Two-For-One Broods This Month – Under the Scope

Who doesn’t like a two-for-one sale? Who turns one of their two eyes away from advertisements declaring “Two for One Price” or “Buy One Get One Free”? No one! Whether we buy or not, advertisers are teasing “Ha! Made you look!” in hopes that we’ll buy. And often we do.

If you’re like me, you like bargains. I get excited when I drive by Burger King and see two Whoppers for $6 or two Croissan’wiches for $5 bucks. And now that Lent is over, I get even more excited! Getting two-for-one is like what Jack Black teaches his students in the movie, “School of Rock”: Getting two-for-one is “Sticking it to the man!” For those who have not seen this movie, I looked this up for

you: “stick it to the man” is an idiomatic verb meaning “to take some action intended to defy a source of oppression.”

Beginning this month, we’ll be witness to perhaps the biggest Two-for-One of our lifetimes. That’s right: It’s two-for-one season on cicadas! You know cicadas: they’re those big, stout-bodied flies with transparent wings that emerge from the ground, crawl up your trees, and start a screeching symphony that echoes across the neighborhood. The instruction manual for a cicada reads like this: hatch from egg, fall to ground, burrow, live underground for many years, get fat sipping rootlet juice, emerge from ground, crawl up tree, split shell, squeeze out of shell, unfurl wings, fly off at high speed, screech to attract mate, mate, pierce twig to lay eggs, die. After emerging from the dirt, it all takes about 1-2 weeks.

Some populations of cicada are notorious for emerging all-at-once a certain number of years after they hatch from their eggs. When such cicadas emerge together in a given year, sometimes in the millions, they’re called a “brood.” This year, 13-year cicadas and 17-year cicadas (Broods XIX and XIII, respectively, so named by entomologists who attended the National Brood-Naming Convention in Vegas a long time ago and were allegedly sober during naming discussions) are in-sync and will emerge together. What this means is that much of the U.S. will see (and hear) not millions, not billions, but trillions of these fat, sap-sucking flies between April and June this year. Get ready: It’s about to get noisy!

How frequently does this humongous entomological two-for-one convergence happen? Well, if you remember your differential calculus, matrix algebra, and stochastic modeling, then you’ll come to realize that none of that is necessary to calculate this frequency. All you need is straight-up arithmetic: 17 times 13 equals 221. Thus, 17-year cicadas and 13-year cicadas emerge at the same time every 221 years.

Two hundred twenty-one years ago–the last time this great two-for-one season occurred–was in the year 1803. Why does that sound so familiar? With trillions of cicadas merging like hordes of screeching banshees in the wilderness forests of the Louisiana Territory, it’s no wonder that Napoleon sold the land on the cheap. “Ces maudites cigales de Louisiane vont me render sourd!” as Napoleon told James

Monroe during negotiations. No translation necessary, Bonaparte: We PoV readers can certainly recognize a French curse word when we see one.

Those  Napoleonic  cicadas  were actually  laid  221  before  that— way back in 1582.  The egg-laying mother-cicadas of that year watched Magellan  circumvent  the  South American continent en route to the Philippines.  The explorer likely avoided North America to escape the trillions of swarming cicadas in that year’s two-for-one extravaganza! “As malditas cigarras da Louisiana vão me fazer ficar surdo!” he explained to his freezing and hungry crew at Patagonia to avert mutiny.  Gosh, Ferdinand!  Curse words are even recognizable in Portuguese!

Imagine all that cicadas miss then whey spend years underground. The great Two-for-One Brood of 2024 may be alarmed to find what we’ve done with the world of their egg-hatching days: the price of Whoppers, fake news,  hate  tweets,  epidemics, political divisions, saber-rattling, consumer costs, and immigration crises to name a few things. It’s got to be more peaceful underground sipping on rootlets. What will this year’s newly-laid cicada eggs wake up to 221 years in the future when they emerge from the ground in the year 2245? Halley’s Comet will have visited three more times. Hurricane Ida  repairs  may  be  complete. Congress will have finally passed a spending bill. LeBron will have finally retired from basketball. Saturn will no longer have rings. Space agencies will figure out how to land craft on the moon right-side up. “Law and Order” will enter its 252nd season. Forever postage stamps will cost more. And, most regrettably, just like they were in 1803 and 1582, Bayou Lafourche and Bayou Terrebonne will be shorter in length than they are today.