Muse – Cicadas, they are a coming

The big, ugly bugs are soon to make a comeback. Brood X, a seventeen year brood that stretches from New Jersey to North Carolina will be emerging in May to get everywhere and make a big mess as they cling to everything and are run over by cars.

Their genus is Magicicada and this type of Cicada is usually termed the Periodical Cicada due to their emerging every 13 to 17 years in mass broods.

These cicadas are ‘big’, ugly and annoying, but not at all dangerous. They don’t attack or have any means of damaging a human. No poison, no stingers, no strong mandibles. The only reason one might land on you is because you happen to be a convenient place to land.

Cicadas start off in a ‘nymph‘ stage and live underground, sucking on the fluids from roots to survive. There are five juvenile stages they go through while ensconced for the 13 or 17 years before emerging, growing form the size of an ant to near adult size. In spring(around now), weeks before emerging, they construct exit tunnels to the surface. These can be spotted as half-inch diameter holes. The night of their emergence, they slip out around sunset and locate a suitable spot to conduct their final molt on nearby vegetation. The newly emerged adults work their way up into the trees and spend four to six days allowing their new exoskeleton to harden as they come out of molt soft and white.

Once they’re fully prepared, the males start their annoying(to us, to female cicada’s, it’s a sexual attraction) singing and take short flights around looking for receptive females. IN the meantime, they feed off plant fluids, just as they did as nymphs. Mated females dig Y shaped egg nests in living twigs and lay up to 20 eggs per nest. A female can lay up to 600 eggs in her time. Six to ten weeks later, the eggs hatch and the new tiny nymphs drop fro the trees to burrow into the ground and prepare for the next wave.

Why are there so damn many of them? Their massed lifecycle and long term hibernation underground allow them to escape many of the normal population control methods, such as predators. And once they’re out, there are far many of them for a predator to significantly effect the population. It’s like eating sand at the beach.

Looking at some data, looks like Virginia will be hit by brood 14 in 2008 and brood 19 in 2011. Though the 2011 brood skirts the south of the state, so hopefully that year should be clear for my area.

The last one I remember was when I was but a youngling, several moves of living location before when I was still in elementary school. I want to this church for daycare and there was where one could see many of the bugs. Smashed on the asphalt, by feet or tires. Clinging to the wooden shed that was set by the playground. The hot, dry air filled with their annoying, constant warbling. It wasn’t a pleasant thing and I’ m not all that eager to experience it again, but their return is inevitable it seems, so the weeks of annoyance will have to be tolerated. I might even do a little documenting. At the very least, I’ll try to catch their song for those who have never heard it. I barely remember it at all(thankfully).

Well end off with How Cicada’s Work and declare this little entry at an end. If you have any tales of the last wave you’ve experienced, feel free to relate them.