The Case of the Disappearing Cicadas

The insect cohort known as Brood X may not emerge on Long Island, a sign of humanity’s effects on even nature’s most reliable periodic events.

On a bright day in July 1987, Elias Bonaros, then 15 years old, grabbed a bucket and headed from his home in Bayside, Queens, to Ronkonkama, a town 40 miles to the east on Long Island. Dr. Bonaros — now a cardiologist, then a budding naturalist — wanted to see the huge, raucous group of periodical cicadas known as Brood X, which were due to come up in the town. When he arrived, he found the streets quiet and littered with empty nymph shells. Residents informed him he was a couple of weeks late. “It was heartbreaking,” Dr. Bonaros — who still lives in Bayside — recalled recently. He comforted himself with the knowledge that periodical cicadas are predictable: This brood’s descendants, he figured, would keep resurfacing in Long Island for the foreseeable future. Alas, he may have missed his chance. The cicadas of Brood X are again expected to emerge across the eastern United States in the coming weeks, as they have every 17 years for millenniums. (Things have already kicked off in Georgia and Tennessee.) But researchers and other devotees fear that some parts of the country, including all of Long Island, may have lost their local outposts of this famous cohort of insects.