2024’s Apocalypse Bingo Card can put a big fat cross through “insect invasion” as America is scheduled to have the first double brood emergence of cicadas in 221 years. How can we know that? Because these peculiar insects have a passion for prime numbers.
Periodical
Brood XIII makes an appearance every 17 years, while Brood XIX pops up every 13 years. This year, they’re going to have to learn to share, as they’ll be wriggling topside together.
The numbers might seem random, but there’s method to the madness.
“Thirteen years and 17 years are special because they’re both prime numbers, which means it’s really hard for a predator to have a cycle that syncs up with them,” explained mathematician
The last time we got such a bumper brood of cicadas was back in 1803, so while we’re seeing in the double brood with the likes of Taylor Swift and Lil Nas X, the last Brood X double bill was going down to the tune of Beethoven.
When it’s time for cicadas to emerge, they wriggle from where they’ve been lurking in the ground for over a decade and shed their exoskeletons. The once-in-their-lifetime event is what has to happen so that they can reproduce, and it’s a short-lived mass orgy that unfortunately isn’t excused from the threat of sexually transmitted pathogens.
A fungus called Massospora cicadina is well-known among the scientific community, an opportunistic pathogen that crashes the cicada orgy and spreads from
“It’s a sexually transmitted fungus,” said John Lill, a cicada expert and chair of biology at George Washington University, to
It’s a different beast to the fungi that inspired
Lucky you for landing on this Earth at just the right time to see it all unfold in real time. Popcorn at the ready, chaps.