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Science

Swarm of Cicadas Takes Aim at U.S. 86

Posted by michael from the check-your-screen-doors dept.
wetshoe writes "'After 17 years of relative quiet, Mother Nature is bringing the noise. 'Periodical cicadas, a species of the grasshopper-like insects best known for the scratching, screeching "singing" of the males, will emerge this May, filling forests in more than a dozen states. Almost as abruptly as they arrive, they'll disappear underground for another 17 years.' The article also talks about areas in the Mid-West where 17-year June Bugs sometimes overlap with 13-year June Bugs. I remember as a child one such time, you literally couldn't walk anywhere without stepping on them, they were everywhere. Reminded me of a biblical plague."
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Swarm of Cicadas Takes Aim at U.S. More

Swarm of Cicadas Takes Aim at U.S.

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  • Not June Bugs (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:01PM (#8546226)
    Cicadas [dancentury.com] are not June Bugs [unl.edu].

    • Maps (Score:5, Informative)

      by DustMagnet ( 453493 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:04PM (#8546259) Journal
      This website [umich.edu] has a nice table showing the years and locations of cicada broods. There are maps of the range, include one for 2004 [umich.edu].

      Interestingly, they don't list any 13-year broods in 2004 (unlike CNN).

      • So the real question is why they're leaving out any data for Illinois. I know we had a bumper crop of these bad boys just a couple years ago....And if you look at the table it lists IL even though the map shows nada. Weird....
        • Yeah, New Mexico and Arizona are also left out. I destinctly remember the last summer when they came (about 12 years ago I think). Us kids though it was great fun to kill as many as we could, and collected them in 5 gallon buckets.

    • Re:Not June Bugs (Score:5, Funny)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:16PM (#8546397)
      Those big juicy June bugs (which show up every year, and not just in June) have to be the stupidest creatures on this planet. Their entire brain can be implemented in a few lines of code:

      begin:
      start uncontrolled flight
      crash hard into random object
      fall to ground and land on back
      take 10 minutes to flip onto legs
      goto begin

      I really don't know what they're trying to accomplish, or why they bother when they're so bad at it.

  • Hmmm... the President of the US whores the country, in order to take over Babylon, then we see something reminicent of a Biblical Plague?

    Hmmm....

    --Mike--

  • Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Reducer2001 ( 197985 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:03PM (#8546249) Homepage
    Reminded me of a biblical plague. Wow! You must be old!

  • June Bugs? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:06PM (#8546277)
    Apparently what some people call "June Bugs" are rather different from what I call June Bugs.

    Who here thinks that June Bugs are, in fact, these things? [cros.net] Because I certainly do. I'm from Southwestern Ontario, right between Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair, and these bugs plague towns near their shores in the spring. But we call them June Bugs... or Fish Flies, or (rarely) Mayflies. But Cicadas are something else entirely.

    Odd.

    • Re:June Bugs? (Score:3, Informative)

      by elmegil ( 12001 )
      Probably not many people. Where I'm from (midwest US) June Bugs are May Beetles (see below for picture links) and May Flies have always been May Flies. But in any case, who ever came up with the idea of calling Cicadas June Bugs?

    • Re:June Bugs? (Score:3, Informative)

      by hawkstone ( 233083 )
      I think only the submitter would call cicadas "June Bugs". Nowhere in the article were they ever called June Bugs. And here is what I think of when someone says June Bugs. [unl.edu]

      (That and the Bugs Bunny marathon on Cartoon Network.)

      • Re:June Bugs? (Score:3, Informative)

        by evilad ( 87480 )
        Yup, absolutely. I'm from Ontario, and firmly disagree with the grandparent poster.

        A mayfly is not a junebug.
        • Coincidentally, what I think of as junebugs are apparently also called "maybeetles". (e.g. see the filename for the JPEG I linked to.) This is the first I ever heard of it, though.

          But I agree; those little dragonflies in the original post I'm pretty sure are most often known by the name mayflies.

    • Re:June Bugs? (Score:4, Informative)

      by qengho ( 54305 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:56PM (#8546852)


      Who here thinks that June Bugs are, in fact, these things? [mayflies]

      Nope. These [hiltonpond.org] are what we called june bugs when I was growing up in Mississippi. I used to catch them all summer and store them in a jar, then release them all at once in August. Quite a sight to an elementary school kid.

      We also used to amuse ourselves by tying a long thread to one of their back legs and letting them fly in circles.

    • And I always thought that "June bugs" looked like this ( http://hortipm.tamu.edu/pestprofiles/chewing/mjbee t/mjbeet.html ) But I could be wrong. P.S. I'm a fellow Ontarian (just a bit further northeast)
    • In Northern Ontario, we call those Shadflies (see http://www.shadfly.com).
    • Being from Sault Ste. Marie Michigan, I learned to call them Canadian Soldiers.

  • Biblical plague (Score:2, Funny)

    by sbb ( 655140 )

    I remember as a child one such time, you literally couldn't walk anywhere without stepping on them, they were everywhere. Reminded me of a biblical plague.

    Oh yeah. Remember the back in "aught 7", (BC 807, that is)? That was a doozy! I remember that as if it were yesterday... ah, the good ole days.

  • Ah, yes, I remember... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Codger ( 96717 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:08PM (#8546301)
    ...the last time this brood popped up, 17 years ago. You literally couldn't walk down the street without stepping on them. You'd go for a walk and come back with several cicadas clinging to your clothes. Racoons and other animals would feast on them - we had racoons who would eat a few hundred of them and then throw up on our roof. Ugh.

    Since then I've become an avid bicyclist. I'm a little worried about what it's going to be like riding a bike with these things flying around. Yum, extra protein, no need to stop for lunch.
    • ...we had racoons who would eat a few hundred of them and then throw up on our roof. :) That's awesome, in a twisted sort of way.

      Nature will provide!
    • These things were really cool from the perspective of an 11 year old boy. I didn't think they would be comming back so soon, though. I remember thinking that next time the Cicadas came out, I would be old. I wonder if I did the math wrong, or if I just thought 28 was damn old?
    • Yum, extra protein, no need to stop for lunch.

      Yeah, just install a scoop on your helmet :)

      I remember many years ago riding thru parts of Iowa and Wisconsin and having to stop to clean my helmet off every few miles, especially if I was riding during the early morning hours (the best time to ride on hot summer days). You'd be flying along just fine, then there'd be a concentration of the little beasties, usually down in low spots near creeks or rivers, and it was like being sandblasted by paint gun slu

  • We loves periodical cicadas. (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Their periods are primes, w00t. CNN doesn't mention this. I guess they're afraid to intimidate the audience.

  • Um, so?.... (Score:3)

    by Giant Ape Skeleton ( 638834 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:14PM (#8546368) Homepage
    What makes this batch of cicadas newsworthy? We have them here in NJ every year. I did RTFA, just not sure what the fuss is about.....
    • Yeah, they only come up every 17 years, but there are many different broods on different cycles, so you get them more often than not.

      My impression from the article, though, is that this particular brood is larger than most (or all?) of the others, so it will be more noticalbe than usual.
      • Not quite. There are annual cicadas which we always have. Every 17 years a brood of 17 year cicadas (different genus) emerge. There are tons of them all at once. Many times more than you'd see normally. This will be a loud summer for the Middle Atlantic and Central Midwest.

        • Re:Um, so?.... (Score:3, Informative)

          by crow ( 16139 )
          According to the article: There are at least 13 broods of 17-year cicadas, plus another five broods that emerge every 13 years. My understanding of this is that most years you'll get a 17-year cicada brood emerging. What's unusual is the size of the brood: This year, it's time for Brood X, the so-called "Big Brood," to surface.
          • Many of the broods don't overlap geographically. There are small broods that emerge a little ahead or behind the main emergence, but I think the article is referring to geographically distinct broods which emerge at different times.

            Here in Kansas the last big emergence was in 1998. We won't see another emergence until 2015. We may get a small number of 17 year cicada (genus Magicicada), but most of what we'll see is normal, boring, dog day cicadas (genus Tibicen).

            The same is true of New Jersey. There
    • gg reading comprehension

      This year, it's time for Brood X, the so-called "Big Brood," to surface. Its range stretches from Georgia, west through Tennessee and to isolated pockets of Missouri, north along the Ohio Valley and into Michigan, and east into New Jersey and New York.

      "This is one of those years we kind of dread," said Paris Lambdin, professor of entomology and plant pathology at the University of Tennessee. "We had an emergence a couple years ago around Nashville, but nothing like what we expect
    • The 17-year cicadas appear, well, once in 17 years. 13-year cicadas appear once in 13 years. Note that there are no 14,- 15,- or 16-year cicadas. Why are the periods prime? YAWN (Yet Another Wonder of Nature), yo!
      • All cicadas are not on the same cycle. Having the dormancy period as a prime number limits the overlap of seperate broods, similar to the way that you hash tables work better when their size is a prime number.
      • IANAE (entomologist), but I have heard that one explanation is that the cidada is basically avoiding predators that have a 2 and 3 year life cycle. Emerging during prime years you would avoid meeting a predator that was ready to eat you every two or three years since the prime is not divisible...

    • Re:Um, so?.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by martinde ( 137088 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @05:15PM (#8547123) Homepage
      Here in Cincinnati they are saying there will be billions of them - 500 per square meter. That's fairly unusal if you ask me. See this [wcpo.com] article for what they are predicting here. Should be interesting.
      • I'm a Cincinnatian, meself. But last 17 year cicada I was living in a well wooded Pennsylvanian town. It was REALLY bad there, and I hope Cincy won't be nearly as bad.
    • Only the fact that instead of a lot of them, there's going to be a whole friggin ton of them, dying and leaving crunchy skins everywhere...
  • forgive the ignorance. So, these things take 17 years to mature or are they hybernating for that long or what?
  • I've lived in Northern VA most of my life and I remember the infestation in the 1950s that covered everything, killed some of our peach trees and filled the air so that you could grab them, when they flew by, and throw them into a large jar (ineffective insect control, but you felt that you had to do something). As time went by, the woods and fields were paved, the cicadas were trapped underground and their numbers declined. Now the eruptions hardly stand out from the usual cicada broods that appear annua
  • where 17-year June Bugs sometimes overlap with 13-year June Bugs

    Well, let's see. Given that 17 and 13 are both prime numbers, would that mean that "sometimes" in this context actually means "221 years"?
    • almost ... but there are several 17 and 13 year cycles.

      the chart from http://insects.ummz.lsa.umich.edu/fauna/michigan_c icadas/Periodical/Index.html
      shows it

      These couple of lines show an example
      1961, 1978, 1995, 2012 - VA, WVA

      1962, 1979, 1996, 2013 - CT, MD, NC, NJ, NY, PA, VA

      1963, 1980, 1997, 2014 - IA, IL, MO
    • There are multiple broods of both 17-year and 13-year cicadas. So while it might take 221 years for 2 particular broods to overlap, any 2 broods overlapping would happen more frequently.

  • Prime numbers (Score:5, Informative)

    by CalCudahy ( 541967 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:44PM (#8546691) Homepage
    I remember reading an interesting essay by Stephen Jay Gould on why these species that only emerge periodically do it at prime number intervals. The problem is that they have to swarm in such huge numbers to overwhelm any predators and multiply rapidly. To prevent a predator from evolving to depend on their "blooms" and wipe them out when they emerge, they only do it at prime number intervals. That way a predator would have to multiply in the same time interval and not some fraction of it. If it was 12 years a predator could multiply every 2,3,4, or 6 years and have a chance of feeding just when the cicadas were blooming. It's a lot less likely that a predator will multiply at only 17 years at the same time as the cicadas.

    There are also species of bamboo that periodically produce tons of seeds to reproduce, but on the order of every 70 years. These too only do it on prime number years.

    Who knows if he was right, but it is a cool theory.

    • Prime Cycles An Advantage? Yes, but not 4 all (Score:4, Interesting)

      by FreeUser ( 11483 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @06:33PM (#8547938)
      To prevent a predator from evolving to depend on their "blooms" and wipe them out when they emerge, they only do it at prime number intervals. That way a predator would have to multiply in the same time interval and not some fraction of it. If it was 12 years a predator could multiply every 2,3,4, or 6 years and have a chance of feeding just when the cicadas were blooming. It's a lot less likely that a predator will multiply at only 17 years at the same time as the cicadas.

      There are also species of bamboo that periodically produce tons of seeds to reproduce, but on the order of every 70 years. These too only do it on prime number years.

      It's a neat theory, and it is probably true that species with life cycles which are a prime number of years have an evolutionary advantage over those whose cycles are evenly divisible, but the advantage is slight enough that his assertion there are only species with life cycles that are prime numbers is wrong.

      Quoth the article:

      Question: What is the life span of a cicada?


      Answer: That depends on the Genus and species of the cicada. The Magicicada Genus of North America has a 17 or 13 year life cycle (the largest of any insect). Other Geniuses of cicadas have life cycles of a variety of years (never more than 17 and usually a primary number). The Tibicen or "dog day" cicada has a life cycle of only a couple of years and which is one of the reasons why we see them each year.


      Most are prime number cycles (probably as a result of the advantage vis-a-vis cyclic predators you cite), but NOT ALL.
      • It makes sense that you would have the "dog day" cicada, and the non-composite cycles species.

        To keep things in balance, you would tend to find that it is important that the predators can survive. To make that happen, you need 'dogs'.

        It would be interesting to compare the genome of various species. I'll bet you'd find that the "dog day" cicada is the more primative genetically (ie, oldest), and the non-composite dudes have more genetic variation.

        Just a theory, IANAG.

    • Re:Prime numbers (Score:4, Interesting)

      by SEE ( 7681 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @09:56PM (#8549261) Homepage
      Who knows if he was right, but it is a cool theory.

      Hmm. Interesting.

      My only objection is that it explains why the times are prime, but not the coincidence of them all being 17 or 13 years.

      Each of the three 17-year varieties' closest relative is a different one of the four 13-year varieties, not another 17-year one. We would therefore, evolutionarily, expect that the ancestral periodic cicadia first divided into at least three species, and then each of those three divided into 13 and 17 year varieties.

      So why did each of the three branches evolve both 13 and 17 year terms, but none evolved the equally prime 11 or 19 year terms? 11 and 13, or 17 and 19, are both seemingly more likely pairs than 13 and 17. Why did it become 13 and 17 three times?
      • Given the existence of cicadas with 13- and 17-year lifespans, a third species of cicada is better off with a 13- or 17-year lifespan.

        If the years are in sync (but with different breeding years), two 17-year species will never "clash" in their breeding year. Similarly, two 13-year species will also never clash. If you add a species with an 11-year span, you increase the frequency of clashes with the other species: a chance of 29/221 (about 13%) per breeding cycle for *some* sort of clash, and every 2431 y

  • Considering the 17 year cycle of this news, how did computer nerds find out about this kind of thing? Before there was news for nerds, what mattered to them?
  • Not sure what your grasshoppers look like, but they certainly do not look like cicadas here in the MidWest....

  • I Remember... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jazman_777 ( 44742 )
    Growing up in Virginia, and the Cicada hordes descended. It was absoultely revolting, you couldn't walk anywhere without constantly crunching cicadas. My friends would grab them by the wings and throw them to the sidewalk, smashing them, which was worse, because now that section of sidewalk was covered with smashed cicadas. I just stayed inside hiding from the plague. And the noise, noise noise, noise, noise (think Grinch here).
  • Behold a plague of locusts! The end is upon us!
  • I live in Stokes county, North Carolina (don't worry about where it is, it's not important) and we had our swarm of cicadas infest us last summer. Noisy little bugs. After they had shed their exoskeletons, though, we the ground was covered in little shells at least one inch deep.

  • I was living in tennessee when the 13 year cicadas came out.. and months before I found some of the larva tunneling up when I was digging around... and THAT was hellish, they were everywhere, and somehow, I found one with no abdomen... just the head..., and it was still flying around...

    weird.

    and they attack lawnmowers and lights, me and my friend shot at trees with bottle rockets.. that was fun.
  • Looks like it's time to fire up the flamethrowers...

  • No BB guns? (and other memories) (Score:4, Informative)

    by Stonent1 ( 594886 ) <stonentNO@SPAMstonent.pointclark.net> on Saturday March 13, 2004 @04:29AM (#8550602) Journal
    I can't believe that no one here has mentioned shooting them with BB guns during the summer. I never did but I saw several people do it. These things are easy to catch. You just pinch their wings between your thumb and forefinger and they can't do anything. We have green ones in Texas every year, they are the most common. (They black and yellow zig-zags on their head) From time to time I see very large brown/orange ones which only seem to come out at night. I've also seen a few solid black ones that were the size of the green ones. Once I even caught an extremely tiny one that was no bigger than a coffee bean. Each one seems to have their own special call. (Only males can call) The greeon ones in Texas have a rising and falling sequence that takes about 7 seconds. The large brown/orange ones alternate wee-oh-wee-oh-wee-oh. The solid black ones seem to have a long high pitch call. When you try to catch cicadas they will sometimes spray you with a drop of clear liquid. I assume it is either urine or reproductive juice. Males are easily identified by their sound. (Females are silent) Males also have breast plates which vibrate to make their sound. Females have none. The females end in a point, and if you flip them over they have a black line extending to the point. Males have an organ (I assume a sort of penis) that flips out from their tail end.

    During the summer, you can find their shells all over the place. They emerge with their wings folded very tightly and take about 12 hours to unfold and dry.

    And remember, there's nothing that a Cocker Spaniel loves more than proudly running around with a buzzing creature in their mouth followed by a loud CRUNCH.
    • God that spelling and grammar was atrocious. I was doing several things at once while typing that. I don't usually sound like a diseased monkey, honestly.

    • You left out the worst part (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      When cicadas finish mating, the male and female separate in a process where the male's genital organ literally lodges itself into the female, and is ripped off the male's body. This process kills the male; the female lives on awhile longer to dig a hole in the ground and deposit the larvae. You can easily tell dead male cicadas apart from the females, because the males will literally have a hole at the posterior end of the abdomen where the genitals used to be.

      Next time you get dumped, just be glad you are
  • My pet ferret loved them. He gorged himself on them. Crunch crunch crunch. About an hour later he threw half of what he ate back up. Guess he ate too many of the little crunchy critters!
    • Pet ferret? Try 'em yourself. Go out at night so you can get 'em before they get hard and too crunchy. They taste like buttery cashews, but with a texture like a fried cherry tomato.

      Actually not all that bad, considering they're insects.

      Fun Cicada Story #2: I was in Malaysia a few years back, and they have cicadas there, too.

      Really BIG cicadas.

      Sparrow-sized cicadas.

      These things looked like flying toilet paper tubes, except heavier. The first time I saw one at night, I thought it was either a bat or a b

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