It’s Cicadageddon, and we’re just living in it.
Any day now trillions and trillions of small, grasshopper-like bugs will emerge from an impossibly long sleep and make an infernal din. By “infernal,” I mean only the devil is going to like it. The rest of us? Not so much.
There are a lot of myths surrounding these beasts. No, they don’t eat crops, so your garden is safe, at least from the cicadas. As for birds, rabbits, groundhogs, and purloining neighbors, I cannot speak for them.
Cicadas eat the sap out of trees. I read that this isn’t necessarily harmful to the trees unless your trees are very small or very young. Then, you must stand guard and be vigilant or the cicadas will destroy your baby trees.
Not true. You don’t have to stand guard. Just throw some netting over the little ones and they should be fine.
No, cicadas do not swarm and cover you like the locusts in “The Mummy.” But when there are a few trillion of them, it would be kind of cool to get slimed, right?
We are incredibly fortunate this year because two separate “broods” of cicadas will be emerging from their earthen bed chambers. Scientific American cannot contain its enthusiasm.
“They don’t often coincide in time, but to have them coincide in time and space is even more unusual,” says John Lill, an insect ecologist at George Washington University. “That’s what’s happening this year that’s generating a lot of buzz — pun intended.”
Omigod. A joke in Scientific American? Is the Earth still in orbit? Sheesh.
I am one of the lucky humans because I live in the state of Illinois, and we are going to be hip-deep in the little critters.
Illinois will truly be rich in these insects because it marks the boundary between the two broods. “I’ve been looking forward to this for years,” says Catherine Dana, an entomologist and an affiliate at the Illinois Natural History Survey at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “We have two different broods emerging in the same state, and that’s a very rare thing.” The two broods’ territories don’t overlap much, but they do border each other. So while there won’t be any regions of unusually high density, scientists are looking forward to seeing whether the broods might manage to interbreed.
I’m trying to get as excited as Dr. Dana. The poor dear has been looking forward to this for years. But scientists watching to see if the broods interbreed? Cicada porn is a weird fetish, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these entomologists are hooked on it.
There are some dangers. About 10% of the cicadas will suffer from a fungus that makes them act like zombies. The Massospora cicadina fungus is kind of gross, but the real question is how can scientists tell the difference between a zombie-like cicada and a normal cicada?
Don’t answer that.
These cicadas, which have either been underground for 13 or 17 years just waiting to hit adulthood, come out looking to mate and start the process all over again.
WVU researcher Dr. Matt Kasson explained to CNN that what happens to those infected with the parasite gets grisly. It grows inside of them until there’s nowhere else to go and “a clump of spores erupts out of where the genitals and abdomen once were. It looks like there’s a gumdrop that’s been dropped in chalk dust, glued to the backside of these cicadas.”
Warning: Don’t eat any “gumdrops” you find on cicadas. It’ll ruin your day, man.