Cicadas: The dormant army beneath your feet - Rose Eveleth
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Let’s Begin…
Every 13 or 17 years, billions of cicadas emerge from the ground to molt, mate and die. Adult cicadas only live a few weeks above ground, but you’d be hard pressed to ignore them -- they are extremely loud! Rose Eveleth explains everything you need to know about these noisy insects, admitting that there’s still some things we just don’t understand.
Additional Resources for you to Explore
For all you ever wanted to know about cicadas, visit Cicada Mania. Including, if you missed it, the songs of the cicadas.
For more about cicadas love affair with prime numbers, you can read this New Yorker piece.
For more about the awesomely gross fungus Massospora that infect cicadas (and for more about cool fungi in general) visit the Cornell University Mushroom blog.
If you want to see where in New York City the cicadas emerged, you can check out this project by Radiolab and WNYC to track them, and learn how to build your own cicada tracker.
And if you live in the Northeast and didn’t see any, there are a few reasons why. Here’s a video on why you might have missed them, or they might have missed you. And here’s a story from Scientific American about why many missed them.
Music in this animation is from:
"Hidden Agenda", "Summon the Rawk"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
For more about cicadas love affair with prime numbers, you can read this New Yorker piece.
For more about the awesomely gross fungus Massospora that infect cicadas (and for more about cool fungi in general) visit the Cornell University Mushroom blog.
If you want to see where in New York City the cicadas emerged, you can check out this project by Radiolab and WNYC to track them, and learn how to build your own cicada tracker.
And if you live in the Northeast and didn’t see any, there are a few reasons why. Here’s a video on why you might have missed them, or they might have missed you. And here’s a story from Scientific American about why many missed them.
Music in this animation is from:
"Hidden Agenda", "Summon the Rawk"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
TED-Ed
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Meet The Creators
- Educator Rose Eveleth
- Director Eli Enigenburg
- Composer Kevin MacLeod
- Narrator Rose Eveleth
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