This is the seventeenth year of the seventeen-year cicada
cycle.
If you live in the Northeast, and you’re in your
mid-twenties or older, you’ll understand what that means.
Cicadas are huge brown-golden insects, and they buzz like
power tools (up to eighty or ninety decibels). Then they die, and their huge
bodies lie on the lawns and sidewalks wherever you look, and the birds and
skunks and possums gobble them up.
But, before they die, they breed up in the trees, and their
eggs and larvae drop to the ground, and the larvae burrow deeper and deeper,
and we won’t see them for another seventeen years.
I remember the summer of 1996. It was very annoying. Cicadas
are astonishingly noisy; 80/90 decibels is a lot of volume, and they produce it
on a high screeching frequency that reminds you of a horror-movie sound effect.
Don’t worry: if you live on the Eastern Seaboard, you’ll be hearing it soon
enough.
So: the 2013 cicadas will mate, and they’ll lay their eggs
up in the trees where they’re singing. When the eggs hatch, the newborn nymphs
will drop to the ground and burrow, deeper and deeper, feeding on the roots of
plants.
And the whole cycle will begin again in 2030.
How old will I be then? Let me see: in 2030. I’ll be 72, if
I’m still alive.
And hopefully I’ll be deaf as a post.
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