Much of the United States is facing a rare natural spectacle this month: Millions of cicadas will crawl out of the ground and mate at the same time.
Magicicada septendecim: In full splendor, it is almost five centimeters long, the body black, with orange stripes on the underside. Their transparent wings are reminiscent of stained church windows with their rich color palette. Her trademark are red, prominent eyes. It neither bites nor stings. Basically, the periodic cicada is a harmless creature.
And yet there is another cicada alarm in the eastern half of the USA. Once the ground warms up to 64 degrees Fahrenheit, which is roughly 18 degrees Celsius, millions of these specimens crawl out of the ground at the same time. Shed their skin and crawl up on anything that protrudes vertically from the ground. These can be fences, mostly trees in the tops of which the male representatives of the species call out for the females so intensely that the volume of the choir can reach 90 decibels – comparable to a motorbike rattling past or a petrol-powered lawnmower.
If the females respond with love in return, mating occurs. Eggs are laid, at some point larvae fall from branches to the ground and bury themselves. Then the cycle starts all over again. For 17 years, in some cases only 13, the larvae grow by feeding on roots, which they prick and give expression to. Until the day comes when it’s time to get some fresh air again.
This May, in and around Washington probably in the middle of the month, it is a particularly large vintage that is leaving its underground labyrinth. Brood X, Roman numerals, the generation of children of those Brut X insects that made noise in 2004. The natural wonder can be observed in 15 states, from New York in the north to Georgia in the south, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi. In extreme cases, as pictures from the previous time show, tree tops are so densely covered with cicadas that it is reminiscent of swarms of locusts. Although there is no relationship between cicadas and grasshoppers.
An entomologist by the name of Michael Raupp, employed at the University of Maryland, has memorable explanations full of metaphors. “Safety in numbers” is what he calls the animal’s survival strategy. In other words: They act in groups, as simultaneously as possible, so that enemies who are after them cannot possibly eat all of them if they dare to venture out of the underground. “We are dealing with teenagers who have spent their previous lives in the dark. They have to let off steam, they want to party,” adds Raupp. “So please don’t lose your nerve if you go wrong.”
The entomologist, who is well versed in dealing with the media, promptly established the link to the corona pandemic. He compares the phenomenon to an excruciatingly long quarantine, which is now coming to an end, if only for a short time. After five to six weeks, everything is over, and then quiet returns to the normally quiet suburbs.
If you look at it in a historical context, Magicicada septendecim offers the opportunity to reflect in peace and quiet. When Brood X last made its way to the light of day, more than 140,000 US soldiers were still stationed in Iraq – 14 months after the invasion. George W. Bush threw himself into the election campaign in the hope of a second term as president, which the Americans actually granted him. Barack Obama sat, largely unknown, in the Illinois Senate before he catapulted himself into the limelight with a brilliant party conference speech in the summer of 2004. After a wave of bankruptcies in the gambling city of Atlantic City, Donald Trump made a brilliant comeback, not necessarily in the real estate business, but with the television series “The Apprentice”, which premiered at the time. Mark Zuckerberg studied at Harvard, where – a few months before the cicada invasion that spring – he founded Facebook, then called The Facebook. The iPhone and iPad were not invented at the time. And a tweet in the English-speaking world only thought of the twittering of birds.
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