Cicada double brood this year
Just to take your mind off the Trump conviction and onto something vastly more pleasant: locusts!
It depends on where you live, of course. But here’s the scoop:
It has begun. Legions of cheese-puff-sized insects have started to climb out of the dirt after spending more than a decade underground sucking sap from tree roots. Over the next month and a half, their numbers will continue to grow across the South and then the Midwest in what will become an emergence of trillions of periodical cicadas.
Dr. Jessica Ware, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History, finds the insects graceful. “They have these beautiful red eyes and lace-like wings,” she says.
This small sliver of their life cycle that’s visible to us, when males and females get their sole opportunity to mate, is a raucous and unforgettable affair. There can be nearly 30 cicadas per square foot. Such high densities are likely a survival strategy since cicadas that come aboveground in off-years would find themselves easy, edible targets. “There’s safety in numbers,” Ware explains. During a mass emergence, “you hopefully have made your predators full with your siblings or distant relatives and you yourself live to pass your genes on to the next generation.” …
There will be no doubt once the cicadas have emerged in a particular place because they produce an ear-splitting wall of sound. “They are so loud,” says Dr. Susan Gershman, an evolutionary biologist at the Ohio State University, “that you can hear them inside your house with all the windows closed.” These are the males vibrating a special pair of abdominal membranes …
Where I live, we’ll just be plagued with the usual black flies and mosquitoes. That’s enough for me. But when I was growing up, I was around during a cicada year. I’ve written about it before:
I remember them well from my youth, circa 1962. In the well-arbored suburbs of New York and New Jersey, they sang in the trees and then carpeted the ground like fallen leaves in autumn, making an ominous crunching sound as one walked, the whole extravaganza a sort of cicadesque supernova explosion that signified their own demise and the launching of the next generation into subterranean abodes where they would hang out for the next seventeen years.
Just to take your mind off the Trump conviction and onto something vastly more pleasant: locusts!
Sorry to be a pedant but.
OK, I’m not. I’m just an insect guy (degree specializing in Orthoptera) and it bugs me. wah.
Which is yet another common misnomer. As R.E.Snodgrass said “All bugs are insects but not all insects are bugs.” Only the Hemiptera are bugs.
As for the cicada calls. “reee, reee, reee.” BUT, everyonce in a while you’ll hear “ree, ree, reeaaaauuuuu.” That’s one being killed by the large cicada killer hornet which is, I guess, what you get for being such a loud mouth. (again wah)
I didn’t have time to include a picture of the hornet on the last comment. Hornet is about 2″ long. Do not mess with.
When I was a kid, a friend and I were playing bat the rock in the back yard. He saw one of those hornets and the imbecile decided to hit a home run.
That hornet sailed up twenty or so feet, stopped and hovered and then dive bombed the idiot as I ran like hell. It was not a pretty sting.
We had loads of cicada wasps at our former home. Scary AF. Carrying a cicada larger then themselves, flying haphazardly through the air, then burying the cicada in the soil for their future self to feed from. Crazy!
At our current home we have lots of trees and therfore lots of cicadas in mid-to-late summer. They make such an infernal racket! And they dive bomb into our windows. One of our Keeshonds, Star, is terrified of them and is very wary of going outside because one of them flew into her fur a few summers ago. I don’t blame her. I hate the bastards too.
We kids used to make a slipknot on the end of 5′ length of thread, tie that round the middle of yer cicada, then thus tethered, fly him around to torment the elders in the house. Loads of fun.
Since it’s insects and I dig insects and I like writing about insects… an FYI.
The immature cicadas are called instars or nymphs. Cicadas undergo hemimetabolous (gradual metamorphosis) as the instars don’t have wings.
Hornets (and many others) undergo complete metamorphosis – grub (caterpillar, larvae), pupa, adult.
OK, I’m happy, I’m done.
Was you ever bit by a dead bee?
This is behind the times. We started the cicada infestation about a month ago here in central NC. For several weeks, sitting outside, I could hear a constant noise that was sort of like an engine whine. Everywhere. Just today I noticed it’s gone! I found dead bodies as I was out weeding today, and now the chewed leaves will be able to recover.
I don’t live in cicada territory but I have visited there. Terrible things; and I say that as a fan of insects and bugs in general. But they are annoying.
I’m not gloating at all about no cicadas. It snowed here last week and it is 48° right now because I live at a high elevation. Personally, I prefer the chilly weather because you can always add an extra blanket. But trying to sleep through that racket! No thank you!
There’s a young French vlogger who’s visiting Tennessee right now and experiencing the cicadas and seems rather fascinated by them — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwDoxGuAYA0
Oligonicella:
Perhaps you’re my guy or gal or mantis … 🙂
There’s a grasshopper-like insect I sometimes see en masse with black glossy skin and yellowish piping. It really gives me the creeps.
What the heck is that thing?
All of them are registered to vote for Biden, too.
huxley:
Does it look like this?
https://search.brave.com/images?q=Jeruselum%20cricket
Jeruselum cricket
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_cricket
Re: Jerusalem cricket
om:
God, that’s horrible. It looks like what the Outer Limits’ Zanti bug was modeled upon.
–Outer Limits, “Zanti Misfits”
https://youtu.be/QyvR-lQwNzM?t=32
But no.
huxley:
crickets from Oligonicella? 🙂
Oligonicella:
I live north of Yellow Jacket, Florida. They were murder on my property for awhile. Was setting a post one day, post hole diggers, and lots of tamping the post down, and something like that cicada killer hornet came out and nailed humble me. I thought it was some kind of really big Yellow Jacket, but it was *HUGE* compared to the Yellow Jackets.
Update: maybe that big rascal was the Giant Hornet?
huxley:
Perhaps you’re my guy or gal or mantis … ?
There’s a grasshopper-like insect I sometimes see en masse with black glossy skin and yellowish piping. It really gives me the creeps.
I prefer the pronoun mantid.
Not knowing where you live, I’ll hazard a good guess. This, the Eastern Lubber (Romalea microptera).
This is one form. It also comes in red, reddish-brown and almost yellow. Them puppies can reach 4″.
Kate
and now the chewed leaves will be able to recover.
Wasn’t the cicadas. They’re siphon feeders.
And… Just so everyone can know who I am – Oligonicella scudderi
Do NOT let a Jerusalem cricket bite you. They’re carnivores and those jaws can literally take off the end of a finger. There are a few katydids that can do the same.
Bonus info: Once they bite the sombitches don’t want to let go. You almost have to crush the head.
I prefer the pronoun mantid.
Oligonicella:
I can go with that … as long as you don’t call me late for supper.
Sorry, that’s not it either.
I recall it seemed a juvenile form, just fat, black with yellow edging. Swarming.
The horror!
@Oligonicella:Do NOT let a Jerusalem cricket bite you.
If we’re talking of the same insect, I think they eat detritus but they certainly can bite hard. But they’re very slow and stupid in my experience.
Where I grew up there was a couple weeks in the year when they’d mass migrate and cover the roads, kind of gross to drive over them.
One of those katydids. Convergent evolution.
An FYI on me. At one time (some 30yr ago) I had a mantid collection numbering a thou or so specimens of over six hundred species. Larger than not a few museums by specie count. I moved the collection on to another specialist. I used to have people from all over the world send me shots to identify.
It was pretty cool. (nail buff)
Thank you, folks, thank you. I’ll be here all night. Be sure to tip the blog mistress on your way out.
huxley:
Give me a size. If they swarm, it’s pretty much limited it to either the lubbers or the migratory locusts (Schistocerca). The only one of those I know of with yellow(ish) ‘piping’ is Schistocerca americana and the next.
That’s as close a pic I could find with a snap search. They do come in a wide variety of color hues down to almost black.
My favorite Schistocerca is lineata. That pic doesn’t do it justice as those greens are metallic bronze sheen. Really beautiful. They will swarm and the body can get quite dark.
I’m runnin’ out of genera. 🙂
Niketas Choniates:
Carnivorous just means eats animal flash. Vultures are carnivorous.
These nocturnal insects use their strong mandibles to feed primarily on dead organic matter but can also eat other insects.
Yeah, they can gather and get squished in enough numbers to become an actual road hazard.
Schistocerca lineata looks like it’s wearing one of those old-style starched collars. Just needs a bowler hat.
I haven’t seen the cicada-killers for a while around here. I suppose that if they follow the cicada cycles, then their appearance in numbers in a place is probably also cyclical.
Philip Sels – I got’cher starched collar grasshopper right here.
That’s a pygmy grasshopper. They’re pretty neat, being only 3/8″ or so.
OK, it’s bed time. Later gaters. This has been fun. I’ll check once in the morning for any other questions.
Oligonicella, they siphoned off so much fluid from the stems that the leaves look starved, then. Anyhow, they’re gone for now. We’ll see their distant cousins next year, perhaps.
There was a huge cicada emergence one summer in the early 1960s during my Maryland childhood. The sound was enormous, though I kind of liked it for its overpowering hugeness, something like the deafening downpour of a hard summer rain on a tin roof. To this day, the milder ree-ree-ree of a few cicadas in an ordinary, non-emergence summer still sounds to me like summer. Where I live now, I never hear cicadas. I miss that summery song.
The cicadas shed their brown, crispy shells as they grew and left them clinging to tree trunks and all over the grass. It got to where you couldn’t walk across the lawn without crunching underfoot. My brothers and I played with the abandoned shells. They’d try to freak me out by hanging them in my hair by their claws, but I was too used to the shells everywhere to care. I’d just scoop some up to throw back at them. Cicada fight! Also, the shells made perfect horror-movie monsters, lined up in rows in the driveway to fight the War of the Worlds against my brothers’ little green plastic Army men.
All in all, it was fun.
Mrs Whatsit, that battle would make a helluva neat YouTube vid.
Kate – you’ll see their relatives this year and every year. We have 150 species of cicada in the US, seven of which are periodic. The other 143 emerge after 1+ yr (depending on specie) underground and they overlap. So, cicadas every year, just not swarms.
Oligonicella:
I’d say it is the lubber, but a young one like this:
https://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/orn/lubber03.jpg
To young lubbers, wherever you are … just stay away from me.