The World Cup cicada: India’s rare insect on a four-year clock

Every four years, much of the world turns its attention to World Cup football.
In Saiden, a village tucked into the hills of Meghalaya in northeastern India, another spectacle is under way.
Villagers watch for gathering rain clouds, the first break in the summer heat, and the moment the forest floor yields beneath their feet. Then, almost overnight, the silence lifts and the forest begins to sing.
Millions of niangtaser cicadas emerge from the ground after spending four years underground, transforming the village for a few brief weeks from May into June.
"Every four years the World Cup comes and so does the niangtaser," says Evansis Jones Myrthong, the broad-shouldered village chief in his mid-forties. "For us, they are the same calendar."
As a teenager, Evansis spent evenings collecting cicadas before hurrying to the village school building, where Saiden's only television - a government-issued black-and-white set - showed live World Cup matches late into the night.
"The school building would be packed," he recalls. "We would keep the niangtaser at home and go straight there to watch until two or three in the morning."
He still remembers the players more clearly than the years: Roberto Baggio, Romario, Bebeto, Batistuta. Most people in the village supported Italy.
The old television still sits in the office of the Dorbar Shnong, the village community council.
The coincidence is more than a curiosity. The niangtaser, a rare cicada found only in this corner of Meghalaya, emerges on a rigid four-year cycle that mirrors football's biggest tournament. In a village where generations have grown up waiting for both, entire stretches of life are measured by its return.
"The sound of the forest and the arrival of the World Cup are the same signal. One starts humming; the other [just] begins. The calendar is that simple,” offers Livingstone B Marak, a slender betel leaf farmer in a faded baseball cap, his lined face shaped by years of working the hills.
Just after sunset, Livingstone, fondly known as Livi in the village, adjusts his rubber goloshes and clicks on his black plastic torch. Flinging a handmade bamboo container, called a tyndong, across his back, he heads off into the night.


Tonight, the 50-year-old farmer is not heading deep into the jungle. He will stay near the edges of the Nongkhyllem Wildlife Sanctuary, on the open land where the shrubs and bamboo begin, searching for something smaller, rarer, and stranger than most people on these hills will ever see.
"Hurry up," Livi calls to his friend Eddie Kharbani, a lean, tall man in his late forties. Glancing at his watch, Livi adds: "We might miss the timing."
By seven in the evening, the road outside Livi’s house in Saiden village’s Iewsier locality had filled with dozens of men, women and children, each carrying a tyndong and a torch, their rubber shoes sinking into the wet earth as they made their way towards the dark treeline.
The niangtaser does not emerge all at once. The first wave surfaces shortly after dark. More follows later in the night. Miss the early window and you miss the best of it.
"It is part of who we are," says Livi with a smile.
The group moves towards the forest edge. Torches flicker on. Ahead, the darkness swallows the treeline.
Earlier that afternoon, it had rained for an hour, breaking the scorching May heat. Now the smell of wet leaves drifts from the bamboo groves as the beams from the torches sweep across shrubs and low vegetation at the edge of Nongkhyllem Wildlife Sanctuary.
A low collective hum has started to drift through the dark, like thousands of high-pitched whistles layered over one another. But the real sound, villagers say, comes deeper in the jungle.
As they step beyond the barren field, the vegetation thickens. Patches of wild shrubs and broom plant bushes crowd the open land at the forest edge, their leaves trembling in the torchlight. This undergrowth, soft and low, is where the young cicadas hide in the first hours after they break through the soil.
Eddie spots two of them on a shrub and swings his torch towards them. Both men now move quickly.
The cicadas are young and faintly coloured, their shells still soft, with shades of blue and pink visible in the light. Livi and Eddie pluck them carefully from the leaves and drop them into the tyndong.
Inside the container, he crushes the insects with a bamboo stick to stop them from climbing back out into the night.
"We only eat the young ones," Livi says. "The mature ones are dark and tough-shelled. We do not eat those."
Fresh from their nymphal skins, the cicadas need two to three hours for their wings to fully unfold and their bodies to harden. For now, their iridescent wings catch flashes of colour in the torchlight.
For the next few hours, the two men move quietly through the undergrowth, their torches sweeping low across the vegetation.
By the time they turn for home, it is late in the night. Each carries more than a kilogramme (2.2lb) of cicadas.
Forest to frying pan
By morning, Wanley R Marak, Livi's wife and mother of six, is already at her small tea stall outside their home, a black aluminium kadai heating on the stove.
The cicadas her husband brought home the night before are now washed, seasoned with salt, turmeric and chilli, then dropped into hot oil.
The smell draws people in before she has even opened for the day.
"In this season, besides tea and biscuits, I also cook the insect and sell it with rice," she says, while chewing tamul paan, a local mix of betel leaf and areca nut. "It is an instant hit. People love it."
Dressed in a blue cotton jainsem, the traditional dress worn by women in Meghalaya, she smiles as she hands a small portion to a customer, a plate of fried niangtaser for 20 rupees (21 cents). The customer eats it standing beside the stall, like a snack.
Raw niangtaser sells between 400-800 rupees ($4-$8) per kg, she says.
Wanley, 45, cannot remember the first time she tasted the insect. It was simply always there: On her mother's plate, in her grandmother's kitchen, part of every fourth year of her life for as long as she can remember.
Fried with salt, turmeric and chilli, the niangtaser tastes like shrimp, Wanley says. Crisp on the outside, soft within.
A woman named Taser
The name itself carries a story.
In the Khasi language, "niang" means insect, and "Taser" was the name of a woman.
According to village lore, Taser once lived in Saiden before tragedy stripped her of everything. Her husband died. Her children died. Then illness took hold: Severe diarrhoea and dysentery that no one could cure.
For four years, villagers say, she survived on nothing but water.
Fearing the disease would spread through the village like a plague, the community isolated Taser in a small hut at the edge of the forest and left her there.
When they returned four years later, the woman was gone. In her place, thousands of insects filled the hut and the surrounding forest.
The late E K Lapang, a former village chief and organiser of the Niangtaser festival, documented the story in a pamphlet published during the festival’s second edition in 2014.
For many people in Saiden, Taser never truly disappeared. Every four years, they say she returns.
Villagers speak of the watery droplets that fall from the trees during the emergence season. To them, it is Taser’s presence in the forest.
Science offers another explanation.
Cicadas feed on enormous quantities of watery plant sap, extracting the nutrients and expelling the rest in fine droplets. During a mass emergence, entomologists call it “cicada rain”.
In Saiden, the villagers have always simply known it as Taser.
Reading the forest
Professor Sudhanya Ray Hajong, an entomologist at North Eastern Hill University in Shillong, about 45km (28 miles) from the village, first encountered the niangtaser in 2006 when an acquaintance brought him a specimen and mentioned that it appeared every four years.
Hajong recognised it as a cicada. What surprised him was that he could find no scientific record of it.
After consulting international experts and waiting for the next emergence to confirm its usual cycle, he and collaborators eventually described it as a new species.
Named Ribhoi Chremistica after the district where it lives, the cicada has never been recorded anywhere else on Earth.
It is also the only known periodical cicada in the Indian subcontinent.
Globally, only a handful of cicada species share such rigid emergence cycles. The best known are the 13- and 17-year cicadas of the United States.


For most of its life, the niangtaser remains underground.
The nymph feeds on bamboo roots, growing slowly beneath the forest floor for four years before emerging for a brief adult life above ground.
But how does it know when four years have passed?
"The young nymphs do not count time in years," Hajong says. "They get cues of annual time passage by the change in soil moisture due to the annual rain cycle, the temperature cycle and the seasonal cycle of nutrients the trees manufacture."
In other words, the nymph reads the forest.
Every monsoon, every dry season, every subtle shift in the soil marks another year gone.
After four of these cycles, the nymph reaches its final stage and begins its journey to the surface.
"Periodic cicadas ensure survival by synchronous mass emergence," Hajong says. "It is one of nature's strategies of evolutionary survival."
What makes the phenomenon remarkable is that each nymph does this entirely alone. There is no signal between them. No chemical trigger or collective decision.


"Nymphs are least bothered about what other nymphs are doing," Hajong says. "They are self-driven by biological instinct."
Millions emerge together at the same time.
As for why the niangtaser survives only in this small pocket of Meghalaya, Hajong's answer carries a quiet warning.
"At one point in evolutionary history their distribution was uniform," he says. But changes in climate, landscape and human activity have contributed to their being confined to only certain pockets like Saiden.
Hajong points to cicada species once found across parts of Southeast Asia that now survive only in isolated forest pockets.
Those pockets, he says, are shrinking.
"We fear these island habitats are getting smaller," he adds, "posing grave threats to their very survival."


World Cup cicadas
Four years after each emergence, Evansis says, the village begins preparing again.
Food stalls appear overnight. Visitors arrive from neighbouring villages, while children stay awake long past midnight. Football matches stretch late into the evening.
On the grounds of the two-day Niangtaser Festival, Evansis moves briskly, checking food stalls, greeting visitors, and keeping an eye on the football tournament unfolding on a rain-soaked field nearby.
Fried niangtaser sizzles in cooking oil. A fishing competition is under way; live music fills the air. Families gather beneath temporary shelters as clouds roll across hills.
Started in 2010, the event celebrates the insect and the traditions, stories and livelihoods that have grown around it.
"The idea is to preserve our cultural heritage associated with this insect and to create awareness about protecting the ecology it depends on," Evansis says.
That ecology is becoming increasingly fragile.
Rapid development, deforestation, forest fires and jhum cultivation are shrinking the habitat the cicada needs to complete its four-year underground cycle.
The harvest itself, Evansis believes, must also be managed more carefully.
"Overextraction of the young cicadas by the villagers during the emergence should be minimised," he says. "We cannot celebrate this insect and destroy it at the same time."


Just adjacent to Saiden sits a government reserve forest where not a single tree or bamboo can be legally touched. But Myrthong knows that cannot last.
"How long will we depend on that?" he asks. "This insect originated from our village. We should preserve it in our own village."
The community has already taken its first steps.
In recent years, the Dorbar Shnong has set aside roughly 16 hectares (40 acres) of community land specifically for the niangtaser. Signboards at every corner warn that trees and bamboo cannot be cut there. During emergence season, some areas are closed entirely to collectors for four consecutive Sundays to allow the insects to breed.
Violators breaking this rule face financial penalties decided by the Dorbar.
Protected patches already appear to be working. Villagers say cicadas are noticeably more abundant there than in surrounding areas.
"Let it recycle, let it grow, let it spread its eggs for the next generation," Myrthong says.
He also wants a balance for the rest of the forest to feed. Birds, fish and other animals depend on the sudden abundance of insects during emergence season. If villagers take everything, nothing remains for the forest itself.
"The insect which comes out in the forest, let that be consumed by the animals," he says. "The one which is on our village land, let us consume it. In that way, the balance will be there."
The final journey
"By mid-June it is over," Evansis says.
The mature cicadas, dark-shelled and spent, begin flying towards the Umrong River in large numbers and drop into the rapids. The river fills with them. Along the banks, dead cicadas collect against wet stones and bamboo roots, their wings plastered flat by the current.
Locals call it niangtaser suicide. Hajong offers a simpler explanation: Cicadas are naturally drawn to sound and movement, and the fast-moving river may trigger that instinct in their final hours.
For the fish below the surface, it is a feast. For the forest above, closure.
The journey that began four years earlier beneath the ground ends in the same river that separates Livi's home from the sanctuary.
Not everyone has watched that cycle for as long as Kewstar Majaw.
At 92, he has witnessed more emergences than almost anyone alive in the village. He served in the Indian Army. He loves watching football. And every four years, without fail, he waits for his noisy visitors.
For Kewstar, the passing of the cicadas has become another way of measuring life. World Cups came and went. Governments changed. Forests retreated. But every four years, if the rains arrived on time and the bamboo still held, the forest sang.
As a boy, he would follow his parents into the forest carrying bamboo containers, the sound reaching them before the insects came into view. In those days, the niangtaser was everywhere. Behind houses. In the trees along village paths. Young ones, mature ones - the forest floor was alive with them.
The chorus was so loud, he recalls with a laugh, that people stuffed cotton into their ears to bear it.
The insect did not need to be searched for. It found you.
Kewstar sits quietly for a moment. At his age, he has watched the forest retreat, the bamboo thin, and the chorus fade with each passing emergence. The insect that once appeared on his doorstep now requires a torch and a walk in the dark to be found.
"It was everywhere," he says softly. "Now you have to go looking for it."
In a few weeks, the cicadas will disappear beneath the earth once more, keeping time in darkness until the cycle begins again. By the next emergence, another football World Cup will be under way somewhere else in the world.
Whether Saiden’s forests will still sing with them depends on what survives until then.

<small>Source: Al Jazeera</small>