The Next Wave of 17-Year Cicadas Is About to Party, Scream, and Die
A special brood of cicadas—an ancient lineage of the periodical insects—is set to burst from the soil this May and June, covering more of the United States than any other 17-year brood.
These bugs—collectively known as Brood XIV—have been biding their time underground since the last Bush administration, biding their time and counting the years go by. Now they're back with two goals: Get loud and get laid.
This isn't just any swarm. Brood XIV is considered the original brood, from which all other 17-year cicada broods split off, according to YaleEnvironment360. This is the motherlode of massive, crunchy, droning insects.
For a few wild weeks to come, the skies will fill with their raspy mating calls, as the insects rise up simultaneously. The synchronized emergence isn't just for flair. It's a numbers game: By surfacing in the billions, cicadas overwhelm their predators—birds, squirrels, snakes, you name it—who are so sated by the plenty that the cicadas' arrival sends waves through the food chain.
When cicadas emerge, populations of cuckoos, blue jays, and some woodpecker species swell. But not all the effects are good: Because the birds are busy eating cicadas, caterpillar populations can go unchecked, allowing those bugs to damage oak trees to a greater degree.
Most of the insects will get eaten, but enough will survive to keep the brood going. Once the survivors lay their eggs—their purpose fulfilled—they die. The brood's tiny offspring disappear underground for another 17 years, from which they will rise again in 2041.
The cicadas are expected to appear as far west as Kansas, as far north as Wisconsin and Michigan, down through the Mississippi Delta to New Orleans, and along much of the East Coast from Georgia and South Carolina up to Connecticut. You can review a detailed map of broods, including where they historically have emerged and are expected to emerge again, at this University of Connecticut site.
And as with everything else these days, climate change could be messing with the cicada clock. A Japanese study found that warming temperatures are pushing some cicadas to emerge earlier in the year. Over time, hotter conditions might even shrink their 17-year underground snooze.
But those are longer term forecasts, and Brood XIV's timing is imminent. In the next weeks, if you hear droning and you're not near a construction site, there's no need to panic: It's just billions of bugs on a once-in-a-generation bender.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Times
35 minutes ago
- New York Times
‘Hot Wasps' Found at Nuclear Facility in South Carolina
Four radioactive wasp nests have been discovered at a South Carolina nuclear facility, according to federal officials. The first nest, which was found by workers at the Savannah River Site early last month, was recently disclosed in a report from the Department of Energy, which owns the site. The facility, near Aiken, S.C., produced material for nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War. Three additional nests have since been discovered at the site, officials told The Times on Friday. 'The U.S. Department of Energy is managing the discovery of four wasp nests with very low levels of radioactive contamination,' Edwin Deshong, the manager of the department's Savannah River Operations Office, said in an emailed statement. 'The nests do not pose a health risk to SRS workers, the community, or the environment.' But the discovery raised questions about the extent of the environmental contamination at the site, said Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina who studies organisms and ecosystems in radioactive regions of the world, including Chernobyl, Ukraine, and Fukushima, Japan. 'This is an indicator that there are contaminants spread across this area that have not been completely encased and protected,' Dr. Mousseau said. The discovery of additional radioactive nests, he added, 'indicate that much greater effort must be made to assess the possible risks and hazards of what appears to be a significant source of radioactive pollutants.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Gizmodo
an hour ago
- Gizmodo
Twist on Famous Double-Slit Experiment Deals a Blow to Einstein's Quantum Doubts
Albert Einstein famously disliked quantum theory's understanding that physical objects, including light, exist as both a particle and a wave, and that this duality could not be simultaneously observed. But a new, simple iteration of a foundational quantum experiment offers the most conclusive, direct evidence yet that Einstein may have been wrong. In a recent paper for Physical Review Letters, MIT scientists successfully replicated the double-slit experiment on the atomic scale, allowing for an unprecedented level of empirical precision. By using supercold atoms as 'slits' for light to pass through, the team confirmed that the wave-particle duality of light—with all its paradoxical properties—holds up even on the most fundamental quantum scales. The double-slit experiment, first performed in 1801 by British physicist Thomas Young, illustrates the dual nature of light in the quantum world. When you shine a beam of light—photon 'particles' following a direct path—through two parallel slits on a screen, what appears on the other side is an interference pattern resembling the union of two ripples in a pond, like a 'wave.' But if you try to catch this mysterious transition in action by peering into the slit, you lose the interference pattern. Niels Bohr, Einstein's main opponent in this debate, referred to this result as complementarity, the idea that it's impossible to simultaneously measure complementary properties of a quantum system. But Einstein surmised that, if a paper-thin slit held in place by a spring was struck with light, the individual photons would shake the spring in a particle-like manner. That way, we could catch the duality of light in action. To test this hypothesis, the MIT team stripped down their experimental setup to the scale of single atoms, which they cooled down to microkelvin temperatures (for context, one kelvin is equivalent to -460 degrees Fahrenheit or -272 degrees Celsius). They used lasers to arrange more than 10,000 atoms into a neat, crystal-like configuration. This highly controlled environment allowed the researchers to adjust each atom's 'fuzziness,' or the certainty of its location. Simply, a fuzzier atom increases the probability that a photon passing through will exhibit particle-like behavior. 'These single atoms are like the smallest slits you could possibly build,' explained Wolfgang Ketterle, the study's senior author, to MIT News. By repeatedly bombarding the atomic 'slits' with photons, Ketterle, a 2001 Nobel laureate, and his team were able to record the diffraction pattern from the photons scattering off the atomic slits. What they found, unsurprisingly, was that Bohr was correct. The more they zoomed in on the path of an individual photon, the weaker the diffraction pattern became, confirming we can't observe light as both a wave and a particle simultaneously. They also tried shutting off the lasers holding the atoms in place—the 'spring' for their setup. Even then, it was impossible to track a photon's path without disrupting the wave-like interference pattern. 'In many descriptions, the springs play a major role. But we show, no, the springs do not matter here; what matters is only the fuzziness of the atoms,' explained Vitaly Fedoseev, study lead author, also to MIT News. 'Therefore, one has to use a more profound description [like Bohr's complementarity], which uses quantum correlations between photons and atoms.' Einstein is sometimes accused of hating quantum physics. This isn't necessarily true. Einstein believed quantum theory needed more work, especially regarding its overreliance on randomness—but he never completely rejected its validity. As he wrote in a famous letter to physicist Max Born, quantum mechanics is 'certainly imposing,' but his instinct is that it's 'not yet the real thing…[God] is not playing dice.' Survey of 1,000 Experts Shows Quantum Physicists Still Can't Agree on Anything Einstein had a lot of questions about quantum mechanics, many of which remain unanswered. And as the Einstein-Bohr debate—and the new MIT finding—illustrates, his rigorous, provocative challenges to what physicists take for granted continue to advance our understanding of the weird, paradoxical world of quantum mechanics.
CBS News
an hour ago
- CBS News
Pittsburgh-area native piloting SpaceX flight to International Space Station
A Pittsburgh-area native is piloting the SpaceX Falcon 9 flight to the International Space Station. A crew of four rocketed off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 11:43 a.m. on Friday, running a day late after Thursday's launch was scrubbed when thick clouds rolled in at the one-minute, 7-second mark. The three-man one-woman crew will replace colleagues who launched to the space station in March as fill-ins for the two stuck Starliner astronauts. The SpaceX capsule should reach the orbiting lab this weekend and stay for at least six months. Fifty-eight-year-old E. Michael Fincke from Emsworth is piloting the mission. Fincke graduated from Sewickley Academy in 1985 and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on an Air Force Reserve Officers' Training Corps scholarship before going to Stanford University. He was also awarded degrees from El Camino College and the University of Houston - Clear Lake. Selected by NASA as an astronaut in 1996, Fincke has three spaceflights under his belt. NASA says he's logged more than a year in orbit, with nine spacewalks totaling 48 hours and 37 minutes of EVA time. "Boy, it's great to be back in orbit again," Fincke radioed after the launch. He last soared on NASA's next-to-last space shuttle flight in 2011. Fincke has received several awards, including three NASA Distinguished Service Medals, which is the highest honor bestowed by the agency. NASA says Fincke's parents still call Emsworth home.
