began appearing under my deck two weeks ago, with tunnels under them; I was worried about wasps, but the Internet seemed set on gophers or maybe voles. The tunnels seemed small for rodents, only like finger-thick, but I learned in my period of febrile research that gophers are much smaller than I’d realized (I always thought they were basically the same thing as groundhogs) and figured that was that.
Fast forward to today and, for reasons that don’t bear rehearsal, I turned over a slate in my yard and discovered a network of finger-thick tunnels with a few slow-moving bugs wiggling around in what looked like a state of offended surprise. It took me a minute because I’d seen these bugs before, but only in absentia: I’ve poked at many a discarded skin of a cicada nymph, but never the thing itself. Turns out it is the year of the Great Eastern Brood a.k.a. Brood X, a cohort of cicadas that carpets New Jersey and parts of the surrounding states every seventeen years.
In point of fact, I knew this was coming, because I’ve lived here forever and I remember the 2004 brood bumbling and dying all over the place at my brother’s college graduation. I just didn’t know they’d create a thousand ominous “mud turrets” under my deck.
It may shock you to learn that all this is relevant to the stated purpose & mission of this newsletter: Brood X is in fact the inspiration for the prime-numbered breeding cycles of the dragons in Brimstone Slipstream, which mathematical modeling suggests is a strategy to prevent hybridization among the different cicada broods. It is also a “predator satiation” strategy, which makes a ton of sense for thumb-sized bugs that fly like senior citizens who’ve had one too many Bloody Marys at brunch; the only defense they’ve got against predators is literally just to exist in such large quantities that the sum and totality of bug-eating creatures in their locale can’t swallow them fast enough to stop them breeding. What that implies about the kind of creature that might prey on dragons is left as an exercise to the reader…
|