While you were sleeping…
The Rip van Winkle of the insect world, the “periodical cicada,” is awakening across the East Coast of North America after a 17 year hiatus. Since 1996, these “Brood Two” cicadas have lived as nymphs two feet underground, sustaining themselves on liquid they suck from tree roots. While biologists don’t know exactly how the cicadas set and keep their rigid schedule, they do know that these occasional visitors will crawl up to the surface, molt, swarm (sounding rather like a chorus of jackhammers), mate, lay eggs, and die– all within a month… at which point the cycle begins again.
One month isn’t a lot of time, and the cicadas will be busy… still, they’re bound to discover that, while they were sleeping these past 17 years, entomologists have made some pretty impressive advances. From figuring out how insects fly to discovering an entire new order of insect, check out “Leaproaches, Mutant Butterflies and Other Insect News That the 17-Year Cicadas Missed.”
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As we remind ourselves that it could be worse, it could be locusts, we might send sustainable birthday greetings to Rachel Louise Carson; she was born on this date in 1907. Trained as a marine biologist, she began her career at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. She turned to nature writing in 1950– and won the National Book Award for her first full-length effort, The Sea Around Us. Her next two books, also on the ocean and the life within it, were also best-sellers.
In the late 1950, she became concerned with threats to the environment, especially the advent of synthetic pesticides. The result was Silent Spring (1962)– a book that brought environmental awareness to an unprecedented number of Americans (even as it elicited vicious counter-attacks from the chemical industry) and spurred a grass-roots movement that led to the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
