northeast-flora-and-fauna

They're back! Here's a periodical cicada I met last week at the Sourland Mountain Preserve in Hillsborough. These red-eyed bugs (and they are true bugs ) have been living underground for 17 years, giving them one of the most interesting lifecycles around. Don't call them locusts though, since that term refers to grasshoppers, a very different kind of insect. Though we and other parts of the world have annual cicadas , the periodicals are a North American exclusive; nobody else has cicadas with the 17 year and 13 year lifecycles of the periodical cicadas. The periodical cicadas emerge in broods that generally occur every 13 or 17 years with the intention of flooding an area with so many cicadas that even if many get eaten by predators, there will still be ample cicadas around to breed and thus continue the species. And while their predators will probably thrive in the year the cicadas emerge, their predator numbers will presumably have returned to normal by the next time t...