A cicada in sync with its brood is a cicada with a chance.The insects’ synchronized emergence is an evolutionary strategy, scientists say. Birds, raccoons and other predators can eat only so many of them. So the more cicadas emerge together, the better the odds that more will live on to reproduce and pass along their genes.“They have the safety-in-numbers strategy,” said Chris Simon, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut who studies the insects.The rare cicadas that lose track of time and emerge without their kin, by contrast, are sometimes called “stragglers.” Most small groups of stragglers get snapped up and don’t survive to reproduce.“Natural selection has favored individuals who wait, because the ones who don’t wait get eaten,” Simon said.This summer, the number of periodical cicadas is expected to be extra large, as two broods emerge at the same time. The last time these two emerged together was in 1803. Tens of billions of the insects are predicted to surface. Users of the Cicada Safari app, which is designed to report cicada sightings and help scientists track the insects, have tallied more than 1,000 sightings in Georgia and hundreds in North Carolina and Alabama.Periodical cicadas fall into two categories of brood, or age class: those that take 13 years to emerge and those that take 17 years. Temperature seems to trigger when they pop out, but how exactly they set their internal clocks or communicate when to come up from the ground together remains somewhat mysterious.What’s more, scientists say they’ve noticed …
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[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnA cicada in sync with its brood is a cicada with a chance.The insects’ synchronized emergence is an evolutionary strategy, scientists say. Birds, raccoons and other predators can eat only so many of them. So the more cicadas emerge together, the better the odds that more will live on to reproduce and pass along their genes.“They have the safety-in-numbers strategy,” said Chris Simon, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut who studies the insects.The rare cicadas that lose track of time and emerge without their kin, by contrast, are sometimes called “stragglers.” Most small groups of stragglers get snapped up and don’t survive to reproduce.“Natural selection has favored individuals who wait, because the ones who don’t wait get eaten,” Simon said.This summer, the number of periodical cicadas is expected to be extra large, as two broods emerge at the same time. The last time these two emerged together was in 1803. Tens of billions of the insects are predicted to surface. Users of the Cicada Safari app, which is designed to report cicada sightings and help scientists track the insects, have tallied more than 1,000 sightings in Georgia and hundreds in North Carolina and Alabama.Periodical cicadas fall into two categories of brood, or age class: those that take 13 years to emerge and those that take 17 years. Temperature seems to trigger when they pop out, but how exactly they set their internal clocks or communicate when to come up from the ground together remains somewhat mysterious.What’s more, scientists say they’ve noticed …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
