Notes from the Wildlife Naturalist:
What’s the Buzz About Cicadas
by Emily Hutto
The year is 2011. Barack Obama is President and TikTok doesn’t exist. The Curiosity rover is launched and begins its journey to Mars. It’s a warm day in June, and a female cicada sits on a twig in your backyard. She cuts a slit in the twig and deposits several hundred eggs.
You don’t notice her.
Her job is finished. She falls to the ground, completing her life cycle. She decomposes. Her body fertilizes the tree that her young will soon rely on for nutrients.
Two months pass. It’s August 2011. You have to find an alternate route to work because One Direction is on tour in your city and half of the streets downtown are blocked off. Your 14-year-old daughter begs for tickets because she thinks she’s going to marry Harry Styles.
Those eggs that the cicada laid in that twig two months ago in your backyard hatch. A nymph emerges, falls to the ground, and burrows into the soil. It starts sucking the fluids out of the tree’s roots, but it doesn’t harm the tree. The ground beneath you is alive. Humming. Growing.
Your life is really busy. You don’t notice.
13 years pass. It’s 2024.
In the past 13 years, a lot has happened. Your daughter didn’t marry Harry Styles, but she did meet a nice guy in college. She’s 27 now. The Curiosity rover has collected over 10 years’ worth of data. A major pandemic rocked the world. TikTok exists, and it’s easy to scroll the time away. The years feel like they have flown by.
And that cicada nymph in your backyard has been sucking fluids out of that tree root for over a decade, oblivious to other planets, presidents, or pandemics. Now it’s finished growing.
You don’t know it yet, but you’re about to notice it.
It’s April 2024. The cicada tunnels right up to the surface of the soil and waits. Then, at the beginning of May, along with billions of its fellow nymphs, it emerges from the ground, climbs a tree, sheds its exoskeleton, and its wings burst free from their confinement. For 5 days, until its exoskeleton hardens, it will be exposed and defenseless. The cicada and its billions of brothers and sisters provide a rare and valuable feast for hundreds of predators. Birds, fish, mammals, spiders, amphibians, snakes, and even other insects gorge themselves on dozens of helpless molting cicadas. But there are thousands of cicadas per acre - hundreds more than the predators could ever eat. Our cicada nymph is one of the lucky ones. After 5 days, its new adult exoskeleton hardens, and the cicada can fly and begin its raucous summer song. The males emerge first to protect the females from predation. By the time the females emerge several days after the males, the predators have had their fill. The overwhelming number of cicadas, coupled with the males’ sacrifice of emerging first, ensures that as many females, and therefore as many eggs, survive as possible.
It’s May 2024, and every day you notice that it is louder and louder outside. You cannot ignore the cicadas any longer. They are deafening. There are tens of thousands of cicadas. They’re on your car, on your windows, on the trees, on the ground. You have to sweep dead cicadas out of your driveway. You cannot remember what silence sounds like. You can hear them from inside buildings. There is an ever-present buzzing in the background of your life, following you everywhere. When you go outside, it reminds you of that concert your daughter made you go to when she was in middle school. What was it called? One Path? Two Directions? You can’t remember or think straight because it’s louder than a stadium full of screaming teenage girls outside. What are these bugs? Why are they everywhere? You vaguely recall reading an article a couple of months ago from some Naturalist at some nature preserve warning you that there would be a historical emergence of some really loud bug. You really should pay more attention to those newsletters.
You get online and read that this plague of Biblical proportions is happening throughout the Midwest and Southeast, and millions of other people are sharing your experience. It’s the first co-emergence of Cicada Broods XIII and XIX in 221 years. The last time these broods emerged together in 1803, there were only 17 states in the US and Thomas Jefferson was President. But the cicadas don’t know that. They’ve survived for 150 million years without governance. They coexisted with dinosaurs. This is their land. It always has been and it always will be. We are just borrowing it for our short time here. The cicadas will still be here long after we are gone, none the wiser to our existence.
You look at pictures of these cicadas. They’re brown and orange, much different than the green ones you’re familiar with. Their buggy red eyes are kind of cute. You go back to that Nature Center and talk to the Naturalist about the cicadas. You learn that only the males make noise. You mean only half of these things are making noise? How loud would it have been if the females could call too? You ask the Naturalist why they emerge in 13- and 17-year cycles, or how they know when to emerge. No one knows the answers to these questions.
You start to pay more attention to these ancient creatures. You notice their tiny little antenna and the intricate, beautiful pattern their veins make in their wings. Each individual is unique. It’s kind of fun to pick up their shed exoskeletons and see what they can stick to. You learn these sheds are called “exuviae”. It takes time to study these bugs. You’re spending more time outside and less time online. Instead of hiking straight to an overlook or waterfall as fast as you can, you’ve slowed down and started noticing the life around you. You’ve started noticing a lot of other bugs, too, not just the cicadas. Moths are pretty cute. You might attend that mothing event at Ruffner in July. There’s probably going to be other bug enthusiasts there for you to make friends with.
The cicadas continue to scream until June, and slowly things start to quiet down. You’re kind of disappointed. You’re almost going to miss the little guys. But there are more than 1 million insect species on this planet to learn about, so you have your work cut out for you. And time seems to move a lot slower these days, since you’ve been outside more and aren’t on your phone as much. You’ve felt more relaxed recently.
Now the year is 2024. Joe Biden is President and you’re all-too-familiar with TikTok, although you aren’t online as much, now that you’re spending more time outside. It’s a warm day in June, and a female cicada sits on a twig in your backyard. She cuts a slit in the twig and deposits several hundred eggs.
You notice her.