Editorial of April 18, 2024
Embracing a Dual Emergence
It’s time for the cicadas, those red-eyed insects that make a lot of noise for a few weeks, then disappear, many for many years. Brood XIX, the Great Southern Brood, and Brood XIII, the Northern Illinois Brood, will emerge together in the next few weeks or so, a rare event as the two broods are adjacent to each other. The last time these naïve little insects showed up at the same time was in 1803, the year Thomas Jefferson doubled the size of the country with the Louisiana Purchase, and a mere five years before the initial publication of “The Freeman’s Journal” in Cooperstown in October 1808. The next time these two broods align and emerge together will be in the spring of 2146.
Cicadas, so called because of the onomatopoeic sounds they make, have been featured in literature since the time of the “Iliad,” Homer’s epic poem of the Trojan War which was finally written down in the late 8th or early 7th century B.C. They also appear as art motifs in the Chinese Shang dynasty, which came to an end around the 11th century B.C. People eat them in China, Myanmar, Malaysia and central Africa.
These little guys are true bugs. Just over an inch long, they look like small candy bars with transparent wings. They are black or orange, with prominent, wide-set red eyes, short antennae and big membranous front wings. The males produce exceptionally loud sounds by rubbing their drum-like tymbals (cicadas’ timbals are membranes in their abdomens). The exclusively North American Genus, Magicicada, spend most of their lives underground, as underground nymphs, and their emergence, after either 13 or 17 years depending on their brood, is synchronized. The brood emerges together, probably a ploy to reduce their loss to predation as their vast numbers will satiate any predator—and they do have predators, birds, bats, wasps, spiders, fish, reptiles, and mammals—long before that bad guy extinguishes the entire brood. They are well camouflaged, closely resembling the bark of trees on which they live; they can also play dead.
These two North American broods, XIX, a 13-year brood said to be the largest of all periodical broods, and XIII, a 17-year brood, will tunnel out of the ground and blanket lawns, streets, houses, gardens, forests, fields, and anything else in their way. This time, more than a trillion cicadas will appear in 16 states in the Southeast and Midwest. Laid end-to-end they would cover upward of 15.5 million miles—to the moon and back 33 times. For about a week they will finish maturing, quietly, and molt. And then it will happen. The male cicadas, seeking to attract a female, will begin to buzz with a slow-building cacophonic crescendo that can both challenge the decibels of an airplane flying overhead and cause hearing loss in humans who venture too close to their perches.
It’s noisy, but these little bugs don’t bite, sting or carry any disease, they don’t stray too far from whence they came, they only buzz during the daytime hours and they are with us for only a month. They are natural tree gardeners, aerating the soil beneath the trees when they emerge, pruning the branches with slits in the bark for their eggs and providing nutrients from their dead, reputedly quite smelly, bodies. They are neither great flyers, great jumpers, nor—worse—great landers, cascading to the streets and sidewalks only to be squished by cars and bikes and pedestrians and then shoveled and scraped away.
Just as they are good for the ecosystem of our deciduous forests, cicadas are good for our gardens. Do not spray them—it won’t kill them all, but it might kill everything else—and do not throw the dead ones away. They make excellent fertilizer. Their visit, although intense, is temporary and we would do well to let them be. Around here, the next cicada emergence is in 2035, when Brood VII, the Onondaga Brood, awakens from its 17-year nap. It won’t be as big as the group this spring, but it will be plenty noisy just the same.