In nearly a dozen or more states, from New York west to Illinois and south into northern Georgia, billions of cicadas that have spent the whole of their life underground for the last 17 years, will emerge.
As the Earth warms, shedding its winter cloak, the mature nymphs dig to the surface, leaving small pock-marks in the grass. It is then that these creatures find a place to perch, settling on anything, from trees and shrubs to fence posts and mailboxes to do their final molt, leaving behind their adolescent shells.
While the cicadas have been likened to one of the plagues of Egypt described in the Old Testament, cicadas are not locusts. They are flying, plant-sucking members of the taxonomic order Hemiptera, and the genus Magicicada.
There are seven species, four with 13-year life cycles and three with 17-year life cycles. Within the seven species, there are 12 known broods of 17-year cicadas, and three broods of 13-year cicadas. The brood emerging in the Northeastern part of the US is Brood X. I know, it sounds confusing, but it’s not.
The 17-year cicada is also known as a “periodic” cicada species that occur only in Eastern North America, and what makes them unique is their developmental synchronization, causing them to appear in great swarms every 13 to 17 years. This unusual behavior is not seen outside North America.
An impressive event
“The reason that this is such an impressive event…is number one: it happens nowhere else on the planet. We have periodical cicadas. There are cicadas on every continent except Antarctica, but it’s just in the eastern half of the United States that we have the periodical cicadas,” the University of Maryland’s professor emeritus Dr. Michael Raupp told Fox News on Tuesday.
“The other piece of this puzzle is that they’re going emerge in massive numbers. And, when I say massive, I mean massive,” he continued. “There are going to be as many as 1.5 million cicadas per acre. This is going to translate up and down the coast west of the Mississippi, into people say billions. I tend to hyperbole, but I’m saying there are probably going to be trillions.”
And much like salmon as they swim upstream, the millions of teenage cicadas have one thing on their mind: sex. After a short period of rest, the male cicadas will burst forth with their mating calls, and are they loud? At 100 decibels, the noise is the intensity of a lawnmower.
“This is like having a National Geographic special in your backyard,” said Raupp, according to the Baltimore Sun.
After mating, the female will lay her eggs in small slits she cuts with her ovipositor on small live twigs. She can lay up to 400 eggs in 40 to 50 locations. It usually takes about six weeks for the eggs to hatch and the nymphs to emerge.
They fall to the ground and burrow into the soil anywhere from six to 18 inches, and there they feed on the juices of plant roots for the next 13 to 17 years. And then the cycle starts all over again. We can expect to see the reemergence of Brood X in 2038.
