Crawling out from underground every 13 or 17 years, the periodical cicadas are nature’s kings of the calendar.

Trillions of evolution’s bizarro wonders, red-eyed periodical cicadas that have pumps in their heads and jet-like muscles in their rears, are about to emerge in numbers not seen in decades and possibly centuries.

Crawling out from underground every 13 or 17 years, with a collective song as loud as jet engines, the periodical cicadas are nature’s kings of the calendar.

These black bugs with bulging eyes differ from their greener-tinged cousins that come out annually. They stay buried year after year, until they surface and take over a landscape, covering houses with shed exoskeletons and making the ground crunchy.

This spring, an unusual cicada double dose is about to invade a couple parts of the United States in what University of Connecticut cicada expert John Cooley called “cicada-geddon.” 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.

  • @givesomefucksEnglish
    1•3 months ago

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/28/us/cicada-brood-x.html

    Literally every couple years, we get the “super brood” and it’s always treated as “once in a lifetime”.

    But they’re already becoming more varied.

    https://weather.com/science/nature/news/cicadas-brood-x-early-emergence-climate-change

    Because some always pop out. If there’s not enough predators, they reproduce and start another brood. Over time it gets it’s own cycle.

    But even on the boom years (which happen like every 5 years now) more are surviving

    It won’t take long for there to be an insane amount of cicadas every year.

    Without as much wildlife to eat them, they will over produce and destroy trees that normally would have survived.

    This is a serious thing and by the time we even realize it, it’ll be too late. Because they eat the roots from underground for years. B