He’d come up studying cicadas, which lay their eggs in trees. When the larvae hatch, they drop to the ground, burrow into the tree’s roots, and stay there for seventeen years, sucking its sap. To the tree, it’s a huge nuisance to have all that nutrition leak out of its lower parts before reaching its upper ones. As a young scientist, Karban read a paper by pioneering cicada researcher JoAnn White, who discovered that some trees were able to locate the place on their branch where the cicada eggs sat and grow a callus around them, suffocating them to death before they could hatch. Karban, like
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