As I have mentioned in past posts, I enjoy watching professional golf on TV, partly due to the interesting geography associated with many of the PGA venues. This weekend's Memorial Tournament, in Dublin, Ohio, is interesting for another reason: the ongoing emergence of the Brood X periodical cicadas.
Among the many 17-year periodical broods, Brood X has emerged in the Mid-Atlantic States, across Western Ohio and most of Indiana and throughout Eastern Tennessee. The noisy, active adults are solely focused on mating and will not feed during their brief tenure above ground. Females will lay their eggs on the tender twigs of trees and shrubs before dying; once they hatch, the larvae fall to the ground and enter the soil where they will ingest nutrients from a tree root for the next 17 years.
Those of us who do not live in Brood X territory can get a feel for the event by watching this weekend's golf match. A background din, provided by the males, waxes and wanes throughout the broadcast while cicadas zoom across the camera shots and swarm about the players and gallery. Of course, many of us can also look forward to the annual, "dog-day" cicadas that begin to emerge in a few weeks.
