Once they get inside insect cells, they become isolated from other bacteria and restricted to small populations. They almost always have exceptionally tiny genomes. These ‘endosymbionts’ are especially common among sap-sucking bugs, like cicadas, and help their hosts to make nutrients that they can’t get through their food. Many insects carry bacteria inside their cells. It involves the bacteria that live in their bodies, and it’s so weird that when John McCutcheon first discovered it, he thought he had made a technical error. They’ll be picked off by birds, snagged by squirrels, and crunched under shoes and tyres, but none of that will dent their astronomical numbers-which is perhaps the point of their lengthy underground stints, and their synchronous emergence.īut the cicada’s weird lifestyles have also left them with a different legacy. When they greet daylight for the first time, they devote themselves to weeks of frenzied sex and cacophonous song, before dying en masse. These black-bodied, red-eyed insects have stayed underground for 13 or 17 years, drinking from plant roots. Round about now, in various US states, a vast swarm of cicadas will start crawling out of the ground.
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