Listen up. Heard ‘em yet? This is our year for the 13-year cicadas. I’m four days back on a Wednesday deadline, so cicadas might be harmonizing everywhere by now. But I found a live one Tuesday and felt just a tad prophetic. My cicada education came in 1988 right here in Warren County. Simple math and faith in pre-Google entomologists made it easy to forecast the bugs’ return in 2001 and then again in 2014.
The first thing to know about cicadas is they are not locusts. Locusts are species of grasshoppers. The second cicada basic is some of the thousands of species worldwide are “periodic cicadas.” Their unique life cycle is to live below ground as larva for a specific number of years and emerge for a very brief adult life. In North America, there are 13-year and 17-year cicadas. And there are more than 20 groups, called “broods”, confined to specific geographical areas. Ours is Brood XXII, the Baton Rouge brood. Its range is from that Louisiana area north and two Mississippi counties wide from the river on up to between Redwood and the Yazoo line. Also due out this year is Brood III, which is on a 17-year cycle in parts of the Midwest. We do have a non-periodic species that comes out in summer every year. An occasional empty “shell” on a tree trunk is about the only sign of that one.
The noise of the periodic cicadas comes from males quickly contracting a membrane located under the wings on each side. For educational purposes, if you find a cicada, look under the wings for the small white structures. Tens of thousands of male cicadas pounding out their love song is the reason for the loud racket. By the way, a female does play a reply tune with her wings if she is “oversueded,” as a friend once said.
After the music comes the mating and egg laying. It is the depositing of eggs in the bark of tender new tree twigs that risks possible plant damage. A lot of twig dieback in a young tree could cause its demise, but I think that possibility is pretty remote. The eggs in the twigs hatch in about six weeks. Adult cicadas have croaked by this time and their offspring larvae fall to the ground and bore down. Each one attaches itself to a tree root and stays put for the 13-year duration, slowly sucking a little sap for nutrition. Right on schedule in the correct year, immature cicadas bore back upwards, leaving pencil size emergence holes in the ground. The new adult insects shed their wet shells, dry out and take flight. Then the music starts.
To me, periodic cicadas are about as interesting a natural wonder as there is. They certainly are not as “romantic” as salmon swimming home to die or hummingbirds migrating to a specific feeder. But hanging on a root below ground for 13 years for one brief shot at romance? Remarkable.
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Terry Rector writes for the Warren County Soil and Water Conservation District, 601-636-7679 ext. 3.