As most of you now know, whether you are in the affected area or not, this is the year of the seventeen-year cicadas, and we in the MidAtlantic and Midwest are now at the height of their season. I have vague memories of 1987, when they last emerged, but the old memories don't match the wildness and fascination of this cicada immersion of 2004.

You can read more than you would ever want to know about these creatures at this excellent cicada site. This site not only has detailed closeup (ugh) pictures of them, but has soundclips of their different songs.

When they first emerged, I thought they were disgusting, but now I think they're kind of cute, in a disgusting sort of way. It was fascinating to watch them heave themselves out of their holes, leave their shed husks behind, and make their way slowly up the tree trunks in the urban neighborhoods. Who could have imagined that a foot or so beneath the landscaping in your "garden apartment complex" lurked countless cicada "nymphs," growing patiently for seventeen years? When they first came out, the pin oak tree trunks were covered with them, as if the trunks had suddenly been decorated with jewels or some sort of holiday ornaments. But then you noticed that these jewels were crawling.

Many of them didn't make it. That first day, when I drove in the parking lots, my tires popped dozens of them, and the pavements were full of flattened cicadas. Others perished on the grass, either eaten by birds or attacked by other insects. But there were plenty more of the successful ones, who made it up into the trees, and within a week they were ready to rock 'n' roll.

When I first heard the "chorus" in the trees, I thought it was some mechanical engine that had been left on. But then I realized that this was the sound of cicadas by the thousands, by the ten thousands, by the hundred thousands and the powers of ten. As they warmed up, the tree chorus picked up speed and volume and sounded like ten thousand little cell phones calling (the old-fashioned ones, not the "music box" newer ones), or perhaps a thousand little industrial engines, revving in the leaves.

Then they put the buzz in the mix. At first only a few, then more and more got the buzz and spent the day making noise. A couple of colder, rainy days kept them quiet, but now that we have summer-like weather, they are going strong, and the racket is high in a neighborhood that already has road noise, helicopters and airplanes overhead, lawnmowers, air conditioners, and car stereos and alarms.

I thought that perhaps they would shut up at night, when it was cooler, but it is a warm night tonight, and they are howling their eerie love calls into the darkness. Every so often, the chorus starts up and there is a vast murmuring of cicadas, reminding me that there is an immense winged multitude out there, going about their business. Their business, of course, is reproduction, making more cicadas. Each day there is an orgy of unbelievable numbers in the trees above me, as they find favor in each other's bulbous orange eyes and embrace in their insectoid romantic clinch.

The noise and the orgy will go on for about a month, and by this time next month, our cicada neighbors will have finished. Later their eggs will hatch and the younglings will drop into the earth. The adults, their work finished, will die, uh, like flies and there will be an unpleasant rain of dead cicadas. Seventeen years from now, in 2021, it will happen all over again.

There are actually mathematically interesting things about cicadas (trying to stay on topic here). Much has been said about their seventeen-year cycle. Why seventeen? Seems a peculiar number for a periodic natural phenomenon. Biologists explain that seventeen is a prime number which is impossible to divide into even numbered sub-cycles which would be easier for predators to follow. (There are also thirteen-year periodic cicadas.) Seventeen years is also too long a period for predators to adapt to; most birds or small mammals don't live that long, so it's not to their evolutionary advantage to wait for 17-year prey to emerge. Nevertheless, other creatures will eat the cicadas if they can, and they do, but there are so many of the cicadas that predators can't make a big enough dent in the population. And even if fewer survived to crawl up the trees and reproduce, their own prolific eggs would re-populate the billions needed for a successful brood. Cicadas are made to multiply, and multiply, and multiply.

So much for cicada math. Now for some cicada philosophy. There is, at least in my observation, a tremendous wastage of cicadas. Millions of them die without getting up into the trees to reproduce. Some of them don't even make it out of their shells. As I said above, predators and human vehicles destroy them too. There seems to be little value for the individual cicada; their purpose, if it can be called that, is a collective one. The brood survives, not individual cicadas.

In the conventional monotheistic viewpoint, God cares for all things, especially living things. "Not one (sparrow) falls to the ground without your Father knowing," as Jesus is quoted in the Gospel of Matthew, 10:29. Is God's eye on the cicada as well as the sparrow? Is there a cicada soul, which is collective rather than individual? Jesus is quoted in the next lines: "…So there is no need to be afraid; you are worth more than hundreds of sparrows." If hundreds of sparrows, how many cicadas? Thousands, or tens of thousands?

The monotheistic religions see us sentients as having an individual, unwaste-able soul, and humankind in its billions, for a religious person, is not like cicadakind in its thousands of billions. We are not supposed to be a collective species which has so many numbers that it can waste mass quantities of its individuals while others reproduce. And yet over history, there has been quite a lot of mass human wastage, either due to natural phenomena like earthquakes and plagues or by the violence of other human beings. Does this mean that God, or evolution, did not intend us to be individuals, but to live more like cicadas and expect that for every billion born, millions would be wasted?

For this one month every seventeen years, we humans are sharing our world with a life form that seems frighteningly alien. Not only don't they think like us, they don't think at all. Their round orange eyes express no depth of feeling, at least to us, and their voices are unpoetic and harsh. It is hard to anthropomorphize them, as we do with fellow mammals, and we don't feel sad when cicadas die. Yet when it comes to numbers and scale, we humans may share more with them than we want to think.

By 2021, when their descendants re-emerge, any number of things may have happened to me. I may be dead, which is not an exciting prospect, though a cicada doesn't think about it at all. If I'm alive, I'll be almost 68. I might not be living in an area that has these 17-year cicadas. For all I know, civilization might have fallen apart by then. I sincerely hope it doesn't, if only for the sake of my mathematics and science quest. If I'm alive, I hope that I will have at least reached quantum mechanics, or even string theory if it's still going. Perhaps by then they will have cicada theory, which proposes a 17-dimensional universe populated by vast numbers of large, winged high-energy particles.

Posted at 3:43 am | link