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Sam Baron, Associate Professor, Philosophy of Science, The University of Melbourne

Prime time for cicadas: what a once-in-1,547-year bug population surge tells us about the nature of reality

Aussiepics / Shutterstock

It’s a big year in America – for wildlife as well as for politics. I’m talking about periodical cicadas.

These curious creatures spend most of their lives in the ground, emerging after 13 or 17 years to eat, breed, die and repeat the cycle. For the first time in more than 200 years, two specific broods of the 13- and 17-year cicadas have emerged together: Brood XIX, in the southeastern United States, and Brood XIII, found in the country’s Midwest.

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