The genus Magicicada lives in North America alone and consists of seven species that are broken into two types: three Magicicadaspecies have a seventeen-year cycle, and four have a thirteen-year cycle. Most of us are used to annual cycles. We experience how everything dies in the fall and then is reborn six months later, but we rarely become aware of cycles longer than this. Occasionally, a partial or complete eclipse, the sighting of a distant star, of two planets “kissing,” will tie us to an interval longer than the three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. The emergence of the cicadas is one of these moments, a wrinkle in time, a glimpse of the incomprehensible world that expands beyond us in all directions. In addition to their longevity, the ability of the seven Magicicada species to synchronize their emergence makes them unique among the more than three thousand species of cicadas that exist worldwide. Most species of cicada stagger their emergence, exposing only a segment of their population to predation annually, while the vast majority remain safe underground. But periodical cicadas demonstrate no such discretion—they enter all at once.

Normally, the story of an insect’s life starts with a single egg, but I prefer to begin my telling in the dark—the dark, loamy rhizosphere of the forest’s underbelly. Here, under a foot or two of soil, all tangled up with hyphae and root, our young periodical cicada lives for seventeen years, a blanched, six-legged vampire sucking root sap for sustenance. The xylem she extracts is mostly water and hardly nourishes. She hugs her root and hopes to evade subterranean insectivores, perhaps in the form of an occasional grub-loving mole. Every couple of years, she gets the itch to shed her skin. Four times she does the trick, sloughing it off, enriching the duff.

Episode credits

Reported: Molly Webster, Pat Walters and Becca Bressler
Produced: Matt Kielty
Music: Matt Kielty
Fact-checking: Natalie Middleton and Diane Kelley
Edited: Pat Walters