Orlando – Waves of two broods of cicadas will take over the Midwest and Southeastern United States this spring. According to entomologists, it will be an emerging event that hasn’t been seen since Thomas Jefferson was president. How many cicadas are we talking about? Billions, maybe even trillions!
Broods XIX known as the Great Southern Brood and XIII aka the Northern Illinois Brood, will emerge together for the first time since 1803. This is a once in a lifetime event. Why? The two broods life cycles won’t align together again for another 221 years.
The Illinois Brood has a 17 year growth cycle and the Great Southern Brood has a 13 year growth cycle. These broods are different from the annual cicadas that return each year bringing the sound of spring and summer with their loud rattling of their tymbals to attract mates.
The tymbals are the thin, ridged areas of the cicadas exoskeleton found on the sides of their thoraxes. The cicadas vibrate their tymbals very fast, using muscles in their bodies. The fast vibration releases a sound and about 300-400 sound waves can be sent out every second.
Dr. Keith Philips, a professor of biology at Western Kentucky University, said the cicada, like most Floridians, love the sunshine and warmth during the spring and summer months.
“The sound volume is more temperature driven,” Philips said. “They sing longer and louder when it’s hot and sunny versus when the rain cools the air. They’re going to hunker down when it rains much like birds do.”
When will the cicada take over begin? They will start to appear in late April from northern Louisiana to western South Carolina. From there waves of cicadas will begin to show up in central Arkansas and spread to North Carolina and even western Kentucky. The last wave to emerge from the ground will incorporate northern Missouri to southern Wisconsin and eastern Iowa. Sure, this doesn’t include Florida, but if spring break plans take anyone to these states, this serves as a “heads up”. They might join in on the spring break festivities. Don’t worry they’re harmless.
While it might seem like two broods of cicadas can’t be that big of a deal, in this case it can be. In 1956, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign reported an aver of 311 nymphal cicada emergence holes per square yard of ground in a forested floodplain near Chicago. That math translated to roughly 1½ million cicadas per acre. That was just the Northern Illinois Brood. The dual emergence of the broods will be massive.
While cicadas seem to live all spring and summer long they only live about a month and don’t go very far from where they emerge because they don’t fly very well. They often die in the trees or shrubs they crawl into and fall to the ground. Most of the time, the smell of the cicada isn’t noticeable when it dies, but in large numbers like what it anticipated this spring, the odor can be foul as they pile up on the ground and even on sidewalks around homes that have a lot of trees.
It’s important people don’t kill the cicadas because according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, they’re very important to the ecosystem.
Cicadas are a valuable food source for birds and other predators. The holes they make in lawns help to aerate the soil and improve water filtration into the ground. As they die and decompose, they add nutrients to the soil. It’s mother natures free fertilizer so to speak. The holes left behind help aerate the soil and allow for rainwater to get underground to nourish tree roots in hot summer months, too.
The holes they make in branches can break them, but it’s a natural pruning for the tree and when fruit grows back it will be larger as the rotting bodies in the tree provide nutrients.
People have been known to eat cicadas. Yes, eat them. They’ve even been compared to a soft crustacean. Read more about that, how the weather impacts cicadas, and the kind we see here in Florida by clicking here!