Cicada World Cup: India’s rare insect on the four-year clock | Nature

The last trip

“By mid-June it’s gone,” says Evansis.

Mature cicadas, with black shells and used, begin to fly to the Umrong River in large numbers and fall into the rushing water. The river is filled with them. Along the beach, dead cicadas collect wet rocks and bamboo roots, their wings covered in water.

The locals call it niangtaser suicide. Hajong offers a simple explanation: Cicadas are naturally attracted to noise and movement, and a rushing river can trigger that instinct in their last hours.

For groundfish, it’s a feast. For the forest above, close.

The journey that began four years earlier underground ends in the same river that separates Livi’s house from the sanctuary.

Not everyone has watched the cycle for as long as Kewstar Majaw.

At the age of 92, he has seen more shows than almost anyone alive in the village. He served in the Indian Army. He likes to watch football. And every four years, without fail, he expects his noisy visitors.

For Kewstar, the passage of cicadas has become another way to measure life. World Cups have come and gone. Governments changed. The forests returned. But every four years, if the rain came on time and the bamboo was still growing, the forest would sing.

When he was a boy, he followed his parents in the forest carrying bamboo, and the sound was heard before the insects began to appear. In those days, niangtaser was everywhere. Behind the house. In the trees along the country roads. Children, mature – the forest floor was alive with them.

The chorus was so loud, he recalls laughing, that people put cotton in their ears to hear it.

The virus did not need to be investigated. It found you.

Kewstar is silent for a moment. At his age, he saw the forest receding, the bamboo thin, and the song fading away each time it passed. The creatures that used to appear at his door now need a light and walk in the dark to find them.

“It was everywhere,” he says softly. “Now you have to go look for it.”

In just a few weeks, these snails will disappear under the surface of the earth, leaving time in darkness until the cycle starts again. By the time it comes out, another world cup of football will be taking place somewhere else in the world.

Whether Saiden’s forests will sing depends on what has happened up to that point.