How did this video not talk about prime numbers?!?!? The 13 and 17-year life cycles are a HUGE evolutionary advantage due to the fact that Broods almost never emerge during the same year! A 17-year brood and a 13-year brood sharing the same range would only emerge in the same year once every 221 years, meaning that they do not compete for food and do not accidentally hybridize.
For the pokemon fans out there: The Pokemon Nincada (JP Tsuchinin) is a Bug/Ground type pokemon. Its name is a combination of Ninja and Cicada. Also, the pokemon Ninjask (JP Tekkanin) and Shedinja (JP Nukenin) reflects the other stages of Cicadas life cycle.
My mom's an environmentalist, so I remember her explaining to me when I was little (I must have been 3 if the last time they came out was 1996) that cicadas hibernate for years at a time. Ever since then, I've been confused as to why I see cicada exoskeletons every summer. Thanks for explaining the difference between anual cicadas and periodical cicadas!
I grew up in Atlanta. I remember finding Cicada shells EVERYWHERE, ALL the time around the mid-90s. Oddly, I never saw a Cicada until last year, but as a kid, there were Cicada skins all over the place! Being a kid, I just assumed it was part of life everywhere all the time. Today, I learned that Atlanta was special as far as Cicadas are concerned. Thanks for educating me, Hank! And the rest of the Scishow team, of course. :D
Can't wait! I helped one last year. it was trying to molt, but ants were attacking it. I got it away from the ants, cleaned them off, and put it on a tree. It crawled up, and turned into the usual cicada shape. It was green at first, and eventually turned black and left!
When I was twelve this bug scared the crap out of me. I almost broke my neck running. It's nice to know that over 15 years later I can finally know its name. Thanks Hank.
I was fascinated with cicadas as a kid. We must have had the annual ones, because their "chorus" was the soundtrack of summer. I loved to find them when they had just molted and were waiting for their wings to dry, because they were often gold or silver and quite beautiful. (Their color changed when their exoskeleton hardened.)
When I heard this loud, shredding noise through a forest one summer, I asked a guide if there was any logging being done nearby. She said no; they were cicada calls.
You could have mentioned a little more clearly that the satiation effect applies to every creature in the forest. Almost every living creature in the forest eats the cicadas until they can't eat another bite and there are still millions of cicadas left to carry out the breeding cycle. It really is an amazing adaption for survival.
Oh dear Lord... I hate cicadas. I lived in Atlanta for 5 months and was driven nearly out of my mind by the buzzing, and they were just the annuals. I love my home, but I'm suddenly glad that we're looking at careers out West.
I encountered periodic cicadas when I was about 12 years old walking alone in a park. As I got further into the park the noise kept getting louder and louder, until it became a constant deafening sound coming from all directions. Needless to say I cut short my hike (in other words, I ran like hell out of there).
When I was in Japan and staying at my friend's house, we were in the middle of Saitama City and we heard cicadas every night I was there. I LOVE the sound of them (the sound may differ from the American ones mentioned but I'm not sure) when I was falling asleep at night, and I prefer them to crickets.
Oh my goodness, yes! I've been waiting since the 2004 brood died, I loved the cicadas!~ They were just so cool to look at, and they weren't used to humans, so they didn't fly away when I tried to pick them up
Me neither. When I was young and lived in Brazil, I did not mind them until one got inside my apartment, flew to my bedroom, then flew to top of my head or ceiling on top of me. I freaked out and never enjoyed cicadas that much ever again. xD
I'm just incredibly glad I live on the opposite side of the country right now. Because no matter how fascinating their life cycle is, big bugs freak me the heck out.
Every year I perform in an outdoor theater. We do a run of 5 shows, each with separate casts, spread out over the summer. The 5 slots suck in increasing order depending on how late they are. I was in the final slot last year and had to perform with the cicadas. At each intermission the director would come back and say, "great job everyone! Now just give me more volume!" and we would barely be able to reply because our voices were all shredded into pieces from being as loud as possible.
OMG! I Remember the last Cicadas outbreak it was so LOUD you couldn’t sleep and they were EVERYWHERE!!!… though I do remember scaring my little brother a lot with the empty shells leftover from the emerging adults. That part was fun ;D
We have a lot of them in Minnesota right now. Really freaked me out last night, when one stuck to me back and came inside with me. I felt something crawling on me, so I went to pick it off, and... It was a lot bigger than I expected, when I thought it was a tick or something.
No, remember how he mentioned that there are 15 broods? Each brood takes a different amount of time to mature. This brood in particular takes 17 years, so this year after 17 years they are finally gonna emerge
I live in Georgia and this is legit f****ing scary as hell, it's some shit right outta Alfred Hitchcock. I walk out my back door and 100 of these things attack me, and don't even think about just walking past your favorite shade tree cause that always ends bad.
I went to Rhodes a couple of years ago and it just so happened to be cicada swarming time... I quite like them, but I think my hearing did get damaged. Until then I had never actually seen one, because in Europe (don't think we have any in England?) you will hear them but you will very rarely find one... so when I saw one I got really excited... and by the end of the day they were everywhere.
We had whatever brood is near St Louis emerge 2 years ago. They will in fact be everywhere and the whole thing lasted about 1 1/2 weeks. Noisy as hell, but really kind cool. The only crumby part in my eyes was just how 'everywhere' the swarm was. At my place of business, we have automatic doors and they where constantly flying in and get stuck, then dying. We probably swept up 200+ of insects off our floors and shelves.
The cicadas took over my area about 3 years ago. You couldn't walk outside without getting blasted in the face by one of those buggers. Then after they had mated and died, there were shells of molted cicadas everywhere and you couldn't walk around outside without hearing them crunch everywhere. Cicadas=not a fun summer
I live in Virginia, my backyard (neighborhood) is ENTIRELY forest. It's more of a constant never ending pitch, then a chorus. It's like a noisy refrigerator, you get used to it after a long time.
I remember the swarm in 2005. They it could have been worse but because there was a lot of development in the area, a lot of the cicada population had already been destroyed.
About four years ago in Texas there was a huge explosion of crickets. They weren't as noisy but they were everywhere. They would gather under streetlights at night and if you rolled down your car windows you could hear them crunching under your tires! Very gross. After a while the smell got pretty bad from all these dead, rotting bugs everywhere. I also remember love bug season twice a year in Florida. Those things are incredibly annoying.
In south Texas we have cicadas every summer. They aren't in numbers that huge, but they do chill out in the trees and make a bunch of noise from like 5:30 to 9pm every evening and leave gross little shells on tree bark for annoying brothers to pick off and stick you your back when you're not looking.
Every time I think of cicadas I remember the summer when an unmanned car rolled to a stop beneath one of the trees that they'd taken over and burst into flames, catching the tree on fire. We were finding charred cicada corpses all up and down the street for weeks after.
I actually like cicadas. In Georgia their out most of the summer and they come out at night and sing the songs of their people. My Grandmother would leave her screened windows open at night and would call their choruses "night music." It would lull me to sleep at night. But of course we don't have copious amounts of them like they do in the Northeast right now.
That is the point. Bugs don't have the need to aspire to be the CEO of Apple or anything like that, they just live and create more of themselves. Evolutionary law says that those are the two driving forces to keep a species going. Now individual cicadas don't think to themselves "oh, lets keep the population going" but thats just how it works.
When I was in Pre-K, there were these huge winged insects molted or dead everywhere, and I haven't seen anything else like them in all my life, so I think they were Cicadas!
Heh, I remember that 1996 swarm (wasn't there one in the '80's too?), it was loud and crunchy! It was pretty freaky, but a neat learning experience. I'm heading back to the east coast for a visit this week - maybe I'll get to see some!
"I dream of locusts in the trees around our house. And cicadas, and vultures, and the shreiking of innumerable gibbons..." The Mountain Goats, Idylls of the King
Cicadas are actually really really harmless. Other than eating some crops and plants, all they do is stupidly fly into things. We were going outside, because it was the last week of school, and a bunch of kids started grabbing them, putting it in their hands, and started to carry them around.
this is the biggest one too if i remember correctly north america also has a 6 cycle one and a 8 cycle one but this is by far the largest... make great targets for fireworks though.
Armis is enjoyed online in 106 countries, it's brain workout benefits of playing Armis * Armis develops critical thinking skills, and provokes logical thinking * Armis builds self-esteem, will-power, and inspires you to be inventive * Armis spurs you to plan for and attain success * Armis emboldens you to learn and understand complex matters easier and faster * Armis sharpens your analytic and cognitive mind it's FREE to any school anywhere in the world
Hank, I have always wanted to know what wild animals do during thunder storms and tornadoes warnings, I live in midwest and during the summer there are lots of thunderstorms, and lots of animals deer, coyotes, and cicadas. What do they do when the weather is really bad?
We have annual cicadas here, and though there aren't MILLIONS of them.. they can still get pretty loud. Like, almost-hearing-over-the-TV loud. See the molted exoskeletons stuck to stuff every fairly often, too.
I've never minded Cicadas... until one of them was on my car door handle and I almost had a heart attack wondering if it was going to fly at my face and eat me.
Oh boy that will be interesting for people there. I spent one month in China when there were cicadas out, and my friends and I had to stop talking when they were ... chorusing.
It is 13 or 17 years specifically as they are both large(ish) prime numbers. This helps avoid predators. If the cicadas had a breeding cycle of eg 16 years, then their predators could have a breeding cycle of one of the factors of 16, eg 8. Therefore for every 2 cycles of the predators they would emerge once at the same time as the cicada. The same goes for 1, 2, 4 and 16 year cycles too. Primes don't have multiple factors therefore the predators' cycle would have to match the cicadas exaclty.
I can't believe the significance of the length of time spent underground wasn't mentioned. The reason it is 13 or 17 years isn't incidental and for me is easily the most scientifically interesting aspect of cicads. C'mon Scischow! I demand a follow up video in the name of science!!
They're about a foot down. It's cold in the winter but not freezing (and if it *were* freezing a foot below the surface, you'd know you've strayed past their range).
Don't worry, they're a harmless annoyance. Adult cicadas have feeding tubes for mouths so they can't bite. While they are above ground they focus on their mating and egg laying. Then they all die and get eaten by whatever. Though they do stick to just about anything they touch.
I got to a school where you have to walk from class to class (mind blower), so I know that Cicadas are very annoying to have plastered to buildings and doors.
Well an idea for another episode could be that you talk about the chaos theory more specifically the butterfly effect there is not a whole lot of information on google, ask,bing,ect and I am interested in learning more about it.
Here in the deep south we had brood XIX come out in 2011, and they are loud, especially in rural areas. The funny thing is from a distance you will hear a sound that reminded me of an old scifi ufo movie were they where landing on the White House lawn, Earth vs the Flying Saucers.
Well, I used to live in the DC area as well, and if you recall in about '04 there was another brood there *shudders*... So you guys have to wait a little bit before that brood turns up again :) And maybe this one will affect you guys too, it just depends on the weather when they hatch.
I'm surprised Hank didn't mention how some cicadas erupt in cycles of a prime number of years, which is thought to be useful so two brood don't erupt together and compete for food. I swear I must have learned that from another interesting and informative youtube channel, maybe Numberphile?
I once found a deformed 4 eyes giant cicada all by itself one summer morning. I poked it, picked it up and even through it on the ground and it didn't even care. Then it flew away twenty minutes later for not reason i can point out. Maybe it drank some radioactive soda or something. I do indeed lazily throw ramune bottles around in my backyard :D
I don't think you understand the horror unless you go through it yourself. I was in the 1st grade when I first saw a cicada. I remember pretending to be sick so I could stay in from recess, getting attacked by one pretty much every time I opened the door and huge swarms of these giant bugs everywhere. They told me it'd be 17 years until the next ones came out so I was gonna get the hell out of here before then but I wasn't aware of this brood nonsense. I fear nothing more than cicadas, seriously
Completely unrelated, but being on the cusp of playing Breath of Fire III, and still playing it at that, it's hard to hear "The Brood" and not think of dragons.
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How did this video not talk about prime numbers?!?!? The 13 and 17-year life cycles are a HUGE evolutionary advantage due to the fact that Broods almost never emerge during the same year! A 17-year brood and a 13-year brood sharing the same range would only emerge in the same year once every 221 years, meaning that they do not compete for food and do not accidentally hybridize.
Brian Emerson they did it finally :)
Higurashi - When they Return
For the pokemon fans out there: The Pokemon Nincada (JP Tsuchinin) is a Bug/Ground type pokemon. Its name is a combination of Ninja and Cicada. Also, the pokemon Ninjask (JP Tekkanin) and Shedinja (JP Nukenin) reflects the other stages of Cicadas life cycle.
I'm so glad you guys did an episode on cicadas! I remember picking them off trees and putting them into buckets (no idea why) when I was a kid.
My mom's an environmentalist, so I remember her explaining to me when I was little (I must have been 3 if the last time they came out was 1996) that cicadas hibernate for years at a time. Ever since then, I've been confused as to why I see cicada exoskeletons every summer. Thanks for explaining the difference between anual cicadas and periodical cicadas!
wait... locust... broods... my zerg heart... i need to travel to the us in the next 10-17 years D:
+Sir Zoidberg I hear you . FOR THE SWARM!!!
Ninjask and Shedinja. That is all.
does anybody else notice how much he bags on Congress? it's hilarious
I grew up in Atlanta. I remember finding Cicada shells EVERYWHERE, ALL the time around the mid-90s. Oddly, I never saw a Cicada until last year, but as a kid, there were Cicada skins all over the place! Being a kid, I just assumed it was part of life everywhere all the time. Today, I learned that Atlanta was special as far as Cicadas are concerned.
Thanks for educating me, Hank! And the rest of the Scishow team, of course. :D
Can't wait! I helped one last year. it was trying to molt, but ants were attacking it. I got it away from the ants, cleaned them off, and put it on a tree. It crawled up, and turned into the usual cicada shape. It was green at first, and eventually turned black and left!
They are BACK
they're not making any noise though.
When I was twelve this bug scared the crap out of me. I almost broke my neck running. It's nice to know that over 15 years later I can finally know its name. Thanks Hank.
Any time you can drop the word "torpor" in a video, that's a success.
I was fascinated with cicadas as a kid. We must have had the annual ones, because their "chorus" was the soundtrack of summer. I loved to find them when they had just molted and were waiting for their wings to dry, because they were often gold or silver and quite beautiful. (Their color changed when their exoskeleton hardened.)
I swear that I hear these every year. They are so loud that I can hear them while driving on the freeway past small patches of trees.
When I heard this loud, shredding noise through a forest one summer, I asked a guide if there was any logging being done nearby. She said no; they were cicada calls.
You could have mentioned a little more clearly that the satiation effect applies to every creature in the forest. Almost every living creature in the forest eats the cicadas until they can't eat another bite and there are still millions of cicadas left to carry out the breeding cycle. It really is an amazing adaption for survival.
I love SciShow for many reasons, and one reason is that they make videos about things I never heard of. That's interesting.
When I lived in Japan, cicadas were a daily part of summer life. Freakin loved those things.
Very nice balance of education and humor. I really enjoyed your presentation, Hank. Thanks!
Oh dear Lord...
I hate cicadas. I lived in Atlanta for 5 months and was driven nearly out of my mind by the buzzing, and they were just the annuals. I love my home, but I'm suddenly glad that we're looking at careers out West.
I encountered periodic cicadas when I was about 12 years old walking alone in a park. As I got further into the park the noise kept getting louder and louder, until it became a constant deafening sound coming from all directions. Needless to say I cut short my hike (in other words, I ran like hell out of there).
When I was in Japan and staying at my friend's house, we were in the middle of Saitama City and we heard cicadas every night I was there. I LOVE the sound of them (the sound may differ from the American ones mentioned but I'm not sure) when I was falling asleep at night, and I prefer them to crickets.
Oh my goodness, yes! I've been waiting since the 2004 brood died, I loved the cicadas!~ They were just so cool to look at, and they weren't used to humans, so they didn't fly away when I tried to pick them up
I live in Connecticut. I'm going to take as many pictures as I can of these guys. Freaking awesome.
Me neither. When I was young and lived in Brazil, I did not mind them until one got inside my apartment, flew to my bedroom, then flew to top of my head or ceiling on top of me. I freaked out and never enjoyed cicadas that much ever again. xD
Cicadas! Oh my god. When I lived in Spetses, Greece there would be THOUSANDS of these! I miss these guys so much.
I actually had a cicada molt on my porch...I took pictures of it through the entire process, it was really neat!
I'm just incredibly glad I live on the opposite side of the country right now. Because no matter how fascinating their life cycle is, big bugs freak me the heck out.
The cicada sound is pieceful to ME I just can’t shut up about how excited I am
that explains a lot. I just saw this video, and I live in the east coast, and I have not seen a single cicada.
Every year I perform in an outdoor theater. We do a run of 5 shows, each with separate casts, spread out over the summer. The 5 slots suck in increasing order depending on how late they are. I was in the final slot last year and had to perform with the cicadas. At each intermission the director would come back and say, "great job everyone! Now just give me more volume!" and we would barely be able to reply because our voices were all shredded into pieces from being as loud as possible.
It is really crazy to think that some of these things have been underground for longer than some of us have been alive.
OMG! I Remember the last Cicadas outbreak it was so LOUD you couldn’t sleep and they were EVERYWHERE!!!… though I do remember scaring my little brother a lot with the empty shells leftover from the emerging adults. That part was fun
;D
We have a lot of them in Minnesota right now. Really freaked me out last night, when one stuck to me back and came inside with me. I felt something crawling on me, so I went to pick it off, and... It was a lot bigger than I expected, when I thought it was a tick or something.
Same, I immediately checked and my relief was immense
I knew what these were and I remember tons of them as a child and haven't seen them since. Beware nostalgia is coming
Wow!!! The Lauryn Hill reference just made me love this guy 10x more!
No, remember how he mentioned that there are 15 broods? Each brood takes a different amount of time to mature. This brood in particular takes 17 years, so this year after 17 years they are finally gonna emerge
Yeah, I never minded cicadas until I spent a week in wine country in Australia where the cicadas were literally deafening...mind blown.
I live in Georgia and this is legit f****ing scary as hell, it's some shit right outta Alfred Hitchcock. I walk out my back door and 100 of these things attack me, and don't even think about just walking past your favorite shade tree cause that always ends bad.
I went to Rhodes a couple of years ago and it just so happened to be cicada swarming time... I quite like them, but I think my hearing did get damaged.
Until then I had never actually seen one, because in Europe (don't think we have any in England?) you will hear them but you will very rarely find one... so when I saw one I got really excited... and by the end of the day they were everywhere.
We had whatever brood is near St Louis emerge 2 years ago. They will in fact be everywhere and the whole thing lasted about 1 1/2 weeks. Noisy as hell, but really kind cool. The only crumby part in my eyes was just how 'everywhere' the swarm was. At my place of business, we have automatic doors and they where constantly flying in and get stuck, then dying. We probably swept up 200+ of insects off our floors and shelves.
The bird population thing is really cool. Population dynamics are neat.
The cicadas took over my area about 3 years ago. You couldn't walk outside without getting blasted in the face by one of those buggers. Then after they had mated and died, there were shells of molted cicadas everywhere and you couldn't walk around outside without hearing them crunch everywhere. Cicadas=not a fun summer
We had them here in Indiana a few years ago. I know what you mean. That description is very accurate.
I live in Virginia, my backyard (neighborhood) is ENTIRELY forest. It's more of a constant never ending pitch, then a chorus. It's like a noisy refrigerator, you get used to it after a long time.
I live in New Jersey. How long will the cicadas be 'around' for? Will it just be a day, or the whole summer?
I remember the swarm in 2005. They it could have been worse but because there was a lot of development in the area, a lot of the cicada population had already been destroyed.
About four years ago in Texas there was a huge explosion of crickets. They weren't as noisy but they were everywhere. They would gather under streetlights at night and if you rolled down your car windows you could hear them crunching under your tires! Very gross. After a while the smell got pretty bad from all these dead, rotting bugs everywhere.
I also remember love bug season twice a year in Florida. Those things are incredibly annoying.
In south Texas we have cicadas every summer. They aren't in numbers that huge, but they do chill out in the trees and make a bunch of noise from like 5:30 to 9pm every evening and leave gross little shells on tree bark for annoying brothers to pick off and stick you your back when you're not looking.
Every time I think of cicadas I remember the summer when an unmanned car rolled to a stop beneath one of the trees that they'd taken over and burst into flames, catching the tree on fire. We were finding charred cicada corpses all up and down the street for weeks after.
Quick question here... I live in Pennsylvania, and so far my area has not experienced the emergence. Any ideas on why this is?
I actually like cicadas. In Georgia their out most of the summer and they come out at night and sing the songs of their people. My Grandmother would leave her screened windows open at night and would call their choruses "night music." It would lull me to sleep at night. But of course we don't have copious amounts of them like they do in the Northeast right now.
That is the point. Bugs don't have the need to aspire to be the CEO of Apple or anything like that, they just live and create more of themselves. Evolutionary law says that those are the two driving forces to keep a species going. Now individual cicadas don't think to themselves "oh, lets keep the population going" but thats just how it works.
When I was in Pre-K, there were these huge winged insects molted or dead everywhere, and I haven't seen anything else like them in all my life, so I think they were Cicadas!
Heh, I remember that 1996 swarm (wasn't there one in the '80's too?), it was loud and crunchy! It was pretty freaky, but a neat learning experience. I'm heading back to the east coast for a visit this week - maybe I'll get to see some!
When I was a kid, I thought that the sound of cicadas was just the sound of heat.
Cicadas are my favorite I grew up looking for them at night
I remember collecting their shells when I was little and using them in my toy soldier wars... Fun times!
Yeah, Hes Right. I Hear them in nearly every Group of trees in my neighborhood
Where I live in PA, we have a ton! I love it! They sound so cool!
"I dream of locusts
in the trees around our house.
And cicadas, and vultures,
and the shreiking of innumerable gibbons..."
The Mountain Goats, Idylls of the King
The Zerg--I mean... cicadas sound really fascinating.
Thank you. There are actually people that understand!
Thank goodness for Robert and Jad. Between them and the Green boys we got a shot at exciting the next generation for science.
Based on that whole 13-17 thing it sounds like we essentially cannot tell exactly when, but have a range of 5 years in which we expect it will occur.
I like this one. Maybe also how they know when they come, and how we could learn from that or use it to our advantage
Yeah I was surprised by that too. Maybe Numberphile called dibs on the prime numbers aspect to the cicada lifecycle XD
In New Zealand we get them every year so it's not such a big deal. Interesting stuff!
Cicadas are actually really really harmless. Other than eating some crops and plants, all they do is stupidly fly into things. We were going outside, because it was the last week of school, and a bunch of kids started grabbing them, putting it in their hands, and started to carry them around.
this is the biggest one too if i remember correctly north america also has a 6 cycle one and a 8 cycle one but this is by far the largest... make great targets for fireworks though.
Armis is enjoyed online in 106 countries, it's brain workout
benefits of playing Armis
* Armis develops critical thinking skills, and provokes logical thinking
* Armis builds self-esteem, will-power, and inspires you to be inventive
* Armis spurs you to plan for and attain success
* Armis emboldens you to learn and understand complex matters easier and faster
* Armis sharpens your analytic and cognitive mind
it's FREE to any school anywhere in the world
Hank, I have always wanted to know what wild animals do during thunder storms and tornadoes warnings, I live in midwest and during the summer there are lots of thunderstorms, and lots of animals deer, coyotes, and cicadas. What do they do when the weather is really bad?
We have annual cicadas here, and though there aren't MILLIONS of them.. they can still get pretty loud. Like, almost-hearing-over-the-TV loud. See the molted exoskeletons stuck to stuff every fairly often, too.
Every time I visit my cousins in Indianapolis during the summer, those dang cicadas in the wood right next to her house are causing a freaking rucus!
I've never minded Cicadas... until one of them was on my car door handle and I almost had a heart attack wondering if it was going to fly at my face and eat me.
Oh boy that will be interesting for people there. I spent one month in China when there were cicadas out, and my friends and I had to stop talking when they were ... chorusing.
It is 13 or 17 years specifically as they are both large(ish) prime numbers. This helps avoid predators. If the cicadas had a breeding cycle of eg 16 years, then their predators could have a breeding cycle of one of the factors of 16, eg 8. Therefore for every 2 cycles of the predators they would emerge once at the same time as the cicada. The same goes for 1, 2, 4 and 16 year cycles too. Primes don't have multiple factors therefore the predators' cycle would have to match the cicadas exaclty.
I can't believe the significance of the length of time spent underground wasn't mentioned. The reason it is 13 or 17 years isn't incidental and for me is easily the most scientifically interesting aspect of cicads. C'mon Scischow! I demand a follow up video in the name of science!!
They're about a foot down. It's cold in the winter but not freezing (and if it *were* freezing a foot below the surface, you'd know you've strayed past their range).
Don't worry, they're a harmless annoyance. Adult cicadas have feeding tubes for mouths so they can't bite. While they are above ground they focus on their mating and egg laying. Then they all die and get eaten by whatever.
Though they do stick to just about anything they touch.
I got to a school where you have to walk from class to class (mind blower), so I know that Cicadas are very annoying to have plastered to buildings and doors.
Well an idea for another episode could be that you talk about the chaos theory more specifically the butterfly effect there is not a whole lot of information on google, ask,bing,ect and I am interested in learning more about it.
Here in the deep south we had brood XIX come out in 2011, and they are loud, especially in rural areas. The funny thing is from a distance you will hear a sound that reminded me of an old scifi ufo movie were they where landing on the White House lawn, Earth vs the Flying Saucers.
I think this must be the very edge of the east coast. I live in Kentucky, and we had ours around 2004 or 2005.
RadioLab just did a podcast about the Cicadas and their noises. It's very cool.
Well, I used to live in the DC area as well, and if you recall in about '04 there was another brood there *shudders*... So you guys have to wait a little bit before that brood turns up again :) And maybe this one will affect you guys too, it just depends on the weather when they hatch.
I'm surprised Hank didn't mention how some cicadas erupt in cycles of a prime number of years, which is thought to be useful so two brood don't erupt together and compete for food.
I swear I must have learned that from another interesting and informative youtube channel, maybe Numberphile?
No way! They have a beautiful sound. Maybe only to the southerners though. I'm in Mississippi.
hey hank, do the circada's destroy plants completely? and will there be pest control people around doing what they do?
I once found a deformed 4 eyes giant cicada all by itself one summer morning. I poked it, picked it up and even through it on the ground and it didn't even care. Then it flew away twenty minutes later for not reason i can point out. Maybe it drank some radioactive soda or something. I do indeed lazily throw ramune bottles around in my backyard :D
I don't think you understand the horror unless you go through it yourself. I was in the 1st grade when I first saw a cicada. I remember pretending to be sick so I could stay in from recess, getting attacked by one pretty much every time I opened the door and huge swarms of these giant bugs everywhere. They told me it'd be 17 years until the next ones came out so I was gonna get the hell out of here before then but I wasn't aware of this brood nonsense. I fear nothing more than cicadas, seriously
we get them every summer. the noise is like drilling into your pain receptors with a drill-bit covered in acid.
Are cicadas just on the coast line or can they be in western MA like near Worcester or something?
I have especially noticed cicadas this summer (in georgia), but i didnt know it was so rare :o
I'm 17. I have never been around when these were alive. That's weird to think about.
I live on the East Coast. :( I drove through NJ twice this weekend (to and from Pennsylvania) and the freaking cicadas were LOUD.
how much of the East coast are they swarming? Like i live in new hampshire are they coming here >.>
Completely unrelated, but being on the cusp of playing Breath of Fire III, and still playing it at that, it's hard to hear "The Brood" and not think of dragons.