The Brood is Coming

 ...thankfully, I don't mean the X-Men villains.

I mean the periodic cicadas. Here in the DC area we're looking forward to the emergence of a 17 year cicada brood.

It's going to be loud and the foxes, raccoons, etc are going to be quite, quite happy. I'm tempted to try and grab a few myself and see how they fry up.

Periodic cicadas are a weird beast. We don't know how they evolved their extended lifespan, we don't know how they know when to come out (although a portion always tend to emerge early or late). And they only exist in the eastern U.S.

The evolutionary advantage is, of course, that so many of them come out that we can't eat them all.

(Mmm, fried cicada?)