Sean Menke, Professor & Chair of Biology at Lake Forest College, along with his colleagues. took advantage of the cicada event in 2024 to learn more about ecosystems.  In nature, populations of plants and animals occasionally explode in numbers, providing a temporary surplus of nutritious food for consumers. When these nutritional ‘pulses’ occur, they can initiate chain reactions in food webs, as consumers switch from their normal diets to feast instead on the abundant new food items. Understanding the consequences of these food pulses for natural communities – which organisms are affected, for how long, and if they stop performing their normal “jobs” to take advantage of the new resource – can provide insights into how ecological systems function and respond to change. My colleagues and I studied the synchronized emergence of billions of Brood XIII periodical cicadas in Chicagoland this past summer. This was an enormous pulse of insect food for birds and ants, one of the most abundant and important group of organisms on the planet. Come find out what we learned, and still hope to find out!