How to Speak Cicada | Hacker News Reader

How to Speak Cicada

insidescience.org

44 pointsredeemed19 comments

Open articleView on HN

Fun article, but to prevent disappointment, we've only learned four cicada phrases:

I want to mate.

No, you can't mate with me.

Sure, mate with me.

Stop touching me.

Realistically, what more do you need?

Perfectly sufficient for this last stage of their life where they do two things: mate and die.

As opposed to the first stage of their life where they do only one thing, suck on tree roots.

"Watch out, bird!"

"My butt fell off."

Found a good PBS video on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_fy2vCcIiE

So they spend 17 years underground, then get out, mate, and then die after around 4 weeks.

For some groups it is 13 years. It is thought that the co-prime-ness of 17 & 13 (all primes are co-prime, as are many combinations of non-primes, so these two numbers are not especially special in that sense) helps reduce competition for resources between those with the different periods. Nature doing its clever but simple solutions thing.

What resources would they be competing for? I would expect more overlapping years would be beneficial since their primary survival strategy is predator satiation.

The ranges of the 17 & 13 year Periodic Cicadas don't really overlap, so the strategy isn't to avoid competition with other cicadas. It's believed that the prime number periodicity is to avoid the life cycle periodicity of predators.

Besides, in areas where different cicadas overlap, they spend something like 99.9% of their time underground consuming the same food resource, alongside the non periodic annual cicadas. Competition between cicadas doesn't seem a major issue.

I've got a ton of M. septendecim in my back yard right now. This is the first time I've heard this kind of call and it was definitely kind of creepy at first. A few get on my house in the middle of the night and then you can hear a single individual call. I thought it was a person outside, crying in pain, at first.

One thing nobody talks about is the stink that starts to develop about two weeks after they first start emerging. My backyard is disgusting with decaying cicada bodies. We even had a pretty long rain over the weekend and it's still pretty unbarable out there.

I'm curious, what Cicada songs the people on HN are hearing?

I'm in Montreal and I'm pretty sure the ones I hear are Dog Day cicadas (N. canicularis)[0].

[0] https://www.cicadamania.com/cicadas/neotibicen-canicularis-h...

I've definitely got M. Septendecim https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeTCje3h/

In China cicadas used to be held as pets, although never as popular as crickets. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crickets_as_pets

Bees also have an advanced and partially decoded language. They can even point direction and distance to the beehive when they find flowers.

be great if we find the "shhhhh! everyone be quiet there are predators around, lets go somewhere else".

There might not be one. Cicadas seem to have almost no predator avoidance instincts whatsoever. Wikipedia describes their survival method as "predator satiation"--that is, emerge in such tremendous numbers that it doesn't even matter how many of them get eaten.

Oh, I was thinking you wanted to contact cicada 3301 somehow. Sorry, I don't speak to locusts.

Interesting how they sound a little different around the world, and also have a different life/growing span. This is my local variety https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5OGl9twsEE they come out during August (usually) and make much noise.

I tried to speak cicada but I ended up just annoying the shit out of everyone and then dying after 3 days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com