Welcome this Tuesday afternoon at the Tri States Baseball kicks off tonight about six oh five with Lance mcgallis of the Reds. In the last ten games are the best record in the Central Division in baseball. The Twinkies are
in town for three. Then we'll see what happens there is the Reds drive toward the All Star breaking more plus later on today at two oh five, it is alleged that Prosecutor County Pillage is going to hold a news conference to determine whether or not there should be criminal charges and the shooting of Ryan Hinton, that eighteen year old boy who was shot having stolen a vehicle and had a gun in his hand, ran away. There's speculation whether the prosecutor's office here in Hamlet County will
indict or not. And now that's going to be announced sometime after two o'clock today. We're going to cover it for you live, I believe, according to Tony benderho's putting his qualifications and credibility on the line saying we will broadcast it live sometime after two o'clock as it begins. But until then, there's more important matters, which are cicadas.
Cicadas and cicadas, And I think we all can agree world to recognize renowned expert on cicadas's professor gen Kritsky, recently retired from Mount Saint Joe, who's written at least five books on the subject, and where do they come from? Why are they here? Et cetera. Professor Kritsky, welcome again to the Bill Cunningham Show. And first of all, Professor, how many years have you spent studying cicadas?
Oh, I'm at fifty one years though.
How many books have you written on the subject of cicadas.
I've written five books on them, I have another one planned, and I've written probably about a dozen research publications. And you and I have been talking about cicadas for thirty eight years.
Now, Well, do we have time to do it in seventeen years from now? What do you think I'm going to try? I'll try to then, thirty eight years ago we started with cicadas. At that point, once you're at Mount Saint Joe, Am I correct about that?
I was? I I working on that interview in the studio.
That's so we don't do that much anymore. But that's a different issue. Professor Krisky, tell me what is the cicada. Basically, what is the cicada? And then we'll get onto more particular issues. What is a cicada?
Well, we're talking about the periodical cicadas. The cicadas are insects BLO. They're belonging to They're like true bugs. They have a sucking mouth part. They're related to aphids and stink bugs. But the periodical skaters, the ones that we're talking about this morning, are these strangers like that have these very long life cycles. And what we're seeing right now is brood fourteen. It's a seventeen year cicada. And the last time I visited Cincinnati was in two thousand and eight.
How many different broods are there? Because every now and then you get a little bit of minor eruptions. Right now there's a major one kind of dying out at this point. How many different broods are there?
There are fifteen different broods, twelve different broods of seventeen year skatus and three thirteen year broods. That's the exciting thing the I discovered in part because if your help helping us get the word out there, we have a thirteen year cicada in Ohio. It's brewed twenty two, and it'll emerge in twenty twenty seven.
So in twenty twenty seven we may do this again.
Well, it's going to be mostly in Brown and Claremont County in Ohio and then ten counties in northern Kentucky. But yeah, I'm looking forward to it.
Why do cicadas exist? What is the purpose? What is the purpose of life? The purpose of cicada life? Why do they exist?
Well, the purpose of just life in general is to reproduce, But for periodical scad is they do a lot of good for the ecosystem. For example, when the nymphs come out of the ground those holes. Those holes persist until December and January, and during the hot summer when the ground gets really hard and a range that rain water
goes down those holes and helps water the trees. When the adults come out and start flying around their food for all sorts of opportunity predators, that allows their populations to rebound. When the females lay their eggs in the terminal growth of trees, it causes them time sometimes that branch to break. We call it flagging, and that's like a natural pruning. So it looks ugly this year, but next year there'll be a bigger flower set on those
trees that had that davage. And then finally, when that's all done, both the males and the females die and their carcasses collect the base of trees. Let's got a little bit of dew and rain in June and July and August. Then they'll start to decay and rot. And that is a scent memory. However, all that smells because they're decaying and all those nutrients from their carcasses are going around the trees where the carcasses gathered to nurture that tree for the next seventeen years.
Are they harmful to human beings in any way?
No, they're not. They I don't bite, they don't sting, they don't carry disease. They won't even carry away small children.
Tom brennanman likes to eat cicadas. I didn't know this till recently, but Tom told me he goes out in his yard and marry Mont often picking up a handful with cicadas at nine and starts eating them. Is that a good idea?
Probably not, because multi for humans eat cicadas, it's more of a of a of a bad They're not a sustainable food source, so you can't have one meal once every seventeen years. But what we're seeing, especially in Merrimont in other areas, is the amount of trees where they're reproducing us is being declined, has declined. So back for example, that that median strip of Marmont where they removed all those trees in two thousand and eight, replaced two thousand ten,
excuse me, and replaced them with the valves. The cicadas didn't merge there this year, but not in the numbers they did back in two thousand and eight. So what they are telling us looking at the distribution that we're germing with Cicada savari is the impact of deforestation urban development on cicada populations. That sort of gives us a little temperature of what we're doing to our own urban environment.
Professor Kritzko, are you saying it's like a genocide against the cicad when you cut down trees? Because I belong to Kenwic Country Club. We've cut down five hundred trees, magnificent oak and elm and other trees. Is Chemic country Club kind of committing a genocide against the cicadas?
Well, as long as our more cicadas than than the mile of those trees. They will disperse back in not necessarily. It might take fifty one years for them to get back to the same population size that they can disperse and fly about a mile per emergence.
When does cicadas begin? When to their life cycle? It was in the eighteenth century that the birth of the christ When did cicadas first emerge?
But we know from DNA studies that the genus Magines Cicada, which is our the periodical scatus, goes back at least three point ninety five million years and then two and a half million years ago the large species suffering into the small speci, so you have two species dead and then half a million years ago the small species species against. So there's now three distinct species of seventeen year cicadas.
So they go back by the bit that the broods what we're talking about now, they all originated since the last ice.
Age, which was about ten thousand years ago.
About twenty thousand years ago, the ice sheet was just north of Tri County Mall. So it's been in the last twenty thousand years that they moved north into the areas where the ice ice sheet was, and as they were doing that, that's when they were going to these usual accelerations and what have you. And that formed all the broods that we see today. You know.
And Tony Bender spends a lot of time in the Tri County Mall, which is now closed. He's crying out in front almost every day. But if he would have been there about twenty thousand years ago and the ice flow the glacier came from the north Pole and stopped around Try County Mall, if it was at the edge of the Tri County Mall and looked up, how high was that ice flow? How high was that glacier?
I don't recall the actual number offhand, but it was noticeable. It wasn't like a little skim of ice. It was several meters.
And that's why did it stop there? Why didn't it keep going all the way to the High River. It did stop, and that created the Great Lakes when it when it receded. But why did it stop there?
We A lot of that has to do is just uh, the overall temperatures that were going on and the tobography. Uh. Fortunately, as it's where it stopped, and then I feel further east in the in the Pennsylvania. It didn't stop as far south, so it's all reads the local conditions. But uh that uh uh that had a significant impact on
the evolution of cicadas. We were now based on the what you see from uh ecological studies in genetic studies, that warming trend after the ice Age, that that continental warming that occurred actually enhanced the cicadas accelerating by four years in these different gaps, and that's what created the different broods.
So, Professor, as far as cicadas, they've been here a long time before human beings are here, and they're going to be here a long time after human beings are gone. Is that correct?
Probably?
So, So the whole life is I get this trait. The male and the female cicadas are like in the ground beginning about three or four weeks ago, and when the temperature gets their certain degrees, they say, every seventh how did you know it's seventeen years this Brewe did they ever miss it by a few years and you're in the thirte seventeen years there's no clock.
Yeah, we discovered stragglers all the time. And one of the things that we discovered media cicada safari is that a lot of times. Well, for example, in two thousand and twenty one, when brew teneburged here, in addition to Brewed ten emerging, we had fourteen coming up four years early, we had some, We had some early brewed thirteen cicadas,
we had some brewed nineteen. Scats are off cycle. And now that we have the ability with smartphones and all and tens of thousands of people's hands, we're getting some information ut cicadas we never never even dreamed of before.
That's where the sixth book is coming on cicadas. But if you're a normal cicada, believe me, there's derelics all over the place. I see them all the time, in fact, I work with some. But as soon I mean, you're a regular cicada and you're on the ground for seventeen years, how do you know it's time? How do you know it's the seventeenth year?
Well, that's a part a subject of a paper which I'm co author on that's currently in the press. But it turns out they have they count to four and when they after they count to four, they can then molt again, and then they after they've done sixteen there's
one more year added on to that. And so for example, and if we were to dig up cicadas in Mary Mounts and Kenwood in that area and the deer last November, we would have found cicadas in the ground with red eyes as ice turned red the fall before they emerge. And then so they seem to be able to count these blocks four, but they don't always get that right either, because I've been digging up these things almost every year between emergencies, and they grow at different rates after they're eight.
After eight years in the ground, you might find two to three different stages of life sidewise in the ground on the same tree. And so there's a lot that we have to still understand about cicadas. But that's all underground. So that's a little heart of the study.
So these billions of cicadas are there, they wait for they go through four molts. I'm not sure what a mota is, four molts of four years each underground, and then they add one year. Then it's time to erupt and they come out. Tell me what I guess. There's a male and a female cicada, right, yes, there are. There's no like transgender cicadas nothing like.
That, not that we're aware of.
Okay, so you got male and female and they come out of the ground together and say it's time to get it on. Is that Is that what happens?
That's pretty that's pretty much it. When they come out of the ground there there with it's the last immature stage and that's when they transformed to the adult. That that day they come out of the ground, and they've got about a month on the for the average cicada to to do the business. We get we get ready
to reproduce for the next seventeen years. And so it seems to us, you know, the the adults only above ground on the average a month each unless they're eaten by a predator, and it takes two weeks for them all to come out of the ground. So that's a six week window that we're seeing right now. And it's it's all about sex.
Well I've said that before, but the male and the female's like it's like they're in heat. They got to get it on quickly because you've been in the third for seventeen years kind of waiting for this moment to arise, and so you're ready to go.
That's pretty much it. And the males gather in large numbers in trees and they all start singing. They call it a chorusing center. Females hear the singing, they fly into the tree and one thing in the tree. Then they'll respond to an individual male call and if they are If the male's unsuccessful at getting the notice of a female, he'll fly to another tree or another branch. And if you are out an area with the cicada singing, you'll notice it gets really loud, and then it drops.
The loudness drops a little bit, and then allow it again. That when it drops, that's when the cicadas are flying to another tree or another branch. The male cicatas because they were unsuccessful attracted the attention of a female.
Am I going from bar to bar in Witnessville something like that? Do you find the right female in the right leather chaps?
That's that's kind of right. These coursing centers, like one giant cicada singles bar.
Well, are they monogamous? Once you find your right cicada with the right kind of configuration? Does the male and female cicadas Marvin Gay, let's get it on. That's kind of it? Or do they get a little bit polyamorous.
Well, it depends. We know that from a racial studies that the typical male cicada will mate eighty five percent of mate once, ten percentle mate twice, and five percent of mate three times.
And like married men, something like that. And so the great majority say, I got my woman. That's it. I asked this question. Did they do it like dogs? How do they do it?
Well? They actually it's called they. If you can see this as the sidewalk in the trees right now, they are they genitalia are at tips of the abdomen, and so they often have found tail to tail as they're doing the nasty.
All right, now, what the nasty is done? Then what happens? Did they have a cigarette? Hold a glass of wine? What do you do?
No? They After a few hours, few days, the female will start to lay her eggs. The male's out of the question. Now the female searches for the terminal end of a tree branch where she'll lay her eggs. She has them up on average on five hundred eggs to lay. Wow, And she lays them in batches of twenty to forty in about a oh maybe a quarter inch to a half inch to slit in the tree. She's laid that block, she walks about a few another quarter inch to whatever
pierces the branch and lays more eggs and doesn't. And she does that until she either a runs out of eggs or b runs out of branch, and then she flies to another branch and continues the process until she exhaust her egg supply.
What happens during the male what's the male during? During this time? Getting with the guys, explaining what's going on? What do the guys do? When the females laying the eggs sit.
They they're sort of bubbling around and eventually they'll die.
That's the way life is anyway. So and at this point, all right, we're at the end of the cycle. The eggs are there, the female's done. What happens to the female.
After she lays her eggs she dies too.
Then what happens to the eggs.
Well, the eggs will hatch in six to ten weeks. And when they hatch, they crawl out of the egg nest in the branch and literally drop to the ground. And as soon as they hit the ground, and I've
seen this many times, they get underground. Within thirty seconds, the vast majority of them, because they are quite vulnerable to spiders, ants and beetles, which have the feast they could get to them, and so it's once underground, they'll feed on grassroots for the next few weeks in the fall, in the in the fall, and then by New Year's Day they're eight to ten inches bowl of the ground, sucking on the tree roots. And that's what will be for the next seventeen here.
What kind of life is that? What kind of life sucking on a tree route for seventeen years, waiting for that moment to come? Well, professor jen Krisky, you're the best there is. Have a title for your new book. Come up with something yet.
Well, the current book that's out, it's called the Pillgrim's Promise because the cicadas that are emerging this year were first noticed by the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony in sixteen thirty four.
How about that? Well, no one knows more about it than you. How do you pass on your knowledge? Has got to be a professor Jean Chrisky to be here for the rest of this century, maybe the next one. Is there another Jen Kritsky?
I certainly hope. So there are a number of people coming up in the working in entomology that I have that had the interest. Even my wife Jesse's coordinating the Idaturalist project. So we've got a lot of good people following us along.
I don't want your information to die with you. May you live long and prosper. Professor Jen Kritsky. We first did this thirty eight years ago. Let's get together in seventeen more years and see what happens.
Sounds like a plan. I'll be there.
God bless Jean Kritsky, Cicada King. Thank you once again. Professor gen Kritzky, formerly a Mount Saint Joe, now retired writing books on the sex life of a cicada. Let's continue with more. Bill Cunningham Big announcement after two o'clock and more coming up on news radio seven hundred ww