Normally, the story of an insect’s life starts with a single egg, but I prefer to begin my telling in the dark—the dark, loamy rhizosphere of the forest’s underbelly. Here, under a foot or two of soil, all tangled up with hyphae and root, our young periodical cicada lives for seventeen years, a blanched, six-legged vampire sucking root sap for sustenance. The xylem she extracts is mostly water and hardly nourishes. She hugs her root and hopes to evade subterranean insectivores, perhaps in the form of an occasional grub-loving mole. Every couple of years, she gets the itch to shed her skin. Four times she does the trick, sloughing it off, enriching the duff.

Episode credits

Reported: Molly Webster, Pat Walters and Becca Bressler
Produced: Matt Kielty
Music: Matt Kielty
Fact-checking: Natalie Middleton and Diane Kelley
Edited: Pat Walters