Two Cicada Broods Emerge Together
weather.com
weather.com
IDK what news you read but every news site i know reads like it was written by dums for dums. You owe yourself better.
The peak lasts not more than two weeks and in two months everything is gone, except mounds of cicada exoskeletons and bodies.
Around my house this is also known as my cat's happy time. His favorite stalk/catch/toy is a cicada. They respond in the most satisfying ways for him. They make noise. They flop around. They fly. They are the dumbest things around. They are the ultimate free toy. EXCEPT for when they are in the house. Then, they are the most annoying thing, and cause for quite the ruckus as the cat is jumping on/over/off of anything/everything in an attempt to re-catch the thing bouncing off the walls/ceiling
> 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!
Based on the table linked in this thread, it's rare enough to be interesting on its own. Geographical overlap of broods emerging doesn't appear to have happened since 1998 and then only in Oklahoma.
But yeah, it's weather.com, they've been clickbait since not long after clickbait began.
[1] https://cdn.britannica.com/32/222432-050-E9798FB1/map-emerge...
The major brood here, XIII, has a sub-brood that shows up 4 years ahead of time. 2020 was very noisy.
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.
“In the same way, death, life and eternity, are very simple things for anyone who has organs sufficiently vast to conceive them. An ephemeral fly is born at nine o’clock in the morning in the long summer days, to die at five o’clock in the evening. How is it to understand the word ‘night’?”
It is quite the contrast, though, to the cicada-epiphany you were imagining.