Cicadas: The Beautiful Bugs Using Prime Numbers to Stay Alive
Cicadas use prime numbers to emerge to avoid being eaten by predators who have shorter life cycles. This spring, two cicada broods, 13-year-cyle and 17-year-cyle, known as Brood XIX and Brood XIII, will emerge at the same time across the Midwest and Southeast US, something that hasn’t happened since 1803. Experts estimate over 1 trillion cicadas will appear, covering an area of 15,782,828 miles if laid end to end.
It was the weekend, and my wife had taken the kids to go shopping. Wanting to rest a little, I stayed home, made myself some coffee with a side of dried mangos, and started watching a documentary I had come up on about cicadas. When I finished the documentary, I was amazed by how these bugs use math to stay alive and saddened about how unfairly I treated these innocent bugs.
Yes, the most misunderstood and unjustly treated creatures on this planet are cicadas, and this mistreatment stems from the fairy tales we grew up with, written by Jean de La Fontaine. In one of his stories, La Fontaine speaks about the friendship between a…
