[HN Gopher] Periodical cicada Brood X will emerge in 15 states i...
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Periodical cicada Brood X will emerge in 15 states in 2021
Author : irthomasthomas
Score : 87 points
Date : 2021-01-19 12:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cicadamania.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cicadamania.com)
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| Interesting. I had remembered one spring/summer in Illinois from
| my childhood where there were just so many cicadas. Everytime the
| wind shifted you'd hear them drone on, the buzzing slowly
| shifting between loud and soft all day. The volume was quite
| remarkable.
|
| I hadn't thought about it in a long time. Fun memories.
| rotexo wrote:
| One of the things I really miss about home: summer bug noises.
| Generally just don't get them in Berkeley.
| hateful wrote:
| This may have less to do with your location and more to do
| with overall trends
| https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/where-have-all-
| insec...
| sjaak wrote:
| Quick, buy sesame seed futures!
| odomojuli wrote:
| For those who don't get the reference:
|
| There's a scene in Silicon Valley based on a story about Peter
| Thiel.
|
| The scene involves the idea of 'prime collision' and cicada
| cycles.
|
| http://valleywag.gawker.com/the-peter-thiel-sesame-seed-scen...
| arusahni wrote:
| I remember being on my college's campus when this brood hit the
| mid-Atlantic 17 years ago. The sidewalks on the quad were
| occasionally crunchy.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Where I lived in DC, people served them to eat dipped in
| chocolate.
| lsllc wrote:
| It's a delicacy for the lizard people from the moon!
|
| /s
| dunefox wrote:
| "What is Brood X, the infestation coming in 2021? They're big.
| They're incredibly loud. And they're coming by the billions."
| "That phenomenon is named Brood X, or the Great Eastern Brood"
|
| That sounds like something from Starcraft or Warhammer 40k.
| mkl95 wrote:
| It is straight out of Metroid, where X is a parasitic virus,
| and SA-X is the main antagonist of Metroid Fusion.
| https://metroid.fandom.com/wiki/SA-X
| santoshalper wrote:
| Also, can we take a moment to acknowledge how awesome
| "cicadamania.com" is? It feels like a throwback to when the
| internet was cool.
|
| Everything about this story made be smile. Except, you know,
| for the swarms of cicadas flooding our country. That part was
| a little less cool.
| joezydeco wrote:
| It's a Roman numeral. Group 10.
| [deleted]
| bitwize wrote:
| We are Broodax! We are born in flesh:
|
| https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/05/04/the-broodax-im...
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| Fond childhood memories....
|
| Playing 'tennis' as they fly across the yard. Dad was not pleased
| with cicada wings and goo dried on his favorite racket.
|
| The cat eating so many he vomits.
|
| The combined sound of thousands within earshot is not to be
| believed.
|
| I actually checked air fares, thinking about 'cicada tourism'...
| throwanem wrote:
| I'm looking forward to this! Granted, wasps will I think always
| be my favorites for macro photography - there's just something
| about getting to see them so close and in such detail that
| appeals to me in a way I don't quite know how to describe. But I
| didn't have a macro lens for the last significant brood emergence
| here, back in 2017, and especially after the privations of 2020's
| lockdowns I think I'll really enjoy the opportunity to see
| cicadas in the same kind of detail.
| reportingsjr wrote:
| I live right in the heart of this brood's range (Cincinnati,
| Ohio) and was about 10 years old the last time it emerged. I'm
| super excited for this spring/summer! It is an incredible sight
| and sound to see so many cicadas everywhere!
| silicon2401 wrote:
| What an interesting phenomenon to experience. I was a kid during
| the 2004 surge and it was incredibly striking. Literally
| everywhere you looked outside, the ground was covered with dead
| cicadas, and it was even difficult to just walk outdoors without
| a cicada flying into you or landing on you. If you haven't seen a
| cicada, imagine an insect about the size of a man's thumb, with
| wings about as long.
|
| As a kid it was novel, if gross, With people cooped up inside
| these days, I feel like it'll be less of an issue.
| echelon wrote:
| > If you haven't seen a cicada, imagine an insect about the
| size of a man's thumb, with wings about as long.
|
| The whole thumb. And that's just the length.
|
| They're bigger than large cockroaches.
|
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/9b/06/00/9b0600f601c8bfada378...
|
| > With people cooped up inside these days, I feel like it'll be
| less of an issue.
|
| It'll sound nice. They produce an incredibly calming, "summer"
| sound.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj7ylgj2JlQ
| quercusa wrote:
| And they are hunted by huge Cicada-Killer Wasps which sting
| them and fly off with them to bury them.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphecius_speciosus
| hristov wrote:
| So we have had the tyrant, we have had the plague, I guess it is
| time for the locusts.
| fnord123 wrote:
| These are cicadas. Locusts look like grasshoppers.
|
| And I'm very fun at parties "[[chl[?]ch]]no
| mckirk wrote:
| Oh god, you are melting! Are you okay?!
| tripplethreat wrote:
| I was expecting some site about the old Cicada-something "group",
| which caused quite a scene a couple of years ago, but instead
| entered a rabbit hole on the actual insect.
|
| Great info, and we do have a lot of Cicadas here in Brazil at
| this time of the year, wonder if perhaps there are similar
| broods.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Hah!, The headline triggered my automatic counting of letters
| and segments looking for prime number cribs as well. Have so
| far resisted the urge to check pixel dimensions on images,
| stego fingerprints, hidden rune thumbnails, exif data, but what
| happens if I xor these images together...
|
| K, no more internet today.
| likpok wrote:
| There are both annual and periodic cicadas. I lived through a
| 17 year bloom (there are also 13 year cicadas in the US), and
| it's quite different from the usual numbers.
|
| According to wiki, it seems like the periodic broods are solely
| within the US/Canada.
| fingerlocks wrote:
| It's odd that the data for the locations of emergence happen to
| respect state lines. Is there no data for South Carolina, or do
| cicadas prefer not to visit that state? Perhaps the website says
| somewhere, but I didn't go down that rabbit hole.
|
| I noticed this because Alabama is not listed as one of the 15
| states, despite being nearly surrounded by cicada observations.
| And I know from experience that the northern part of the state
| gets swarmed with cicadas when they emerge.
| odomojuli wrote:
| Few observations:
|
| Cicada groups split off while they occupied glaciated
| territory. The Appalachia mountain range is famously, formed by
| glaciers. The Valley and Ridge part of Appalachia, was a major
| highway of immigration and colonization. It is more likely that
| territory borders respect the geography and that the brood
| respects geography, rather than to each other.
|
| A rough inspection of the brood distribution and the
| continental divides shows approximate respect to the St.
| Lawrence and Eastern Continental Divide.
|
| There also seems to be some respect to the division between
| Mississipi Flyway and Atlantic flyway, which are bird migration
| routes.
|
| It is my understanding that an organism highly dependent on
| deciduous forests will respect those regions and this includes
| most of the South.
|
| Turns out, humans like deciduous forests too. They're useful
| for timber, charcoal and potash (fertilizer). The borders of
| this territory lines up pretty squarely with the border to
| Canada. That makes civilization a predator of the cicada
| through deforestation. The Onondaga brood is named for the
| Onondaga people.
|
| As I understand, the Brood distribution effort is done by
| crowdsourcing.
|
| Given the longevity of the brood cycle and the inconsistency in
| historical record, it could very well just be the case that the
| recency of this effort has not synced with an emergence.
|
| That's my guess why cicadas and humans line up.
|
| More practically, cicada cycles provided a necessary
| evolutionary flush of nutrients, bacteria and fungi across the
| distributions. They breed in such overwhelming numbers that the
| entire ecosystem of predators is likely to prosper from their
| emergence. So perhaps humans settle where there is game and
| timber, and where there is game and timber it is likely that
| the area prospered from a cicada cycle.
| ortusdux wrote:
| I had not thought about the possibility of a connection between
| locust and the increasing popularity of no-till farming. As I
| understand it, tilling is one of the primary causes of the
| decrease in locust swarm population and frequency over the last
| 100 years. No-till is on the rise, reaching 21% in 2017. I wonder
| if we will start to see more swarms in the future.
| juancampa wrote:
| Enjoy your sesame seeds while you can [1]. Serious question
| though, can these really have a devastating effect on agriculture
| these days?
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxh2X6NjuhY
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I was in DC in 2004 when they came out last time. I don't
| recall any concerns about agriculture and nothing in our yard
| got damaged. You just had to clean up a lot of dead cicadas. I
| think most of their feeding is done underground and they come
| out to mate and then die. It's not like locusts that eat
| everything in their way. Birds were super happy though.
|
| It stlll impresses me that they are better at keeping track of
| years than I am.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've only once seen an outbreak of locusts and I hope I'll
| never see one again, it still gives me the creeps more than a
| decade later. _Everything_ covered in insects, as far as you
| could see. This was in Northern Canada, just South of Sudbury,
| near the Magnetawan river.
|
| I'd never seen anything like that ever before, I had to stop
| for gas, saw a few insects land, went in to pay and by the time
| I wanted to go back to the car it was literally covered in
| insects, there was no way to get into it without bringing a few
| hundred of them along. I ended up waiting out the worst of it.
|
| Horror movies really don't capture the feeling well.
| SamBam wrote:
| Locusts have been extinct in North America since about 1930.
|
| The biggest plague used to be the Rocky Mountain locust,
| which would cover every surface for days, utterly destroying
| farms. Those went extinct in about 1905. The High Plains
| Locusts went extinct in about 1930. [1]
|
| There are various theories about why they went extinct --
| something to do with what the settlers and farmers were doing
| to the land. But it wasn't an obvious culprit like pesticide,
| which wasn't really in widespread use until about the 40s.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_locust
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I've only once seen an outbreak of locusts and I hope I'll
| never see one again, it still gives me the creeps more than a
| decade later. _Everything_ covered in insects, as far as you
| could see.
|
| There is a locust swarm in _Things Fall Apart_ (a work of
| fiction) which is viewed as cause for celebration. The
| locusts cover everything and eat the crops -- but they can be
| harvested and eaten themselves.
| markdown wrote:
| > Things Fall Apart
|
| A devastating tale. We had to read it in school.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| At least there aren't ever any spider outbreaks. I don't
| think my spirit could handle it.
| dharmab wrote:
| ... we've all heard the factoid that the average person
| supposedly eats 4 spiders per second. This statistic is
| misleading; it's based on a study examining on the peak
| rate of spider consumption in areas where the spider-
| streams are densest. The global average rate is probably
| closer to 1 spider per second (obviously higher while
| asleep than while awake) ...
|
| - https://what-if.xkcd.com/120/
| _ihaque wrote:
| (For those who didn't click, note that What-If #120 is
| "Excerpts from What If articles written in a world which,
| thankfully, is not the one we live in")
| danaris wrote:
| Nah, we all know it's just a statistical problem, and the
| real culprit is Spiders Georg
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/spiders-georg
| arthurcolle wrote:
| I don't really get this meme.
| nitrogen wrote:
| I feel like I've seen a video of tons of spiders flying
| overhead somewhere...
| quercusa wrote:
| I saw that one time high (as in feet above sea level) on
| Mt. Lassen (N. California). The sky was full of little
| sparkly web-strands; it was very cool.
| rriepe wrote:
| They might just be using very high prime numbers.
| arcticfox wrote:
| I was just in the Brazilian Amazon, and there was a funny
| moment there re: spiders... I stepped out onto a small
| floating dock and my weight sank the bottom of the dock
| below water level. There were probably ~100 spiders of all
| sizes that immediately emerged around my feet from between
| the slats as they were forced out from their homes
| underneath the dock.
|
| Fortunately I don't mind spiders much, but it did look like
| a scene out of a horror movie.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Thanks for the details. I've now added a new entry to my
| list of places never to go. I do hope those little guys
| were able to resettle somewhere less prone to
| anthropogenic climate change ;)
|
| Places to Avoid, list written + maintained by Arthur
| Colle:
|
| [] Deep space [added: after seeing Gravity]
|
| [] Mariana Trench [added: after seeing Underwater]
|
| [] Amazon rainforest [NEW, added: 2021-01-20]
| dwighttk wrote:
| My brother told me to climb under an outdoor couch in
| Texas when I was about 6 and I was immediately covered by
| hundreds of harvestmen (aka daddy long legs.) I remember
| being startled and yelling for help but was not
| permanently scarred or anything. Spiders only creep me
| out the usual amount.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| There are tarantula migrations during mating season in the
| fall. If you live in the Bay Area, you can see them up at
| Mount Diablo State Park.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Migrations, like, they are just walking across the ground
| or something?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Must've been a good duck and goose hunting season that year
| and the next though!
| dugmartin wrote:
| Cicadas aren't locusts. They don't really swarm like locusts
| its just that there are a lot of them at the same time.
| Locusts are really just stressed out grasshoppers.
| lhorie wrote:
| I'm actually worried they won't show up in the numbers
| they're expected to. I've read several old stories about
| thick clouds of birds and/or insects literally eclipsing the
| sun (the biblical plagues of egypt is one notorious example),
| but then I also read some recent articles about how some
| species that used to show up seasonally in large swarms
| suddenly had their numbers drastically decreased one year
| (monarch butterflies are a famous instance of this)
| xattt wrote:
| An echo of the clouds of birds is a daily "commute" of
| black crows in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
|
| Around sunrise, they head to forested land northeast of the
| city. At sundown, they head back to their roosting grounds
| in Victoria Park. The sky is filled with hundreds of crows
| for approximately 10 to 15 minutes during this rush hour.
| It's absolutely fascinating to watch.
|
| Every so often, you get to be "lucky" winner of them
| roosting in a tree in your back yard overnight. They cackle
| throughout the night. Anything under the tree will be caked
| in droppings by morning.
| acct776 wrote:
| Are they protected....?
|
| I wouldn't stand for that....uh...shit.
| reportingsjr wrote:
| What a childish and selfish thing to say. You should be
| ashamed of yourself.
| [deleted]
| SllX wrote:
| Does the self-protection and vengeance of a crow society
| count?
| kazinator wrote:
| The term "murder of crows" contains a clear message to
| those who are attuned.
| throwanem wrote:
| As I understand it, the largest consensus around probable
| cause for that decrease has to do with neonicotinoid
| pesticides, which both bioaccumulate and also affect many
| more species than their intended targets. I don't actually
| know whether larvae of a brood that's been underground for
| over a decade would be more or less likely to be exposed to
| concentrations significant enough to do harm.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| From wikipedia:
|
| > The emergence period of large prime numbers (13 and 17 years)
| was hypothesized to be a predator avoidance strategy adopted to
| eliminate the possibility of potential predators receiving
| periodic population boosts by synchronizing their own generations
| to divisors of the cicada emergence period. Another viewpoint
| holds that the prime-numbered developmental times represent an
| adaptation to prevent hybridization between broods with different
| cycles during a period of heavy selection pressure brought on by
| isolated and lowered populations during Pleistocene glacial
| stadia, and that predator satiation is a short-term maintenance
| strategy.
|
| Wow.
| dmit wrote:
| Classic devops trick. Schedule your jobs at prime intervals -
| this way it's much less likely to get concentrated waves of
| traffic at 0:00, or 12:00, or in exact 15-minute increments.
| WmyEE0UsWAwC2i wrote:
| Thia avoids collisions as long as the process takes less than
| one unit of time to complete.
|
| If not, processes that take more than one unit will overlap
| eventually[0]
|
| [0] Advent of code 2020, day 13.
| https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/13
| odomojuli wrote:
| Addendum: Don't just pick any prime numbers. The Babylonians
| devised our time system because it's highly composite or
| 'antiprime'.
|
| So obvious primes such as 2, 3 and 5 won't do.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Excellent advice. Good for programming in general when it
| comes to sleeps or waits and such. If you have multiples of
| 10s everywhere when an error happens every, say, 10 or 20
| seconds, it might be hard to tell where it's coming from. But
| if you make them relatively prime to each other, you can can
| easily tell: "Oh it happens every 37 seconds? I know exactly
| what that is!"
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Wow. This one simple trick actually just made my day. Cheers.
| ZeljkoS wrote:
| There is an entire Numberphile video dedicated to that:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7jfHM-mMC4
| dwighttk wrote:
| This is weird. I graduated outdoors in spring of 2005 and I
| remember a lot of cicada noise and people talked about this brood
| X being in 2005 not 2004. I usually would just assume my memory
| was off by one but I know which year I graduated.
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