Study
The Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution of Periodical Cicadas
Williams, Kathy S.; Simon, Chris
Annual Review of Entomology, 1995
A synthesis of periodical cicada biology: the 13- and 17-year life cycles, brood structure and geography, synchronised emergence, mating behaviour, and the hypotheses advanced to explain both the length and the primality of the cycles.
- Studied in
- Magicicada
- Sample size
- review of periodical cicada research
Magicicada species spend 13 or 17 years underground feeding on root xylem before emerging in enormous synchronised broods, at densities reaching well over a million per hectare. Emergence is synchronised within a brood and cued by soil temperature after the requisite number of years. Predator satiation is well supported as a function of the synchrony; the specific length and primality of the cycles are hypothesised to reduce overlap with predator and parasite cycles and with other broods, and are not settled.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Synchronised mass emergence is best explained as predator satiation, with the particular cycle lengths remaining an open evolutionary question.
How NatureHQ reads it
Two claims usually travel together here and only one of them is established. That the synchrony works by swamping predators is well supported: emerge in numbers no predator population can eat through, and enough survive regardless of how many are taken. That the cycles are 13 and 17 *because those numbers are prime* is a plausible hypothesis that has never been tested in a way that could fail, and it is repeated as though it were the finding.
- Almost all work is on North American Magicicada; other long-cycle cicadas are barely studied.
- Hypotheses about why the cycle lengths are prime are difficult to test on a 17-year organism.
- Brood boundaries and stragglers complicate the tidy picture of discrete broods.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: Annual ReviewsPublished in an Annual Reviews journal.
doi.org/10.1146/annurev.en.40.010195.001413
This reference was resolved automatically against Crossref on 2026-08-11.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-11.