I hate news pages that are just a video. I prefer to just casually read news instead of having to watch a whole video on the topic. I find Apple News shows me a ton of these type of articles (looking at you MSNBC) and I wish I could toggle some option to never see pages like that again.

For those not familiar with major brood years, it is a sight to see. Depending on where you are, there is a constant ambient echo of cicada shrills. When living outside Washington DC I'd leave the windows and balcony door open to wake up to the cacophony, which started around dawn. Thousands of cicadas would fly across the interstate (Dulles Toll Road in my case) and local parks.

The peak lasts not more than two weeks and in two months everything is gone, except mounds of cicada exoskeletons and bodies.

The story is a little misleading.

> 2024 will mark a rare natural event as two distinct cicada broods emerge together for the first time in over two centuries.

That means these two particular broods haven't seen each other in that long. It doesn't mean no broods have coincided in the last two centuries, though that makes for punchier stories.

https://www.newsweek.com/cicadas-brood-both-emerging-same-ti...

There are 15 broods in total. They emerge on 13- or 17-year cycles.

https://cicadas.uconn.edu/broods/

When I lived in the PNW, I really missed cicadas. Am looking forward to this year's songs!

A good resource, with all the broods listed, including the two that are going to emerge this year (North Illinois Brood and Great Southern Brood) and the typical ranges of each brood: https://cicadas.uconn.edu/broods/

Sesame crops will be decimated

What’s the precision of individual cicadas being able to follow their regular timeline? Like if 10,000 cicadas in one area are in a 13 year cycle how many will accidentally wake up before then?

The concept of the cicada lifecycle fills me with awe and wonder.

Could you imagine spending a majority of your life below ground. All you know is soil. You are pretty slow and clumsy burrowing around in the below ground world.

Then, you go through this metamorphosis. Not only do you reach an entirely different plane of existence (going from the below ground world to the above ground world) - but you enter that new world with wings free to travel in 3 dimensions at high speeds. You have sun, weather, mammals, cars, birds, buildings, trees... All things you are experiencing for the first time. And you get two weeks to pack it all in during a frantic mating frenzy.

Imagine if this experience happened to you.

When I was a kid in south Georgia there was a year where two other cicada broods lined up. The sustained volume in and around the woods was measured at well over 85dB and peaking much higher locally, to the extent that if the woods were a workplace OSHA would require a hearing protection plan to be implemented. It sounded like there was a racetrack just over the hill, but in every direction.

In Japan, they have a different species of cicada, and cicadas reliably emerge every single summer. As a result, the sound of cicadas is a popular shorthand for summertime in Japanese media: https://www.tofugu.com/japan/cicadas-in-japan/

Does anyone know where to find some really good, high fidelity, stereo recordings of cicadas? I've tried making recordings but just cannot capture the sonic experience very well at all.

Kind of related Numberphile video: https://youtu.be/j7jfHM-mMC4?si=gjHKuqLqgAXk5_J0

RIP Christopher Evan Welch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxh2X6NjuhY

God no. This sound awful. I can’t think of anything creepier than cicadas.