The Earth Is About to Feast on Dead Cicadas

AndronETalksNews
Wired
By CELIA FORD
SCIENCE – MAY 10, 2024 11:53 AM
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 cicadas—Brood XIX, which is on a 13-year cycle, and Brood XIII, on a 17-year cycle—have started to emerge together across the Midwest and Southeast US for the first time in more than two centuries. To most humans, they’re an ephemeral spectacle and an ear-splitting nuisance, and then they’re gone. To many other animals, plants, and microbes, they’re a rare feast, bringing new life to forests long past their death.
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