Why It Sucks To Be Born As a Periodical Cicada

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]You hatch from an egg and immediately fall into the dark. You will not see the sky again for 17 years. You are not sleeping. You are awake down here tunneling, feeding on root sap, growing through five body stages over 17 years, aware of the dark, aware of the roots, aware of the slow passage of seasons through the temperature of the soil. And when you finally come out, you will have 4 weeks to do everything your species needs you to do. Then you will die 17 years. 4 weeks. That is the deal. Your body is counting not consciously.

[00:00:37]Through changes in the root sap, spring chemistry, winter chemistry, your body reads each cycle and increments something. Some biological counter that nobody has ever fully understood toward the number 17. Some cicas get the count.

[00:00:54]A warm spring that mimics the seasonal signal too early. A cold year that blurs the boundary between one cycle and the next. Something in the root sap that reads like a cycle when it isn't. The counter ticks to 17 before 17 years have passed or after. And the cicada emerges alone. No brood. No millions of siblings. No wall of sound carrying for miles. Just one cicada surfacing into a forest that has moved on without it. It sings. Nothing answers. You are going to be one of them. Skip forward. You are 3 years underground. You are the size of a fingernail. You have molted twice, shed your outer shell, and grown a new, larger one each time. You move through the soil, find roots, feed almost continuously because the sap is thin, and you need a great deal of it to grow.

[00:01:44]Above you, seasons cycle through the root chemistry. Spring sap, summer sap, the thin, cold sap of winter. When the tree pulls its resources down, your body reads each one. 3 4 R five. In year four, you mol for the third time. In the dark, alone, you shed your own skin. The old shell splits along your back, and you pull yourself out of it. Legs, head, the whole shape of you, and leave it behind in the soil. You are soft for a few hours, pale, larger than before. The new shell hardens around you in the dark, and you lock back onto the root, and you keep feeding. Nobody sees this.

[00:02:24]It happens in the dark and the route is there and the counter keeps going. Six.

[00:02:29]Seven. Skip forward 10 years. You are close to adult size now. Still wingless.

[00:02:37]Still in the dark. The forest above you has changed. Saplings become trees. Old trees fallen. You have been feeding on this forest for a decade. And the forest does not know you exist. Above you right now, the brood is underground too.

[00:02:53]Millions of them. in 14 states all counting and and no all reading the same root chemistry you are reading all incrementing toward the same number you are counting with them your count is wrong skip forward year 16 your eyes have begun to turn red's counter has reached a threshold and the chemistry has shifted and the eyes are turning red and emergence is coming and there is nothing you can do about the timing of of it. You begin building the exit tunnel. A vertical shaft half an inch wide running straight up through the soil. You stop just below the surface. The last 1/2 in of earth between you and the sky. The trigger is temperature. The soil at 8 in depth must reach exactly 64° F. Not approximately.

[00:03:45]Exactly. Your body will not break through until it does. You wait. 16 years and 11 months underground, 1 in from the sky. You've been underground for 17 years, 1 in from the sky. Drop a if you'd have broken through early. A warm week in April. The soil hits 64°.

[00:04:03]You break through the surface. The light is overwhelming. You have not seen light in 17 years. You climb the nearest tree trunk, wings wet and folded, exoskeleton still soft. You wait for the sound.

[00:04:16]There is no sound. The forest is a normal forest on a normal April morning.

[00:04:21]No roar of emergence, no wall of sound, no millions of siblings breaking the surface alongside you. Just birds doing what birds do and a squirrel in the undergrowth and a woodpecker working at a tree somewhere to the left. Because the emergence is not happening. You emerged alone, but the sun is on your back. For 17 years, your world was the cold of soil at depth, the specific temperature of roots in winter, the thin warmth of summer conducted downward through 6 in of earth. You have never felt direct sunlight before this moment.

[00:04:59]It hits your exoskeleton now, and every receptor in your body is registering something it has no category for. Warm in a way nothing underground was ever warm. You cling to the bark and the sun moves across you. to end for this one specific moment before the silence has fully registered. This part is correct.

[00:05:18]This part is everything you were built for. Then you wait for the sound. Your exoskeleton hardens over 6 hours. Your wings dry. You turn dark. The black and orange of an adult cicada and your timal, the vibrating membrane on the sides of your body begins to fire. 100 dB. The sound carries for a mile in every direction. It is the loudest sound any insect on Earth produces and you are producing it alone in a forest that has no context for a single cicada song in April. And every bird within a/4 mile has turned its head toward you. This is what 17 years was for. This specific sound at this specific frequency that a female of your species will respond to with a click, a precise rhythm, a frequency that only she makes and only you are listening for. You were built for this. The song is perfect. The song is everything. Nothing clicks back. You sing for a day, 2 days, 3 days. The sound carries for a mile. The mile is empty. The females who would have answered are underground still counting.

[00:06:23]Or they came and went already and their bodies are decomposing in the leaf litter below you. Your song is perfect.

[00:06:30]Your timing is wrong. On the fourth day, a bird lands on the branch. Not a predator drawn by the roar of emergence from miles away. Just a bird doing what birds do on April mornings in a forest that has nothing unusual happening in it. It regards you for a moment. The survival strategy of your species is predator satiation emerge in such overwhelming numbers that predators eat until they cannot eat anymore and millions of you survive anyway. The strategy works because of the brood. You are not millions. You are one cicada on a branch in April. You are still singing when the bird moves. Somewhere in this forest, 6 weeks before you emerged, a female straggler laid her eggs. They are hatching now. Tiny nymphs, white, the size of ants dropping from a branch one by one, falling to the forest floor, immediately burrowing. Each one finding a root. Each one locking on. The forest floor closes over them. They are in the dark now, awake, feeding, beginning to count. Their count will be wrong, too.

[00:07:35]Or it will be right. The same warm spring that fooled you may have fooled their mother. Or they count correctly and emerge with the brood, and the forest roars, and they are statistically spared. They do not know which yet. They are one-year-old and underground, and the root sap is turning cold. Brood X is the largest periodical cicada brood on Earth, 14 states. In 2021, it emerged population densities reached 1 and a2 million per acre in some areas. The sound was audible from space instruments. News stations covered it for weeks. It is underground right now.

[00:08:12]Every nymph from the 2021 emergence is in the soil, counting. They have been underground since 2021. They will not surface until 2038. They are awake down there tunneling, feeding, reading the root sap. Most of them are accounting correctly. Some of them are not. In 2038, on a Tuesday morning in May, when the soil hits 64°, the ground across 14 states will move and the sky will fill with sound. And for 4 weeks, the largest insect emergence on Earth will happen again. And in that same forest, a few weeks later, one more cicada will break the surface alone. It will climb a tree.

[00:08:55]It will begin to sing. The sound will carry for a mile. 17 years underground for 4 weeks above ground. And some of them get the count wrong. Drop A if that hit you. And if you want to see another animal whose life is somehow even harder, it's right there.