Lead
In 2021, many places in the United States issued warnings at the same time, because the "17-year cicada", which happened once in 17 years, was unearthed again, and this time the number of cicadas was larger than before.
Because this cicada is threatened by birds and other predators, its life cycle is too short, and it can only crawl out after a hibernation in 17 years to adapt to the environment, and the cycle gap between the two is 17 years, but they have never disappeared.
The reason they lie dormant for so long is because they have to escape their predators.
In fact, there are many magical things in it, such as their cries have a kind of magical effect, which can increase the appetite of the neighbors, and some people even want to raise a nest.
But what is unexpected is that this cicada, which was once regarded as a delicacy, showed a "magical" effect at the moment of breaking the ground, and the green trend that swept through the house directly flooded the house into a "sea of cicadas", which made people blurt out.
So how powerful is this cicada?
1. The cicada that can do magic.
There are many different species of cicadas in North America, millions of them throughout the Americas, but they all have one thing in common – they call amazingly.
However, the familiar cicada song often refers to the ordinary cicada, not the cicada that emerges once every seventeen or thirteen years.
Although these cicadas only live for a few weeks after being unearthed, they have accumulated energy during the hibernation period of more than ten years, and not only grow relatively large, but also have a particularly healthy physique.
The name "cicada" has evolved many times in Chinese, and this means "wax", this name was first derived from the shape of the shell of the cicada, people think that the shell of the cicada is like wax, so this small animal with amplified calls is called "cicada".
There are many kinds of "magic" of cicadas, compared to the lifespan of other cicadas around, their ten days are really long, so their calls and reproduction are faster.
Another magic is that they adapt to the climate of North America, which is often windy, rainy, and sometimes snowy, and this wayward climate makes the cicadas that have been dormant for 18,000 years very hard, so they have developed their own "summon cards".
The cicadas hibernate for a time that is multiples of seventeen years, so every seventeen years a large wave of these cicadas appears, and tens of thousands of billions of cicadas are eaten by the birds, but this is only a small case for them.
There is also a kind of magic in their calls, which is that the average cicada calls just ordinary plants to attract the cicada to suck the honey, and the cicada can also attract predators.
Nowadays, this kind of cicada only has this kind of magical call only in the eastern cicadas that grow in large numbers in the deep forest, and the cicada calls in the deep jungle have the strange ability to excite not only the cicada, but also other insects, and even the leaves that sound the sound of the tree, but the call is of no use to humans.
In addition, the call of the cicada can also make the neighbor's appetite skyrocket, and there is a netizen who lives abroad, and his neighbor smells the cicada again, so he runs to the yard to find one of these cicadas to raise a nest.
Although the cicada is a small insect that is sometimes unbearable, this is also an arrangement made by nature for ecological balance, so I can only endure it.
2. The magic of the magic cicada is dormant.
This is how cicadas survive in nature, and in fact, cicadas have a unique history of growth over a long period of time.
Cicadas are creatures that evolved from insects near shallow waters, and they have the longest larval stage underground, some will be a few years, some will be a few months, and some will be less than a month, of which the most common in the United States is a seventeen and thirteen year cycle, but there are also very few two years, or even a year.
The environment in which they live has hardly changed, they still live in soil with enough humidity to help them store energy and tolerate cold, and it is also permeable, allowing air to circulate underground, ensuring that they can breathe underground.
On the surface, their larval stage only has three stages: development and hatching, eating food, and molting, but this is only the growth stage of the larval stage, and when they break out of the shell and become a pupa, they begin to hibernate until they are finally "fed" in the ground, and then begin to carry out the next stage of growth.
The 17-year cicada is one of the oldest insects in North America, and the 17-year cycle is the trajectory of many temperature changes in the Americas.
The cicadas dug a hole in the soil every year during their seventeen years of dormancy, and because they grew in size, they had to dig up the excess dirt while still getting enough air inside.
But they can't dig a hole every year, so they can dig a hole and molt and then dig another hole and molt again, and so on and so forth, but they can also dig for three years, four years, all the way to the end of their career, and that's what happens to their instincts.
The reason cicadas' hibernation cycle takes seventeen years is because they have magically dodging abilities, and their dormant cycle is a prime number, which means that the common divisor of their dormant cycle is only 1 and 17.
And the reproductive cycle of their breeders is 1 year, which means that when the cicadas appear, their predator numbers will surge, but when the cicadas begin to hibernate, the number of predators will decrease, and it will not be until seventeen years later, when the cicadas reappear, that the number of predators can return to the previous high point, which is this survival strategy.
At the same time, this survival strategy is called "saturation escape", and it is also a strategy of great research value in the field of mathematics.
Many mathematicians want to use mathematical methods to deduce the relationship between the number of cicadas and their predators, but the number of cicadas and their predators is extremely large, so no mathematician can use mathematical methods to calculate them.
As we already know, there are three possibilities after the cicada hibernation in the seventeen-year cycle: digging holes and molting until the end of the career stage, and life reaches the end after digging three holes and molting three skins, in which the time of digging and the number of holes are random.
Therefore, there may be cicadas with vigorous vitality, and even cicadas that are ready to go, and these cicadas may hang up, but this is also the normal state of life, and the cicadas that survive are basically very powerful cicadas, and they are also the cicadas with the shortest dormant cycle.
Burstmann studied 10^8 samples of cicadas in a seventeen-year cycle, and finally came to the conclusion that "the cicadas have the highest survival rate around seventeen years", and the same is true for the other 222 types, and it is this ability of the cicadas to adapt to the environment that has allowed them to evolve over so many years and become an unusually powerful army.
In addition, they leave a set of calls for their offspring, which allows them to take risks and minimize their losses, a survival strategy that is well worth learning and applying in everyday life.
3. Wonderful adaptation to the environment.
The survival of cicadas is so tenacious, since they can lie dormant underground for 17 years, can they also survive on the surface for 17 years?
In fact, this question is really not a problem, the dormant period of the cicadas in the ground is the longest period of their life.
If it weren't for the cicadas that climbed onto the branches of trees hundreds of years ago due to rising temperatures, shed their skin, and finally landed on the ground, we might not even know that such a creature existed, but this has finally become the result of nature's chosen trajectory.
The reason for the cicada's strong dormant ability is their wings, which protect their bodies well, and are also highly poisonous, so they can also feed their wings as tadpoles, but they still have no way to adapt to the cold of North America.
Their ability to hibernate also lies in the fact that our ancestors who were also dormant with them also experienced a miserable period when the temperature dropped and they froze to death, so in the end they adjusted with the season and found a way to adapt to themselves.
The seventeen-year cycle is the best one they can adapt to, and so are their calls, so today's cicadas are able to survive and reproduce today's most spectacular populations.
It can be said that the cicada must have a very strong ability to survive in such a long life cycle, so it is an animal worthy of our admiration.
epilogue
There are many magical mysteries hidden around us, and the cicada is just one of them, nature has infinite magical power, so we should explore this wonderful power more, experience the magic of nature, and better use this power of nature to social development.
At the same time, we should also attach great importance to the ecological balance between living things, which determines that we can survive in a harmonious environment, so we must protect the ecological balance and return nature to the respect it deserves.