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Daily 157: Millions Monday - Cicada Estimates

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Summary

Slightly chilly day. Announcements: staff elections June 1st, need 4 poll runners + 1 overseer (hopefully vaccinated non-staff). Yearbook cover photo Thursday. Ball playing, swinging, biking. Gentle day, nice JC. Millions Monday: cicada estimates - ~100 eggs per female, maybe 100 per tree survive, 10 mature trees = 1000 cicadas in field. Baltimore: ~100K yards × 100 cicadas = 10 million cicadas. Strategy: overwhelm predators with numbers.

Transcript

0:00 Welcome to ANI In the Air, Under the Tent, and Around Baltimore, your daily podcast briefing
0:06 of all the goings ons, ins, and arounds of our Tennessee Bay School.
0:09 So today was a slightly chilly day.
0:14 We had our mandatory announcements where I mentioned the fact that at school meeting
0:24 last week we agreed upon having the returning staff elections on Tuesday, June 1st, and
0:33 that we'll need to have the group that runs it kind of figured out and elect it hopefully
0:40 tomorrow in school meeting.
0:42 Need at least four people to run the polls and one person to kind of oversee it all.
0:48 I'm kind of hoping it'll be a bunch of fully vaccinated school meeting members, campy staff
0:55 of course, and I guess we'll see about it tomorrow.
1:02 Let's see, what else.
1:08 We're having the yearbook photo shoot the cover on Thursday, so be sure to be there
1:15 I guess at 12 we're doing that and I guess there's if people want to do creative writing
1:27 stuff they can submit that to the yearbook as soon as possible and I guess out in the
1:38 field plenty of ball playing and swinging and running and biking and all the wonderful
1:46 good things out here.
1:51 Pretty gentle day, had a nice JC I assume, I wasn't able to attend but seemed to go okay
2:00 and yeah I guess it's Millions Monday so I thought I'd just do a quick thing on cicadas
2:08 so how many cicadas can we expect to come out well and we'll just stick with you know
2:20 well we'll just explore that so I don't know how many eggs a female cicada will lay into
2:26 a branch but most insect populations lay a lot of eggs so let's go with 100.
2:34 So 100 eggs and maybe half of those will survive per tree well there might be multiples per
2:46 tree so I don't know let's just say 100 per tree will kind of come out so if you had 100
2:56 per tree and just looking around one two three four five yeah we have lots of little young
3:13 trees that will no doubt be useful to the next generation of cicadas but the ones that
3:19 have been actually around are mature that we didn't have to cut down I'm not sure what
3:24 happens to the ones where the tree disappears in the middle of their life cycle but so that
3:31 might be a thousand cicadas coming out just like right now in our field seems a bit high
3:41 but probably between a hundred and a thousand seems quite possible and then there's like
3:49 lots of trees around every place so let's say the number of houses say in Baltimore
4:04 well houses with yards but so it's about 600,000 people three per house so 200,000 houses say
4:15 half of them are cement locked so maybe 100,000 yards it's a lot of yards and if you had a
4:24 hundred cicadas per yard that would be something like 10 million cicadas which already seems
4:34 like a heck of a lot of cicadas I have no idea on the reasonableness of those numbers
4:41 I feel like a hundred per yard well I don't know maybe it's reasonable but it's a lot
4:50 so cicadas are coming and I mean their strategy is supposed to be huge amounts of numbers
5:01 so that the their predators get filled up and can't actually eat any more of them so
5:11 that kind of speaks to like hundreds upon hundreds of them but imagine these current
5:20 conditions it's a lot of effort to a lot of likelihood of bad things happening to them
5:29 during their 17 year sleep cycle or growing cycle I don't know anyway that's the podcast
5:38 for the day have a good one and I will see you when I see you