second child, I inevitably start worrying about housing. For me and my husband to grow our family and stay in our two-bedroom rental in Seattle, our kids would have to share a room. He did it growing up, and it would be more affordable than getting a bigger place. But I struggle to wrap my head around the idea. I grew up in a three-bedroom home near where we live now; I had my own room, as did most of my friends. Even though housing prices have skyrocketed, I still want to give my children this privilege.
When I ask my husband what it was like to share a room as a kid, he shrugs. He didn’t consider it that big a deal. But many parents I’ve talked with who live in metro areas with high costs of living feel the same as I do. Some are stretching their budgets to afford a house with more bedrooms; others are reluctant to grow their families without having more space. As I mull this over, I wonder: Why do so many of us prioritize giving kids their own room?

Read the full article.