Why I am staying home this May

Poststructural Pub
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U.S. National - AP
Periodical Cicadas to Emerge in May

By DAN LEWERENZ, Associated Press Writer

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - After 17 years of relative quiet, Mother Nature is bringing the noise. Periodical cicadas, a species of the grasshopper-like insects best known for the scratching, screeching “singing” of the males, will emerge this May, filling forests in more than a dozen states. Almost as abruptly as they arrive, they’ll disappear underground for another 17 years.

“Why do certain insects take only one year to develop, and others take two or three? It’s just part of their genetic programming,” said Greg Hoover, senior extension entomologist for Penn State University.

There are at least 13 broods of 17-year cicadas, plus another five broods that emerge every 13 years. The last to emerge, Brood IX, was seen last spring in parts of West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina.

This year, it’s time for Brood X, the so-called “Big Brood,” to surface. Its range stretches from Georgia, west through Tennessee and to isolated pockets of Missouri, north along the Ohio Valley and into Michigan, and east into New Jersey and New York.

“This is one of those years we kind of dread,” said Paris Lambdin, professor of entomology and plant pathology at the University of Tennessee. “We had an emergence a couple years ago around Nashville, but nothing like what we expect this one will be.”

No other periodical cicada covers so much ground. And with hundreds of them per acre in infested areas, the noise will be hard to miss.

“In 1987, coming back from the University of Maryland on Interstate 95, when you drove through a wooded area you could hear the insects,” Hoover said. “This would have been mid to late June, with the windows down, and then it would shut down when you got to a field or a non-wooded area.”

In rare years, a 13-year brood can emerge to add its collective voice to that of a 17-year brood.

“Out in the Midwest is where things get really hairy,” Hoover said. “Missouri, Illinois, Indiana have combinations of 17-year-brooded individuals and 13-year-brooded individuals, and they can have overlap.”

There’s no question that the class of 2004 will be a nuisance. The cicadas will make plenty of noise, and adults are poor fliers that tend to bump into things.

But as swarms go, these cicadas aren’t that bad. Adults don’t feed on leaves, so they won’t strip the trees, but they do lay their eggs in twigs.

“The females, once mated, will lay pockets of eggs along twigs that will cause structural weakening of those twigs,” Hoover said. “Eventually they may drop off and fall to the ground, the nymphs will drop off and fall to the soil, and that’s where this species is for the next 17 years.”

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YUM - FEEDING FRENZY!!!

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I think it was about five years ago that we had a confluence of 17-year and 13-year cicadas. I got some great pictures of a few. They’re pretty photogenic if you’re into the sort of triangular with bulging green eyes look. I know I’ll regret saying this come August, but I kind of like the sound of cicadas in the summer. It beats the hell out of winter.

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Another great year for bass fishing. Some of the best bass fishing I have ever experienced in Maryland was during the cicada summers.

Ron

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The sound of cicadas is one of my all-time favorite sounds!

:slight_smile:

Robin

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You’re worried about noise?!? We have Mormon cricket infestations here when millions and millions of the hideous huge crickets swarm through areas of the state. On highways their squashed bodies create an inches-deep slippery slime that causes car accidents and must be removed by snow removal equipment! They strip nearly every living plant in their path and cause millions of dollars of damage to crops. Personally, I’d vote for noise.

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Our classmates tormented us about it but all I can say is they are probably thinking thank God for those guys with size 13 shoes now.

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Time for “locust shells”!

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I remember a summer about 25 years ago when the same thing happened in New England with gypsy moth caterpillars. A freight train got stuck in a valley, and somebody I knew couldn’t get his car up his driveway. ICK!!! Plus, entire swaths of area were completely stripped of any leaves.

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A cicada on its way out, but with just a little buzz left, makes an excellent cat toy. Looks like a fun time coming.

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When I was a kid I lived in Evansville, Indiana, near the confluence of the Ohio and Wabash rivers (see article above). I used to climb a tree at dusk and find a place to linger as it got really noisy. The cicadas would zoom around me and alight on the trunks and limbs of the tree within a couple of feet of my perch. Extremely cool.

Best wishes,
Jerry

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Susan, you’re taking anthropomorphism to new heights. :wink:

Jef

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SLC, Utah - In a rare performance that crosses denominational lines, the world-renowned Mormon Cricket Choir joined the Chipmunk Choir for a benefit concert of chorales and anthems by composer Johannes Sebastian Bach. L. B. Weekender, who was in attendance, is reported to have said, “it was like the chirping of the angels.” It is no exaggeration to say that the place was abuzz.

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EW! Looked up cicada on the web…I’d rather have a good old Canadian woodtick or mosquito land on me!

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When I was in high school I had a friend that would collect a dollar from everyone and then he would eat a live cicada. He got rich and well fed at the same time. Not an act that anyone would copy.

Ron

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Okay wise guys, here’s a snippet or two from a CNN news report from last year:

"PALOMINO VALLEY, Nevada (AP) – Swarms of Mormon crickets are marching across the West, destroying rangeland and crops, slickening highways with their carcasses and leaving disgusted residents in their wake. “It’s yucky,” said Amy Nisbet of Elko,“You drive down the street and they pop like bubble wrap.”

Five million acres are infested in Nevada with the 21/2-inch long creeping insects. Their voracious appetites take in anything – sagebrush, alfalfa, wheat, barley, clover, seeds, grasses, vegetables. They don’t fly, but can hop and crawl a mile in a day and up to 50 miles in a season.

The Mormon cricket actually is a katydid, similar to a grasshopper. It got its name in 1848 when swarms invaded the fields of Mormon settlers in Utah. According to lore, the settlers prayed for divine assistance that arrived in the form of gulls, which ate the insects and saved the crops.

In Utah, agriculture officials estimate 6 million acres – more than double last year’s plague – will be infested before the crickets die off. The chief weapon is carbaryl, an insecticide commonly known as Sevin. It is mixed with bran and spread before the crickets as they advance. Crickets lured to the bait quickly die. The poisoned carcasses are consumed by cannibalistic fellow crickets, which also die.

State officials said their priority is to protect public lands, crops – and motorists. In Idaho the state has posted warning signs on State Route 55. Crickets smashed by cars create a mush slicker than ice. “We’re doing our best to keep them off the highway. It can be like a grease slick.”

A 1939 state publication noted an infestation in Eureka County in 1882, when trains were unable to travel the main line of the Central Pacific Railroad “due to the rails being so thoroughly greased with crushed crickets,” state archivist Guy Rocha said. In the 1930s, a band of crickets 12 miles long and at times several feet deep was reported in Elko County, Rocha said.

The crickets have existed for millions of years and were once a food source for American Indians. But the swarms covering fields and roads and houses horrify modern residents."

Yuck.

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Leviticus 11:22 Of these you may eat the following: locusts of every variety; all varieties of bald locust; crickets of every variety; and all varieties of grasshopper.

Non-native North Americans and Europeans are the only cultures of the world who don’t eat insects. What, after all, is a shrimp or lobster, but some kind of undersea cockroach?

Best wishes,
Jerry

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Cicadas don’t land on people - although they’re such lousy fliers that I have had one bump into me before falling to the ground. And they most certainly don’t drink my blood! Nor do they carry all sorts of nasty diseases like mosquitoes and ticks.

Actually, you seldom see a live one. You’ll hear a deafening screeching noise that wavers up and down more or less continuously and you’ll see a
lot of empty shells hanging from tree limbs and trunks where they came out of the ground and crawled up a tree to molt.

All in all, they’re a nuisance but still preferable to all those nasty little biters.

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Wow! OK, Susan, you’re off the hook this time. :wink: That’s quite a story. It sounds like what you need is a good old-fashioned flock of gulls. Good luck!

Jef
PS

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I saw something similar, but less extreme, involving regular ol’ crickets in Killeen, Texas (next to Ft. Hood), back in about 1966. At the very least, several blocks of streets and sidewalks were literally covered with them, and there were birds everywhere[/], having a wonderful time. This was early in the morning, and by the time I went back into town the next day, there wasn’t a cricket to be seen.

My most fun thing involving crickets was when a friend found one in the crushed ice at the bottom of his glass after finishing a coke in a restaurant. The fun part was that the first thing he saw was a little bit of leg, which he took to be part of a cockroach. He was quite relieved when he figured out that it was just a cricket. It used to be very common to find dead crickets all around the lids of ice cream and soda coolers in rural Texas grocery stores. I gues they were just trying to cool off.

Cicadas are very cool. We don’t seem to have them out here in California, which is too bad, since I’m heavily into insect photography. (Check out my http://www.pbase.com/darwinian if you like insects and spiders–and hummingbirds.)

Cicadas aren’t closely related to crickets and grasshoppers, by the way. They’re in the Order Homoptera, Suborder Auchenorrhyncha, which also includes tiny things like leafhoppers, treehoppers, and planthoppers. Other suborders within Homoptera include aphids, whiteflies, and mealybugs.