If you haven’t had a chance to use your cicada preparedness skills, the opportunity has probably passed, at least for the next seventeen years. Cicada season is winding down, and while most New York City residents didn’t get the cicada invasion they were promised (aside from Staten Islanders) that doesn’t necessarily mean the insects are dying out. Dr. Chris Simon, a biologist at the University of Connecticut, tells the New York Times that the bugs emerged in a “jigsaw pattern.” Some pockets of the Eastern U.S. are cicada-free thanks to cold springs or land development by humans, but the insects popped up elsewhere. Brood II made its first appearance in Oklahoma this year, possibly because a different brood fell out of its usual rhythm and emerged in the wrong year. We can’t say we’re jealous that our grass doesn’t “crunch from the residue of carcasses,” as the Times puts it.
