Key Points
Brace yourselves, Midwesterners: A truly shocking number of cicadas are about to live, make sweet love, and die in a tree near you..
Two broods of periodical cicadasBrood XIX, which is on a 13-year cycle, and Brood XIII, on a 17-year cyclehave started to emerge together across the Midwest and Southeast US for the first time in more than two centuries..
During the 2021 Brood X emergence, Zoe Getman-Pickering, a scientist in Lills research group, found that as birds swooped in on cicadas, caterpillar populations exploded..
Once fully grown and aboveground, adult cicadas shed their exoskeletons, unfurl their wings, and fly off to spend their remaining four to six weeks on Earth singing (if theyre male), listening for the sexiest songs (if theyre female), and mating...
They may smell like bad hamburgers, but Yang says that if youre lucky enough to host a tree full of cicadas this year, its best to just leave their bodies alone to decompose naturally..
