Overhead, underfoot,
they abound
And they have been seventeen years in the ground.
For
seventeen years they were immune to politics and class war
and
capital taunts and labor taunts,
And now they have come out like
billions of insect debutantes
-- Ogden Nash, “Locust-lovers, attention!” inspired by Brood X (1936)
Cicadas! They're coming soon.
The Brood X cicadas are returning this spring and spanning across more than a dozen states. Billions are set to emerge, including here in Ohio. This Brood X cicada is likely to make an appearance in Ohio by mid-May and stick around through June. They've have been underground for nearly 17 years – nymphs hatched, fell to the ground, burrowed into the soil and fed on fluids sucked from the roots of plants and trees for years.
“Usually, it takes until the temperature about eight inches below the surface of the topsoil reaches about 68 degrees, and usually they are triggered when there’s a nice warm rain,” said Ryan Larrick, with the Ohio Department of Agriculture.
(Karaline Cohen. “17-year cicadas returning to Ohio in the coming weeks. ABC 6. WSYX. April 28th 2021.)
Cidadas are ugly.
When it comes to appearance, cicadas are the stuff of nightmares. These large housefly-shaped insects have a sickly, caramel-colored exoskeleton and transparent wings with veins sprouting from their thorax. Their foremost pair of legs is especially long, which helps them cling to tree limbs.
Hidden on their underside is a long tube protruding from their head, which they stab into plants in an effort to suck out the plant’s nourishing juices – their only food source during adulthood. To top off that interesting collection of body parts, most cicadas have fire-engines red eyes – not red-tinted eyes either … red red.
They'll harass you. They'll land on you and you'll unknowingly take them into the house on shirt or pants, only to buzz around moments later in an apparent suicidal collision flight into everything in the house.
They are big and fast enough that if one accidentally flies into you, it might leave a mark. Once past the creepiness factor, they're almost comical looking. Really.
And, cicadas are loud.
Cicadas are the most efficient and loudest sound-producing insects in the world. Cicadas are like tiny violins – their bodies are similar to that of a violin in that much of it consists of empty, air-filled spaces that act like a resonating chamber and amplify the sound they generate.
Adult cicadas (also called imagoes) spend their time in trees looking for a mate. Males sing (or otherwise vibrate the air or their surroundings), females respond, mating begins, and the cycle of life begins again.
To make their love buzz, the male cicadas rapidly vibrate a pair of white, ribbed membranes called tymbals that sit on either side of their abdomens.
“So, an individual male can actually reach about 100 decibels, which is about the same noise level as a running lawnmower,” (Or, just shy of standing three feet from a chainsaw.)
Fun Facts – Cicada
Once top-side, the nymphs grow wings and appear white. As their exoskeleton hardens they become darker. The hardening can take four to six days, according to the University of Michigan. Once they are fully hardened, they are mature and ready to mate. The females lay around 20 eggs at a time in slits they cut in tree branches. The eggs hatch within six to 10 weeks.
17-year cicadas are actually a little bit blacker in color and they actually have the red eyes believed to ward off predators.
Be careful to differentiate the bona fide Brood X emergence from stragglers. In the world of periodical cicadas, stragglers are any individual insects that fall out of sync with their brood’s emergence schedule. Straggler emergences tend to be patchy and scattered compared to the main emergence. Brood X’s 2021 emergence is likely to have even more stragglers than usual because two other adjacent broods have emergence schedules that are four years before and after it, according to researchers at the University of Connecticut.
Most cicadas can be found around maple trees. You won't find them on pine or cedar because they really don’t like those sticky surfaces on those trees.
Early colonists saw hordes of emerging cicadas and quickly misidentified them as locusts. “They were thought of as a biblical plague,” said John Cooley, an assistant professor in residence at the University of Connecticut.
Over their many years beneath the soil, cicada nymphs shed their exoskeletons, a process known as molting, five times.
Cicadas do not sting or bite, according to the University of Michigan. They are not considered a pest.
Why are cicadas active during the hottest part of the day? Cicadas have figured out a way of sweating. They feed on plant sap, so they are constantly sucking in liquids, and as the temperature gets hotter and hotter, and they start to overheat, they remove the water from their blood and pass it through ducts in their body. As it exits their body through pores on their thorax, they get that continuous evaporative cooling. This allows themto be active when it’s too hot for the predators that feed on them. Many reptiles and birds and mammals that would normally go after them seek shelter from the heat when it gets to be 110 degrees or more, but cicadas can still be active and feeding and sending out mating calls.
Cicadas can kill recently planted trees or saplings. If you are looking to plant, you should wait until fall. If you have recently planted, experts suggest putting netting over trees, so the females don’t cut into the tree and kill it.
By emerging all at once in densities of up to 1.5 million per acre, cicadas manage to overwhelm predators, from songbirds to skunks, who quickly get too full to take another bite of the buzzing buffet. Once the raccoons, frogs, snakes, squirrels, possums and any other animals interested in an easy meal can’t eat anymore, the cicadas are free to go about their business of spawning the next generation.
Humans can eat cicadas, too. Cicadas have been eaten (or are still eaten) in Ancient Greece, China, Malaya, Burma, Australia, North and South America and the Congo. For Native Americans, the history of eating cicadas goes deep. Claims about what they taste like vary, with some people comparing them to shrimp, others to asparagus and a few people even mentioning peanut butter. But before you go wild eating cicadas, please note that they may contain elevated levels of mercury and can cause allergic reactions, especially among those with shellfish allergies.
Cicada are employed in the traditional medicines of China and Japan for hearing-related matters.
Coming out of the ground only in prime numbered intervals, periodical cicadas avoid ever synching up with booming populations of predators, which tend to rise and fall on two to ten year cycles, wrote Patrick Di Justo for the New Yorker in 2013.
Not all cicadas emerge every 17 or 13 years. Nearly 3,400 species of cicada exist worldwide and the majority of them conduct their emergences every two to five years. Periodical cicadas, made up of seven species in the Magicicada genus, are the only ones that spend either 13 or 17 years underground and they are only found in the U.S.
The wings of some cicadas are naturally antibiotic, according to research published by the National Library of Medicine (2013). The cicada’s wings kill bacteria on contact with a layer of incredibly tiny spikes and a chemical coating. The same coating of nano-scale spikes or pillars that cicadas use to keep their wings free of bacteria also keeps them dry by repelling water.
Annual and periodical cicadas in the U.S. have a terrifying parasitic fungus of their own. Like Ophiocordyceps, the fungus Massospora cicadina infects cicadas while they’re rooting around in the soil as nymphs. Once an infected cicada has emerged back into the sunlight to mate, the fungus starts eating the insect’s internal organs. As the fungus grows it castrates the cicada and replaces its butt with a white plug made of spores. As these horny, fungi-mutilated bugs fly around meeting members of the opposite sex they spread the deadly spores to their brethren as well as any patches of soil they fly over. “We call them flying saltshakers of death,” Matt Kasson, a fungi researcher at West Virginia University, told the Atlantic’s Ed Yong in 2018.
Cicada Killers are large wasps, approximately two inches in length. They are black or dark brown, with colorful yellow markings on several segments of their abdomen. After mating, females take to the skies to do nothing but hunt bumbling cicadas. After dragging their immobilized prey into a special chamber the wasp hollowed out along her burrow, the female wasp lays a single egg on the cicada and seals the chamber’s entrance. In two or three days, the larval wasp will hatch and begin eating the paralyzed cicada alive over the course of a week or two.
Some of Brood X’s number decided to pop out a whopping four years early in 2017 and some researchers wonder if the warmer temperatures and longer growing seasons caused by climate change could be behind the increasing number of stragglers.
(Alex Fox. “14 Fun Facts About Cicadas.” SmithsonainMag.com. March 31, 2021.)
Read Fox's entire article by clicking here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/14-fun-facts-about-cicadas-180977361/
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