By Michael F. Duggan
Magicicada septendecim—what the hell was evolution thinking?
The seventeen-year cicada is a large, largely defenseless insect that apparently tastes good to every insectivorous bird and animal and whose survival strategy is to reproduce in such spectacular profusion that the combined appetites of the local natural world can’t keep up with it. How does it pull this off? Born underground, it stays there in immature form living a solitary life that must seem pretty pointless even by large, solitary insect standards for an arbitrary-seeming 17 years (compare this longevity to the four-week lifespan of a housefly). It then emerges simultaneously in uncounted billions. A supreme example of a lopsided lifecycle, cicadas only live for a a few weeks as adults, scratching that seventeen-year itch in a frenzied, buzzing orgy. The cyclic hum-bug is a fascinating natural phenomenon of the Mid-Atlantic states and a few adjacent latitudes of the nation.
One can only wonder if there is a metaphor here for the human condition or if the rest of the natural world sees us the way we see cicadas: a creature that takes forever to mature, becomes sexually obsessed at the age of 17, and then joins a noisy, overpopulated swarm. On the other hand, we live longer, are global in distribution, and are arguably better-looking.