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It's your friend's older sister who taught you to swear in French. Ali ward back with an episode. I have waited most of my life for no exaggeration. When I first came up with ologies as a concept, it was partly just to drink an expert into talking to me about cicadas. If this weren't the thirteenth month of a global pandemic, I would have recorded this in an Ohio backyard instead of over the internet. I would have hitchhiked there in a bug costume, holding a brood ten or
bust sign, and I would have meant it. So this is the spring that bug lovers have waited seventeen years for. But before we cover ourselves in discarded exoskeletons, let's say some thanks to the backbone of the show. Patrons, thank you so much. You can submit questions to Theologists by joining patreon dot com slash ologies. It costs as little is twenty five cents an episode, Folks one dollar a month.
My heart is not expensive. You can also support the show just by texting links of episodes to your neighbors or friends or enemies if you'd like, on your podcast app or you know. You can leave a review if you like. I have read every review ever left, including this one this week by Neutral Viking, who said I applied to a PhD program because of Ologies. They say. I started listening to Ologies in twenty nineteen, during one
of the lowest points of my life. I had never been one for science, but decided to give the podcast a shot after a friend recommended it to me. Maybe it will be a good distraction, I thought. Half a dozen episodes later, I realized how much I actually loved science, but never had it presented in a way that I connected with because of Ologies. I went back to school one day hope to study volcanos on other planets. Neutral Viking, Hell, yes,
astro volcanology. That episode is all yours. Okay, so leave one see if I read it next week, I dare you. Okay, let's get to cicadology. Cicada in Latin means tree cricket, but your Appalachian friends may call them jarflies. I just found out I have only seen a cicada in the wild maybe three times in my life. And each time I crowded around it and gasped and took pictures like
an American at the Eiffel Tower. I have never even seen a periodical cicada, the ones that emerge in the trillions every thirteen or seventeen years in the US, But at their last emergence in two thousand and four, I was so envious. So this year we're getting ahead of
their emergence. After the Forest Entomology episode last October, I asked Kadubs the hiking scientist aka doctor Kristen Wickert, for a cicada hookup, and she started an email thread full of my secret internet science crushes, including Dan mosguy who runs cicadamania dot com What's up Dan? And this ologist who is the authority on periodical cicadas. He hails from North Dakota. He got his bachelor's in biology from Indiana University and his masters and PhD in entomology from the
University of Illinois. He's now a professor and the dean of Behavioral and Natural Sciences at Mount Saint Joseph University in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the editor of American Entomologist. He's written multiple bug books and authored scores of papers on insects. He is the cicada guy, so he typically appears in the news sometimes maybe you've seen him in all khaki field gear and a tan sun hat, and he has a gentle silver beard with kind of a tidy upturned mustache,
like a friendly smile. And we hopped on a call to record, and I just screwed it up so bad, Like immediately I dropped off the connection and I could not log back in, and there were all these tech hiccups. So I texted our wonderful assistant scheduler, Noel Dilworth. I said, hey, I sent him a new link, but he hasn't shown up, but I hope he's not mad. And then I got the reply, I am not distressed, And I had texted
him that instead of Noell. So, between wanting to do this episode for seventeen years and then talking to the world expert in it and texting him about him, my level of body sweat was clinically dangerous, but regardless, we
figured it out. We got on the line to ch about life cycles and ghostly remains, cicada chasing, insect cuisine, the decibel levels of our springtime friends, and what you should do if you see a cicada, the app Cicada Safari, their cultural and pop cultural influence and what they are doing underground for nearly two decades while we missed them with icon legend and cicadologist doctor Jean Kritsky, who may or may not already be mad at me? Are you mad at me?
Why?
I felt so mad?
I was like, oh.
No, maybe he just left forever. I was mortified when I realized that I went to you but secrets out. I'm a human being, that's all right, it's all my all right, down to business.
I'm Jeene Kritzky and I use he him.
And now you are, from what I can understand, a cicadologist. Do you ever call yourself that?
I consider myself an entomologist. Although I work with cicadas, I also do a lot of work with honeybees.
Okay. For more on his bee work, you can start with the Tears of Ray bee Keeping in Ancient Egypt. And while you're buying his book, he has a new book that came out this week. It's called Periodical Cicadas, the Brood ten Edition and it's thirteen bucks with a paperback. The link is in the show notes treat yourself, get it. He literally wrote the book on these gorgeously loud, mysterious creatures.
So can you tell me a little bit about what we can expect this year from the cicada population in the United States.
Sure, this year we're going to experience an emergence of brood ten. I say brood ten. That's capital B with the Roman numeral for ten, which is an X, and so some people that I want to make a little sexier than it really is brood x. But it's brood ten. And we're already beginning to see signs of it here in the Midwest. People are reporting lots of moles in their yards, mounds from where the moles have been feeding because the cicada nymphs are right now about four to
six inches below the surface. And we'll start seeing our first sign of cicadas in late April after a big, heavy rain. Some of the cicado, especially the soil is a very heavy clay soil. They'll actually extend their tunnels above ground, and they're called chimneys or turrets firm similar to what grayfish will sometimes do.
News flash to me that crowdads aka crayfish emerge sometimes out of tall, lumpy turrets they build. And also I googled cicada tunnels and one image taken under a deck look like a damn coral reef, or like big tall stacks of dirty poker chips, or like the tallest birthday cake ever, out of which a beautiful ghoul pops up to say happy seventeen year's Day, surprise.
And they'll crawl way to the top of these things. They get as large as a twelve inches high, and then as the water seeps down through the soil and gets out of the tunnel, they move back down. But you'll see these little chimneys that'll be under things like people's decks, or under the large overhang of a roof line, for example, or an outbuilding of some kind. I've even
seen them under pallets. So people but have a wooden palate that's not solid wood but gets nice and super wet, and you lift it up in They' filled with these little chimneys underneath. But that's the first sign that we'll see. That'll be usually this in late April, we could see, especially in some of the southern States and northern Georgia, for example, we could see a few cicadas emerging around
the first of May. They come out of the soil when the soil temperature reaches sixty four degrees fahrenheit and then specific well, these are cicadas, you know. They they got things to do. They got to come out in seventeen years. They keep track of numbers and what have you. Once you hit that temperature for sixty four degrees farenheit and then you have a really nice soaking rain that just sort of saturates everything, then they really pop. I mean,
it's just it's amazing. The highest density I've ever seen was three hundred and fifty six per square yard. Wow, and that was over the course of about a two week period. They came up. But the first even they come up. By the they come up by the hundreds
and thousands. Some of the things I've noticed. I remember the first time I experienced this one evening, I thought it was I thought it had to go in because it's starting to rain, and what it was with the cicada and it was falling from the trees, a bubby landing on the dried leaves, and it just sounded like a heavy rainstorm. I remember seeing a yard where so many cicades were crawling it blades of grass. The grass looked like it was in a heavy wind, which is
sort of like moving around. It's really quite amazing. And then the weirdest one. You know, I do a lot of work in cemeteries, and so I've been in cemeteries. When these things start crawling out of the ground, it's it's almost like a scene from some kind of a B fifties movie, horror movie. You will these things, I'm crawling out of the ground. They are under the ground.
They're under the ground.
If there was as much larger you could probably have a really good sci fi movie.
When they leave those exuvia behind, they look kind of like ghosts that have been frozen.
To me, it does. It's a it's a hollow shell reminder of what was. There was an article I remember reading from the early nineteenth century talking about the only the cicadas have left. I they called them locus at the time. The cicadas have left, and all we see are their ghostly reminders.
Oh that's beautiful. I was going to ask this if it ever kind of gets your goat that they're called locusts because a locust is a type of like grasshopper morph.
Right, Yeah, Cicadas are insects have belonged to the sorry to get technical, let we love it, the insect order hemipter, which are sucking insects like bedbugs and stink bugs and leaf hoppers and aphids and so on. They belong to the suborder that includes the tree hoppers and leaf hoppers what have you. They have sucking mouth parts in the case of the periodical skates, red eyes, orange veined wings, black body as adults, whereas locusts, on the other hand,
are essentially a form of grasshopper. It's really interesting the very first time they were seen, and you know, our history of these things goes back to sixteen thirty four. Oh dang, that's when William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth Colony, reported them in his History of the Colony. And he actually may have gotten the date wrong. He actually at
the top of the page wrote sixteen thirty three. And then what he wrote, which is kind of neat, he wrote to and in the spring before, especially all the month of May, there was such a great quantity of a great sort of flies, like for bigness to wasps or bumblebees, which came out of holes in the ground and replenished all the woods, and ate the green things, and made such a constant yelling noise as made all the woods ring of them and ready to death the hearers.
They have not, by the English been heard or seen before. Orse sits now. The reason I say he had the date wrong is it turns out sixteen thirty three there is not a brood of cicadas that it would emerge if you go back in time in sixteen thirty three today.
So you had to kind of backtrack and figure out okay minus seventeen minus thirteen.
Yeah, it but creditors that there were cicadas that should have emerged the following year in sixteen thirty four. And it turns out he didn't write that passage in that that same year. He did it a few years later, so he might have gotten the notes mixed up or what have you. And so I think he probably got the date wrong. But they called them flies until the early eighteenth century.
Well, you know that was going to be one of my questions because they're in Hymiptera, But are there a lot of Jmiptera bugs that have the kind of robust wings that they do.
Oh, there are a lot of numbers. A lot of cicadas do it. And then they're the lantern flies. They have large wings as well, so there are some.
I was trying so hard to impress him by knowing what a hymiptera is. It means half wing, and I did not realize cicadas were among them.
Okay, and there are some strong flyers, not as strong as dragonflies per se. But some of the Regivians have our strong flyers as well. Some of us are bumbling along it. Periodical skadis. If you've seen them, they don't look like they're savvy insects. I mean, they're sort of tumbling around, and I've seen them get picked off by birds. You know. They just seem very clumsy at times.
Yeah. Well, what's the difference between a periodical cicada that might come out every seventeen years like breuten or thirteen years and annual cicadas.
They belong to different genera, But if you want to look at it, if you look at them, you'll find that the annual cicadas sometimes some are called dog day cicadas because they come on the dog days of summer. They're much larger their head is more flat, their eyes or are black, sometimes green. Many of them are black with brown markings, are black with green markings that were camouflaged. And as I say, they're about a half inch to an inch larger than the periodicals.
So the annual ones come out in the heat of summer every year, and although they are more chunk, you won't see their camouflaged bods as readily, and you will not witness anything near the numbers of the periodical cicada. The annual ones are just all in all more low.
Key and behaviorally, they are much more cryptic. They look like little camouflage insects. And if you stand under a tree, let's say in late August, and hear the annual cicadas singing away, you can stare at them and stare at that tree, and you can't see them, because, yeah, their whole survival strategy is totally different. It's to be cryptic. And when the male starts singing, of course he then is very vulnerable to a bird if the bird can find it, but he's up in the shadows of the tree.
A couple of years ago, my wife and I were in Greece and we heard cicadas in the trees, and we must have looked for twenty five minutes to find a couple of them. We were less than three feet away, but it was really hard to pick them out. But on the other hand, the periodical skater, they're in your face. Yeah, it's not so much that you need to look for them. It's like where can you look that they're not present to And they come out in big numbers.
Is that part of their evolutionary strategy is just a ton of them at once? How does that work?
Well, it's works well for them. It's called predator satiation, is what we think is happening. They come out in these large numbers, you know, and some of the birds are major predators of them, but their little crops can't hold many more cicadas. And the analogy I like to use is imagine walking outside and all of a sudden, you see the whole world is inundated with flying Hershey's kisses. I'm fond of Hershe's kisses. And you tend to eat and eat and eat and eat and eat these, but
eventually you will get tired of them. And in nineteen ninety one and run fourteen emerge, I was over in a little Marrimuntain area, a little suburb of Cincinnati. It was really kind of cool to watch. I saw this dog the first say. They're coming out, snapping out all over in the yard. It's just going at him. Five days later, go back to see how the emergency is going on at some of my test sites, and that dog is just lying on the porch, paws folded and cicada's walking all around him.
Does not carry over it. I'm over these things.
And that's why a lot of people like to collect cicadas in cicada years, but not to use this fish bait this year, but to use for next year. And they'll freeze them. And I've seen people collect ten five gallon containers of these things and free them for the course of a decade.
So periodical cicadas are in the genus Magicicata, and they make a splash. They are smaller than the annual cicadas, but they have such style in the form of blood red eyes, and there's billions, maybe trillions of them. In fact, their genus looks like magic cicada, but Magi actually comes from the Latin for many or just a staggering as load.
But not from the word magic, okay, but you will have a magic spring and summer if you live in Delaware, Illinois, Georgia, Indiana, New York, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Michigan, as well as Washington, DC, and you can witness the party. And if you miss it, you're going to have to set your calendars for twenty thirty eight to see these hordes of beauties. Now, Breod ten
is the largest group of the seventeen year cicadas. They emerged this year, but there are over a dozen seventeen year broods and a small handful of thirteen year broods. And I'm going to link on my website to a US map to see which broods might be in your area. Now, elsewhere in the world, you can always gaze at an annual cicada. If you have them, you can tell you love it if you can find it. But if you have periodicals in your area, they're hard to miss because
they blanket everything. How old were you when you saw your first emergence?
I was pretty old. You thought I was born with a cicada year. I'm from North Dakota, so we don't have periodical skaters there.
Oh, you were born in a cicada year, though, that's auspicious.
Brewed ten year it was nineteen fifty three, and then in nineteen seventy I was living in northern Illinois, and of course they have Brewod thirteen, they're not Brood ten. So I missed that one, and then finally in nineteen eighty seven I was able to witness my first brewed ten emergence. However, I did a lot of field work in nineteen seventy six with Brood twenty three, a thirteen year cicada that emerged in eastern Illinois.
Had you already been studying them previously or was this kind of like a chance field work assignment and then you started getting into them?
Well, I became an entomologist in part because of periodical cicadas. My undergraduate professor at Indiana University, Frank Young, wonderful man. He's deceased now, but in that second week of that course and he starts talking about these things, and I thought, whoa, yeah, this is just wild. And he was the cicada specialist for Indiana, and so I knew within two weeks of
listening to this man, my life is in bugs. And so I went to the University of Illinois, where I didn't work on cicadas as my major PhD work, But my advisor was also Illinois cicada special doctor Lewis Standard and another wonderful guy. Between Lou and Frank, these guys love life. My dad he loved life, but he sold insurance. Yeah, but these guys just loved coming to the office every day, and I found that infectious.
Jean told me about being in coll and taking on a mapping project and researching old letters from eighteen sixty three to track down where in the county the brood may emerge. Back in the eighteen hundreds, scientists had to dispatch grad students on horseback. But in the late nineteen seventies, Jane just cracked open a window and let the wind through his hair, following his bliss to mud tunnels and
still wet wings. Yeah, did you get into a Chevy nova and just like ramble around the country looking for different emergencies.
You could say that although it wasn't a Chevy nova, it was a Chavette.
Close And can you tell me a little bit about what one of the worlds, if not the world's biggest authorities on periodical cicadas. What is your job like When people ask you, Oh, nice to meet you, Jane, what do you do? What are you doing them?
What? Actually? The cicadas usually won't pay the bills. Okay, I'm a dean of Behavioral and Natural Sciences at Mount Saint Joseph University, and I'm the longest serving faculty member there. But I'm an anemologist who works on that. I'm a frustrated historian. And so while I was in Illinois, I was able to use the fantastic library resources at Illinois. I think it's now the largest state university library in the US, and I was able to find mimeographed staple
papers that had all the USDA records on them. And to me, when every time there's an emergency, you make observations, you come with hypotheses, But with cicadas, it's not like looking in checking every year. You've got seventeen years between these emergencies. So I decided to start looking through newspapers, any kind of publication I could find for old historic records of cicadas. And I'd gathered about seven to eight thousand by the time I was done. And then I
found this is getting back down into the eighties. I found a computer program for the Macintosh at the time that was primarily used for demographic marketing and where to put golf courses, but it had a great mapping program. And so I literally took all eight thousand of these things and put into it the Phipse code, which is a coding based on the alphabetical order of the state and in the alphabetical order of the county in that state.
And then from there I could map out these cicada brudes seventeen years apart and see how the patterns changed and how we are knowledge built up, and then you know where are there areas where we had emergence records go back to the beginning and so on.
Do golf courses, by the way, side note, do golf courses see a lot of emergence as well?
Some do? Yes, Yeah, I've been in several golf at several golf courses where there's a decent a cicada emergency, especially the ones where they've that are near other areas where ciccadoes are heavy. They've just planted some new trees and the ends of the fairways along the rough.
And you know, this is one thing I think that still mystifies us. But can you describe a little bit of the life cycle. What are they doing that whole time.
Let's start when the adults emerge from the ground. Okay, and that's going to happen here in Cincinnati, somewhere in early May. I have a formula that developed a few years ago which will allow you to predict when in May they should come out within a forty eight hour plus or minus forty hour period. But we need to
have all the April temperatures that do that. So around the twenty fifth of April, I take the long range forecast that I calculated when the cicada should come out, so that'll be here in around the twelfth of the fifteenth of May. You might see them a week earlier in Georgia because of being further south. But what will happen is I mentioned the soil will be sixty four degrees fahrenheit, nice soaking rain, and that causes the nymphilens
cicadas to come out of the ground. They start wandering on trying to find a vertical surface to crawl up because they get. Their whole purpose now is to shed their nymphile skin and transform to the adult. I've seen them crawl up trees, brick walls, fence walls, tombstones, blades of grass, whatever going up. They climb up that surface and they lock their little legs into the tree trunk. It's a tree with their tarsal claws getting nice solid purchase.
And then all of a sudden, the back of the thorc splits open like somebody wearing a black coat under with a white shirt underneath it. And that's just too small, and they split the seam. They see this thing open up, and then it goes up and cracks the head capsule. And then slowly the adult cicada wriggles its way out and pulls itself out to the point where it's saying upside down, being held in place just by the little tension of the old nymphile skin holding onto the abdomen.
And you see these white string like things coming out. Those are the breathing tubes.
I looked up a time lapse of this, and yes, those tracheal tubes are like little white threads, kind of like the final rip chord that detaches from its old self. And also as I watched the wings inflate on this one video, started to cry and how beautiful and emerging cicada is crying. So pretty.
The trachion that the cicada breathes by and those are mostly are made of kite as well, So when it transforms, it's literally pulling its trachial tubes inside it. You know, the old ones are being pulled out because it's made new ones on the inside. Oh wow, if you thought puberty was rough, yes, interesting what this is like. So it's hanging there for a few minutes, and then eventually it'll start doing what I like to call a cicada sit up. It starts trying to sit forward but just
can't make it. And then it finally can gravel hold of the old nymphal skin and it wriggles its the labdoone free and by this time it's out. It's clear. It's it's white in color, it's got red eyes, two black patches behind the head. But the wings are all shriveled. And the next thing it has to do is expand its wings, So it starts pumping fluid through the wings. They slowly expand to where they look like a typical cicada with the wings held tent like over the abdomen.
But they're still creamy white because the their exoskeleton hasn't hardened yet. Now this has taken about ninety minutes, depending on air temperature. Now they have to start hardening the exo skeleton and they'll slowly start turning dark over the next ninety minutes again, and then they'll eventually look like the typical adults cicada with the red eyes and the black body and the remembranous wings, with the orange color
on the major wing banes at the base. And then the thing I want to do now is basically climb to the tops of the trees. It's even though it's dark, it's not completely hard. It's gonna take a couple more days, two to three, four, five days somewhere before they complete this process of hardening. But they want to get farther up so their hidden as from some of the major predators. And then they start flying, and that's when you'll see
the birds really attuned to them. I've seen this many times, a cicada flying from one tree to another and a blue jay grabs it right out of the air. You know, because they're not strong fliers per se. And at this time more males emerged the first couple of days than females. That vanguard there is going to give its light so other they're lives, so that others could live. Then eventually
the numbers start to equal out and the females. Then more females come out and grow your numbers towards the end. But that emergence process is going to take about two weeks. They don't They all don't come out in one night. It's like, not like this massive thing. This good, but this is about a two week rolling period, and if you have some cool days in there, we might slow down. It can be a little longer, but on the average about two weeks.
So the early male gets the acts just first on the scene, horn up looking for ladies. They are delicious. They're like the first French fry you eat out of the drive through, just the least likely to survive, and males and females will sprout out over the next couple of weeks, all looking for springtime, summer loving.
And after about five days or so after they've emerged, the males can start singing.
Yes, I had so many questions about this. When you say singing, what would you say that it sounds like it's beautiful?
Yeah, I remember these things got me tendier.
I love it. I think it sounds kind of otherworldly to me, just this really kind of high pitched buzzing.
Yeah, it's very much so. There are three species that are calls who are different from the three species. The large one, sept in decim, has a sort of like and it sounds like when you hear a whole course of these things, it sounds like some nineteen fifties science fiction movie. And that's the sound of the flying saucers flying in.
Yeah.
And then the smaller species, cast and eye, which is very common in some of the areas that have been turned into suburbs here and since, is more of a constant sound. And it doesn't all stay constant and sound and levels. It'll get louder and then drop off louder, drop off. The highest I've measured is ninety six decibels.
Ooh oh gosh. That's about as loud as like a rock band playing right as a rock band. I've never been more like your old uncle. But yes, different calls like the ones on the wonderful, incredible website Cicadamania run by Dan mos Guy hit different decibel levels and some are said to approach one hundred and twenty decibels, which I looked it up, and that is a volume of an ambulance siren. So man bugs screaming for love.
I'd say Joe is on the flight path. This is a international airport and skados will drowned out the jets.
Wow.
And if you get the chance to go into a major Cicada area, when you're done, after about a half hour collecting and recording and taking measurements, whatever, you get in the car and the windows are up, you feel like you've been to a concert.
Damn you, Tonitis, You're a cruel mistress.
It just keeps you. You just it just keeps ringing.
How are they making that loud of a sound.
The sound is made by a timble, and there are two timbles on the first abdominal segment of the mail, and then the male's abdomen is mostly hollow, and so that acts almost like a resonator to get a little louder.
Think of the belly of a stringed instrument. So there is a reason a violin or acoustic guitar is hollow, it's probably also horny.
And you put ten twenty thousand of these in one tree, m it's going to add up. And the sound if you've ever taken the Bendi's straw, you know the one that has yeah, and you can you pull it out. You hear that old snapping sound, Do that about one hundred and fifty too hundred times in a second, and that's that's your call for that mail amplified with the abdomen being hollow, and then multiply that by twenty thousand and you might have a good example of a course.
Yeah, oh my gosh, oh, I know that there is an aside here about hollow males being the loudest, but I'm just going to let you write that one in your head. I prefer to think of cicadas as just croonique for love, a symphony of sexual aspiration giving us outdoor ambiance as the weather and maybe our love lives heat up, but also maybe not so. Yeah, it's a chorus, just a huge course, and it's a that.
We actually refer to chorusing centers. Males will gather, large numbers of males gather in a tree. The ecological term is often uses a lech l e k And that's where large aggregations of males curve and then the females fly in. And there are three types of calls that the large piece of Dessa makes. The first one is that that fair. Then there's a gap, and just as he gets to the oh, the downs the downturn, the
female will flick her wings. She does not have timbles, so she cannot make a call like the male does, so she'll flick her wings at that moment. And if the male sees that or here's that notices it, he'll turn and walk towards her. Seeing again she she flicks her wings, he'll walk closer. Then he'll go into a second call that doesn't have that space, that quiet phase, but it just keeps going well fair or fair, that type of thing. Then he'll actually start tapping her with
his fore leg and they do the nasty. Now, if you're a male sit nearby and you hear this female that flicks her wings at the right time, you could steal her by capturing her attention. So when the first male gets to the lower fair and he guess that old portion, another male might start singing before he gets there, so she doesn't hear the end of the call to flick her wings.
What a dick.
And also apparently, if you are hosting a boys cicada on your hand and you want to prompt it to perform, try snapping your fingers at it. It will mistake the sound for a lady and then try to impress you by screaming.
And so I mean, it's really it's like a gigantic cicada singles bar with a lot of competition.
So you might someone might literally swoop in and steal your girl.
Yep. When the sound gets loud and then drops off in intensity, that's because if a male has been unsuccessful, he will probably fly to another branch, treat another tree. Maybe the luck is better over there. So that's why you can hear this. This is very loud up to ninety six decimals, then it drops down to like seventy five to eighty, depending on the numbers of ciccadoes that are there. And if you watch the trees, you'll see this flight going from branch to branch between trees.
When that happens, Oh that's so, that's gonna be so great just to pull up a lawn chair and like crack a beer and just to watch them jumping around.
Oh it is last year and brew nine emerged. My wife Jesse and I we went out to check on the cicadas and we didn't realize that we were there just as Tropical Storm Bertha was coming in. So we had a good cicada experience, but we didn't have that magical experience where you're in it, where you just your ears are ringing of them. And so we went back
in front of another two days. It was COVID time, so we had to arrange to go hotels that had COVID cleaning regimens, and we took our own food with us and whatever, and we went and we had a great cicada fix that you need to get. And as we were driving back to Cincinnati, we stopped at a rest stop in West Virginia and invade our dinner and they had just started emerging at the at the rest stop. That was just so pleasant to be there as the
you know one one's Sayinara, glad he came. And just to sort of end that.
That should I drive to the Midwest? Should I rent a van and just f off and drive to the Midwest and let these things crawl in my face. I want you so bad. And as we started recording this, Jarrett was like, let's go see them. And I am in the sound booth in the closet and I started to cry. So it might happen.
And now what.
Happens when she is gravid or preggers, She gets not as knocked up as a cicada can get.
What happens, well, then she's got to find a place to lay her eggs, okay, and she will lay her eggs in the new growth of trees. That's the terminal at the ends of the branches of the new leaves are and she will find a tree and they they are over twohundred species of witty plants that cicadas have been shown to ovalposit or lay their eggs in.
Oh wow.
And she has a structure called an overpositor, which is a structure at the tip of her abdumen which she pulls out of a slit the tip of araben and then literally it's it has a central raw and on each side are two structures that are serrated and they move opposite and literally cut into the wood. And a
colleague of mine. At ken State University Star Campus, Matt Leonard and I and his students examined the chemical composition of cicada ovipositors, and it turns out they are also like we see with a canuoned wasp that lay their eggs in a bark and so on, also reinforced with metals. And these metals are increase along the side of the serrations, so they're armored.
Again. Wow, oh that's amazing. I'm just going to restate that for all of us. So Cicada ladies. Ovipositors are serrated like knives and reinforced with metal also like a knife. So imagine your crotch is a knife and you wait seventeen years to pierce tree bark with this a baby shank.
She'll lay between ten to twenty eggs, and each little egg nesser it's about a quarter of inch long. Walking out of the corners down, puncture the tree twig again, lay more eggs and so on, and she keeps doing that until she either runs out of a branch that she has to fly at another one and eventually runs
out of eggs. I've had a student, Kayleas Stalworth, for her research project decided to help find out exactly how many cicada eggs does a female have, and so we sampled females from four different broods and she counted sixteen thousand eggs.
Oh wow, so many babies.
They averaged five hundred and six Wow. But there was a range. It could be between four and six hundred, but was right right around five hundred eggs, just a little over five hundred. Then you start realizing that think of all the cicadia to see how many you are reproducing, how many are in the trees laying eggs, and then multiply that by five hundred.
Oh, that's so many. But they still have quite a trek to make, right they do.
After she lays her eggs, they die and both the male is dead and the female then drops dead and that's it. And it takes six to eight weeks after they were laid that they all start hatching, and that's usually the end of July first of August. Again, talking about sitting in near lawn chair with a beer watching this. If you're at the right time, in the right place, when the eggs are hatching and the nymphs crawl out of there, the egg nests and the sun is the
right ankle. You can actually see these things drop like little little flecks to the ground, and that's when they're extremely vulnerable. Spiders, ants, ground beetles go after these things like crazy. So as soon as they hit the ground, they've got to find a crack in the soil and it's usually along a blade of grass, and they get underground immediately as fast as they can.
So, yes, eggs are laid in slits in tree twigs and then they emerge and once on the ground, they start looking for thirteen or seventeen year real estate.
Not all make it, but that's why we're laying five hundred eggs.
Yeah, And so.
They feed on grassroots for the first few weeks, and then by New Year's Day they're ten to twelve inches below the surface, latched onto a tree root sucking. And I know it because on New Year's Day I went out and dug up cicadas.
Really, so they've already latched on there. So do they spend those cold winters just sucking up sugars from the tree roots?
Well, yes, but although they're feeding on the Xylum tissue and oh okay, as you remember from biology, Xylum is the water conducting tissue that brings water and minerals from the soil up to the leaves. The floam has the sugars coming down, so they they're feeding on this nutrient poor fluid for the next seventeen years and not moving probably more than a yard or a meter any direction during that time.
In all my bug lust, I realized I forgot to ask does this hurt the trees, and most arborous say not really. So the main peril is in younger trees, whose slim little twigs are the bulk of their branches. So it's recommended not to plant young trees a couple
of years before a cicada brood emerges. So for everyone in brood ten territory who just spent their quarantine gardening, I'm so sorry, but just think you will have a lot of tiny friends to hang out with for the next seventeen years in the backyard.
It thought that the law life cycle might be a response to their evolving and adapting to the ice ages.
Really yeah, okay, So tell me a little bit about that and about these long life cycles and how they know when to come out.
The life cycles. Well, there's two life cycles. Seventeen years and thirteen years, and the idea is that the thirteen year cicade has evolved south of the glaciers. And if you look at the thirteen year cicada distribution, they're mostly in the southern part of the eastern United States. They don't get into Florida, but they're in Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama,
what have you. They cop up up the Mississippi ver Valley in Illinois and Missouri, and they get up into South Carolina and parts of North Carolina on the east. But then the seventeen year skaters are generally more north than that, although they are some of that in eastern Oklahoma that get a little far south. In general, it's thought that the ancestor of the periodical skate is split into two.
So Gene explained that cicadas are creatures of climate evolving and separating into different species and broods and groups relatively recently in the last ice ages, adapting to ice sheets and going further south and then advancing north again when
they receded. And the thirteen and seventeen year periodical cicadas separated over the last three hundred thousand years, which geologically speaking is pretty recently and then further split into the three thirteen year broods and twelve seventeen year broods and brood X or ten is about to have its moment. How do you handle it? When people say brute X? Do you correct them?
Oh? Yeah, I have to have a teacher.
Okay.
It's attributed in part to Confucius. But there's a phrase the first steps towards wisdom is calling things by the correct names.
Okay, that makes you feel better. I called it brute X forever because I thought it was a Generation X. I thought it was even named after Generation X.
Well, that's that's what generations are like it, I know.
Oh my gosh. Can I ask you questions from a listeners?
Certainly?
Okay, they know you're coming on and they're very excited. But before we do a quick note about sponsors of the show. Because of them, we can toss a cicada load of money at a worthy cause each week, and this week, doctor Kritzky requested it to go to Mount Saint Joseph's University in Cincinnati, School of Behavioral and Natural Sciences, and Gene says, you can designate it for cicada research. Our VP will be shocked, So let's do that now.
If you feel like tossing a few bucks that way, There's going to be a link in the show notes. And thank you to the following sponsors for allowing this podcast to donate.
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Okay your questions. If there's anyone on planet Earth that can answer these questions, it's going to be you. Miranda Halsey Vincent. First time question asker wants to know why are their eyes so big and why are they the best bug ever?
Well, the eyes of the whole subgroup to which the cicadas and their relatives belong to are called the alcon rinca because that the eyes are quite noticeable. The eyes are very noseble because of the red pigmentation. But they are a visual insect in the sense that they need to see their mate and look where we are they're going. Also, they'll have a behavior. They'll they'll feed on fluids under tree bark and sometimes they'll spray it at potential predators.
I've been at a Bradford pears, for example, and I thought it was raining because these scades were sort of shooting honeydew at me.
Oh my god, and.
So they need to know what's going on. They can aid these things pretty well. I don't know how accurate they could be, but they were hitting me. But I'm a pretty big target compared to a cicada ps.
I looked up this sprinkling and there's a page on cicadamania dot com that explains reassuringly, you may have been under a cicada filled tree on a sunny day and felt a sprinkler or two. Don't worry, it's just watery tree. Sap xylum passed through a cicada under which Dan has embedded a video of cicadas doing this, and y'all, it looks like a super soaker fight in the suburbs in the heat of August. It is just juicy water sports
from a bug rump. Pretend it's a blessing. Wipe it off, move on, you get me fine, Ryan g. Carter Hildebrand, first time question asker Ashley Burdett. In Ashley's words, I would love to know what they do underground. Do they hibernate until the next in star or is there just a whole cicado world like society. Megan daw cold and do it? A bunch of people had the same question.
Sure, well, they're not hybernating. They're down there feeding. They're to below the frost line. And if anybody's ever gone into a cave like Mammoth Cave, whatever, once you get in there, it's about fifty six degrees fahrenheit below the frost line. Even though it's cold here and it's been cold for the last couple of weeks, you gotta get below the frost lighted it's gonna be in the fifties. So if you go down a foot, so it's not
going to be that bitter cold and solid. I was out digging up cicadas back in November when it was a few cold days, and I was surprised that some of the scades that I expected to see four and six inches below the surface, we're already eight to ten inches down. So they're down there. They're sucking on a tree route, they're making a tunnel. They're not scooting around very fast you dig them up. They're ectotherm animals, so they're going to be moving slowly, but they're not hybridy
per se, and they grow at different rates. One of the differences between the thirteen and seven years cicadas is that the thirteen year cicadas molt an extra time within that first five years of life. Oh okay, and that triggers they're coming out four years early. But you can find seven years into the life cycle. I've dug these.
I have found third, fourth and fifth star cicadas at seven years underground, and by the time they reached for seventeen year scades, by the time they reach thirteen years old, they're almost all of them are in the last in star, and then by usually by the fourteenth year they are, but they don't Baltimore. They're just hanging around down there, feeding and getting ready for the Magical seventeen.
It's bananas that when you see periodical cicados, at least in pretend that they are old enough to drive a car. Technically, that is true.
I've never thought of it quite.
That way, but yes, Many patrons such as Katie Timothy Luke, Earl of gramblekin A, Laura Smith, Angelicus Carduzzio, Zwelf, Juniper Brooke, Nikki Debarco, Barti Goodwin, and first time question askers Molly Cousins and Alex Bowman wanted to know how are they better at time management than people? Essentially? How do they know when to come out? Is there a stage manager underground?
What's happening? Do you have any idea to do Scientists know if there's something chemical that triggers that emergence, how do they sense it?
Oh, that's one of the things that there's some federal work going on now that I'm involved with with my colleagues, that we're trying to determine what's the true We know that they can determine year passages by the changes in fluid flow in the asylum. You know when the tree goes dormant. There seems to be some they can detect that leaf sets and flower sets can trigger, because that you'll see more fluid flow. But what we don't know is how do they remember what year it is?
Hm.
We did have an event happened here in Cincinnati in two thousand and six. We had a December that reached seventy degrees and it continued into January, and the maple tree in my backyard leafed out. I thought I wasposes to me, this is January, and then we had a hard freeze in February. All the leaves fell off. Come the late March early April, the trees started leafing out again, and in parts of Cincinnati where BREWD fourteen was expected
to come out the following year, they came out. So for those cicadas they thought they thought seventeen years had passed even though they had two leaf sets, it occurred in one year.
For more on how leaves come and go, by the way, check out the phonology. Episode also heads up to Hannah Noos, I'm about to pronounce your name wrong and I am sorry. And so this devetails into a question from several listeners. A first time question asker David Ortonoff, first timer, hunter Elliott, Hannah Newst, and Earl of Graymulkin all wanted to know, in well, in Earl's words, not to be depressing, but
to be depressing. How is climate change affecting cicadas? And a hunter wanted to know could their hibernation cycles be altered because of it?
That's one of these that we're looking into, and it seems possible. As I mentioned, they are climate insects, if you will, they emerge when the soil temperature reaches sixty four degrees fahrenheit, and prior to nineteen fifty, the average for Cincinnati was May twenty eighth, twenty ninth. Since nineteen fifty, and in the last few years, they're now coming round between the thirteenth and the sixteenth of May, so spring is now two weeks warmer than we were back in
the first half of the twentieth century. And that's not surprising. Anybody that goes to a garden store sees these growing season charts and they'll notice that the planning zones are
moving northward from that. What that could do, for example, if you had continuous like what happened in two thousand and six and two thousand and seven, if you had a year event happened where there was like trees that seemed to the cicadative a two year things had passed, they might molt in that first five years, which would trigger a four year early acceleration and emerging off cycle.
And that's actually happened in nineteen ninety one. My students in my ecology and evolution classes, which was an alternating course I taught at the time, know that we would go out to the orchard at the university and we'd dig up cicadatives. To sort of drive home the scientific method, I gave this wonderful paper written by Monte Lloyd and joe Enne White. It talked about this between thirteen year scades and seventeen year cicadis and it said what stage
or growth they should be at each year. And I said, okay, these cicadas laid their eggs, they hatched in nineteen eighty seven, this is nineteen ninety one. What stage should they be at if their brew tend cicadas? And to drive the point home, I had to write it out a card. They put the card in an envelope they sealed the end, they signed the seal and then we go and then we got shovels and went out and dug up cicadas, and the cicadas were bigger and they should have been.
So what that meant to me was they're going to come out four years early.
So in nineteen ninety nine, the year before they were supposed to emerge early, doctor Chrisky presents a paper like the Nostro Damis of Cicada Wizards. So much is on the line. He's making a huge prediction y two k rolls around cicadas should pop out early according to his forecast. Were they right? Did they come out?
And they came out, oh, and massive numbers. It was mind boggling. At that time, we didn't have an app to use to help us map these things. We didn't have the Wi fis to help I used then answering machine. And the one woman called and said, why are all the cicadas in my front yard? And so my students and I went out to look for him, and sure enough her yard was packed with these things. But what
was exciting was they were singing. Usually when cicadas emerge off cycle like that, they all get eaten by predator because they don't come out in large enough numbers. They were singing, they were mating, they were laying eggs.
What's going to happen to that one? Is it going to get off cycle now or is it going to step in line with the rest?
Oh, that's what we wanted to know. So, of course, working with cicadas, that's the problem. This is to the year two thousand. Yeah, So I went back in twenty thirteen. My wife and I went to the study site and by the way, this is one of five places and since ay where that happened into the year two thousand and they started coming out. They were coming out. We found shells all over the place. We went out there and even the hundreds of them came out. We'd go
back the next day. We couldn't find a single adult cicada. Those cicadas did not survive predation to reproduce in twenty thirteen. Wow, wait four more years now, you remember this is out seventeen years later. If I worked on fruitflies, i'd have this done in two months. But no.
So this last early emergence happened in twenty seventeen, and adult cicadas who were just little baby eggs in that early two thousand emergents made it all around Cincinnati and their babies were on time seventeen years later, and not in one backyard, but thirty three different locations recorded. So what happens to all these early bird cicadas things are out.
Of sinc What we've seen now is the origin of a new population of brood six.
Oh wow.
And we thought that would be what would be happening because if you look at certain places here in Cincinnati, we have Brewed fourteen adjacent to Brew ten four years apart. Now six is there. In the Eastern States, we got Brewed nine adjacent Brew five adjacent to Brew one. And so this some kind of a genetic switch that triggers a four year cycle maybe coming to play. We see these patterns that corresponded. So I feel like the cicadas revealed one of their secrets.
That you can kind of start to tease out the mechanism of that, like chronobiology.
Yeah, and get a sense to what what's really happening. And it's just so cool. It's neat to have people realize that evolution is happening in your very backyard.
Mm hmmm. Would you say that you're a patient person overall. Do you think that's what enables you to deal with these long stretches?
Well, yeah, I am patient. I also have other things I like to talk about work on.
So okay, you're a multitasker, so yes, Gene has many professional obligations and publishing deadlines and pet projects. Oh, speaking of pets, listeners Red took first time question asker Miranda Halsey Vincent, who was very excited about this episode. Rachel Kasha first time are Gracie Van Derver, Victoria Boat right. A lot of them wanted to know about Cicada's as pets. Miranda asked, can you keep them as pets or do they make good pets or not at all?
Well, if you don't mind a pet that you don't have to play with because it's underground, you can't dig them up and playing back, that's not going to work. So yes, I have a lot of Cicada pets in the woods behind my house here. But it's not that they're not like a dog. It'll be that, you know, it's like it's like, what's the vision of dog and his cats? You know? For example, dogs need a lot of attention, They demand a lot. Some cats do as well, but cats are like having an older uncle or aunt
hanging around. That's nice, mellow, But cicada's uh. And as you can, you can certainly use them as yet of his pets when they come out as adults. But you've got to be prepared for early disappointment because they will die in about a month.
And maybe if there were boys, they might be just singing their heads off. Yep, okay. On the topic of heads, let's talk about mouth holes and yours and putting cicadas
into them. So many listeners on Patron including Lauren Duberglass, Rachel Kasha, Mitch Hughes, Crystal just Swan, Monica Rasmussen, mal Lucas, Meghan MacLean, Heather Densmore, Kathleen Sachs, Daniel Saltana, Zoe Jane, Emily z Hollis, Aaron mcglessick, Katie Timothy Meredith, Lloyd's cicada loving partner, Evan Robertson, Samantha Mitz, Alison Ewald, Sheila Lutewiler.
First time question askers Gigi who once accidentally ate one while playing volleyball, Gavin eve Ross, Paul Smith, Tim Dodge, shellfish allergic Kevin Biemer and Leah Darple, who wrote in are they safe to eat? I asked because I once watched a friend's dad smear a live one with peanut butter and pop it in his mouth. Well, some people wanted to know why their dogs like to eat them, and others were curious, if you have ever eaten cicadas?
Well, I think dogs like to eat a lot of things. They're gears. I actually by cat Budeno was probably maybe the only cat in history to have fresh, live periodical skaters for five consecutive years. Jesse, and I'm a drive all around to all the bruds coming out in the cycle. When you get to brood water, there's a skater brood almost every year in the next ten years, and so I made it a point to bring him home some cicadas to play with an eat. Now answer you that, yes,
I have eaten cicadas. I don't make a habit of it, because one of the things I'm really actively concerned about this year is our cicadas under threat. But with betting out to the colony experience, I've had them deep fat fried, I've had them sauteed, I've had them in salads and stir fries. If you feel like you need to eat cicadas, you want to collect them rise they're e merging from
their shells, because they're nice and white and soft. If you should eat them when they're all dark, it's like eating you know, the tail end of the shrimp, the part that you hold and dip the shrimp into the cocktail sauce. You don't. You can't eat that sort of papery, parchment like stuff. Just it's just too solid. That's what
it's like eating an adult cicada. That's that's mature. You should want to also females because they're filled with eggs, whereas the male is mostly hollow, so you get more nutrition from the female.
Oh yeah, Eve Ross, a first time question asker says that they know some entomologists who shake the trees and have cicada eating contests. Have you witnessed this ever?
No?
Okay, I was like, that's got to be You've got to really just gorge yourself on that. Every year that periodical cicada broods emerge, there are people eating them, so make no mistake. There's even a cookbook called Cicada Delicious, and some folks say they taste like lobster, popcorn or shrimp, or are nutty and buttery. And for more on eating insects, check out the episode we did Entomophagy Anthropology in January
twenty nineteen, and I'll link it on my website. But different indigenous groups have varying relationships to the cicada in diet. It can represent eternal life or even hardship, as the Unendoga nation located in what's now upstate New York, relied on them for sustenance after their people were attacked and crops were torched by colonists. So the bugs can be symbolic now of resilience and sacrifices made by their ancestors. But patron David Ordinoff asks are we looking at dwindling populations?
I experienced the last brood ten emergents in Baltimore where I grew up, and it was a wild experience. And Hunter Elliott says, I need there to be as many cicadas as possible all my life. They are the beautiful, bug eyed, screaming monsters that sparked my interest in insects as a child. So what kind of head count are we talking?
It's sort of. It's interesting the eighteen nineties, entomologists at the USDA were getting kind of worried with all the deforestation for agriculture, thinking that would have an impact on cicadas, and that's mentioned in the USDA works by Marlott in the eighteen nineties. In nineteen nineteen, headlines and the and newspapers around the country talked about Brood ten's emerging, it's probably on its way out. There's concerned about it's going extinct.
As crazy as that sounds, it's happened. Brute eleven, which emerged in massive numbers in sixteen ninety nine just outside of Boston, went extinct in nineteen fifty four. Wow, Brood seven, which occurs in upstate New York is just only found in two counties. That's going to probably be next for it. It's on protected lands, so maybe that'll that'll that'll help it.
But one of the things that graduate advisor Frank was really concerned about and talked about this in the nineteen fifties and then he and I worked on it in nineteen eighty seven was are we seeing signs of periodical ccade to brew ten decline? And we are Brewed ten was known to occur in every county the state of Indiana, and now it is in the upper third of the state. It's highly fragmented. You have to sometimes drive miles between
emergence zones. There are parts of the southern part of the states that have massive numbers who are still there. But that's been going on here in Ohio. In northwest of Ohio, several counties that reported cicadas in the late nineteenth century early twentieth century no longer have cicadas. So one of the things I'm hoping that we do with people helping us with the Cicada Safari app, is to really give us a good picture what's the status of brew ten.
But before everyone had cameras and omniscions and global connectivity in our pockets, folks sent out letters. So in nineteen oh two, scientists sent out fifteen thousand letters to schools and postmaster and railroad conductors asking, Hey, if you see or hear this beautiful shrieking bug, just give us a
heads up. But these days, with the Cicada Safari app that they made, Jean's team was able to capture nearly eight thousand recorded sightings of an early emergence of Brewed nine, something they could have never done with grad students on horseback or dusty letters handed out across the nation. So if you are underwhelmed with dating app options, just go on an insect safari in a local park and upload
some horny bugs. Maybe wear an Ology shirt and you'll find your soulmate also looking for hornybugs, and I will officiate your wedding. Maybe just saying. And so now people can download Cicada Safari and what they take a picture and let you know where they took it, like geotagged it.
Yeah, we want to do two things. We want to help people have more enjoyment with the cicadas. So after you've downloaded the app and it's free, there's no mighty cost, no money. We don't collect the data to sell to people, none of that. With the Center, I Engagement develops apps to engage a user to provide the research data I need so that I can map out cicadas. And so we encourage people to go on their own cicada safari and if they see one, they take a photograph and
submit it. I've got a group of colleagues who are volunteering and working to help us identify and examine every photograph, and we are expecting fifty thousand photographs. That's great, and so we're hoping for that if we can get you know, I've been told to expect maybe sixty five thousand, So we're not sure how this is, how this is going to do, what's going to go into but we're looking forward to be overwhelmed.
Great US ologites. Do your thing Cicadasafari app, So.
Each photo is a voucher specimen that what they're looking at is a real periodical cicada. That's important. We want to verify that the observations are accurate. If they are, they're put on our live map, and so users of the app can follow the emergence when it starts in northern Georgia and slowly see it move north as spring moves northward in April and May and June. We've also with the new version that we've put out last year, can also receive eleven second videos, and from the videos,
we can hear the calls. When you hear the calls, you can identify the species.
Nice so everyone in the US where there are cicadas, like get your cameras, get your phones ready.
The cicadas are unique to the eastern United States. They don't occur any further west than eastern Kansas and Nebraska. Our friends in Philadelphia, our friends in Washington, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Louisville, Nashville, those metropolitan areas. That's important. Get cicadasafari and help us, help us find out what's really going on with this massive brood.
Oh that's great. A few more questions from listeners. Zoe wanted to know how do people's feelings and associations about cicadas very in different cultures and places? And also a lot of listeners are I personally, if I see one, I want to hug it. I get so excited, But some listeners are scared of them. So how do feelings differ and what's the best way to embrace cicadas in your heart?
Well, the culture first of cicadas our amazing animals, as we've been talking about, but there's some really interesting culture differences. In China. During the Han dynasty, you'd find cicada ambulets, pieces of jade carved in the shape, and adult cicada placed on the tongue of the deceased as a means
of ensuring a resurrection or birth. When I visited the Jade Buddha Temple in Shanghai when I was selecturing in China in nineteen eighty six, they had a little store right next door to the temple that sold religious artifacts for what have you. And it's much like we see here in czel At around some of the Catholic churches have little shops that sell crushes and ambulets and what have you. And they had these large wooden carved cicadas.
And it turns out when the cicada nimb crawls out of the ground, up the tree, this dark out of the dirt and everything else, and sheds its skin, that's symbolic of the Buddha reaching the next level of understanding.
Oh wow, that's beautiful. Who doesn't love a makeover, especially spiritually. So these ghostly shells that they leave behind are called EXSUVII, and truth be told, I almost named my company Exsuvia because I love them so much. So it's just such a cool reminder that you can chill and get ready and then boom blast out and be like fabulous and then hopefully no one puts peanut butter on you and eats you and talks about it for seventeen years.
We have found now just sketches by Van Goll of cicadas. We've got a couple of da Vinci cicadas. They're not very big, they're on rebuses. And in Japan there's wonderful examples of cicadas in those scrolled paintings and watercolors, just gorgeous. Here in the United States, Copopelli, for example, it's thought
by many to be a cicada. Oh, if you know the flute player, So if that flutes, the proboscis of the insect, it's got a big hump on the behind the eyes, so it's got dumblings like it's bent over and it sings. I'm trying to think of of other cool examples. In nineteen seventy, Bob Dylan and got an honorary degree from Princeton University. And while he's there receiving his degree, the cicadas are screaming at the distance. And what does he do. He goes home and writes a song.
The locusts sang for me.
Oh beautiful, that's a beautiful thing. Did any get stuck in his hair?
H No, blugedly. The story goes that he went there with David Crosby, who sat in the front row with the dignitaries, and he made small talk with Greta Scott King, who also received an honorary doctorate that year. He got his cap and gown. He didn't address the group, He just got his honorary doctorate, walked off stage, took off his cap and gown, gave it to somebody, and drove away. So you wonder then how close he did to listen, because he was actually really tuning in on the cicadas.
So to patron Emir Kaku, who asked, is there any music that was inspired by cicadas singing in the summer, there's at least one, and Cicada Mania also has a whole page devoted to cicada theme songs. And again there are indigenous nations who are said to have paid homage to them and their drum rhythms. And so when you hear them, just think of them serenading you because they're so happy to see you after all this time, and unless you're a tree, they do not want to bite you.
So all the patrons, such as Rainbow Warrior Emma Parks. Amy Miller first time question askers Taylor Noel and Sterling Macki and Katie Rampy, who would like to be assured that they're not a baby, would like to know how not be I scared? What's a way to maybe get over your fear of them? They don't bite us, do they? No?
And some people if you grab them, and if you're afraid of me, you're not gonna be grabbing them per se. But they're lovely little animals. You should always face your fear. So go out there and really get yourself involved with the cicadas. Watch this slow motion dance they do as they shed their skin and turn into adults. Listen to the coursing. When Gideon Smith, this individual from the eighteen forties wrote in eighteen fifty one, he was talking about
brewd ten and he said, I'm paraphrasing here. You know, while some people find this sad son, I enjoy hearing, but I was melancholy as I heard it, because I wondered if I'd lived to hear it again.
Mm oh.
He died one year before breudt Ten emerged the next time, in eighteen sixty. He died in eighteen sixty seventy or year before.
Wow, I could have sworn that Earl of Gramblekin wasn't the only one who asked this, but a few people wanted to know if moth man exists? Is there a cicada man somewhere?
Not officially, although this sounds self serving, there was a headline in nineteen eighty seven that referred to be a cicada man in Cincinnati. Oh that's amazing. I've been called a lot of things in my life.
That was a first And what about last two questions? I always ask worst thing about cicadas. Don't worry, I'll ask the best. But the thing about your job that is the most annoying or difficult or irksome, anything really sticking.
Your craw well irks them is a good way. It's not that it angers me by any means, but I do don't like them. When people just step on a Willia Nelly, that bothers me.
Oh my god, it looks like a huge M and M. Anyone see the nineteen eighty six Corey Haynes vehicle. Lucas Jane didn't, but if you did, you might remember a young wynowna writer, and a Charlie sheen and a subplot of emerging locusts, which for some reason they did not call cicadas. But either way, my sisters and I can quote entire scenes of that movie, a lot of great bugshots. Just got to say, but what else irks?
Gane and I do get a lot of questions about eating them, okay, And that's understandable because the whole reason they're called they were called locusts, and part was related to people looking at these insects and trying to interpret their what these things were using the King James version
of the Bible, and John the Baptist sate locus. We knew that the indigenous people of New England date locus when they've came out in seventeen fifteen, the report from a reverend Philadelphia said the English split them open, eat them because they said they're the locus they eating. By John the Baptist, I can't eat right now. If indeed the cicadas are in decline, then I really don't like killing them per se, because I want them to be around for many centuries.
That makes tons of sense every you know, thirteen seventeen years, hopefully someone will write in a journal about their experience.
You know, Oh yeah, I you'd be surprised the number letters I get. I'm informed about it. I'll do to hear of somebody that's got a letter archive. I'll give them dates and what to look for and see if there's any mention of cicadas or locus depending on the time period.
That's great that you can say, like look in spring ish and this year.
And one thing people can do if they want to have the fund themselves. The Library of Congress has a wonderful website called Chronicling America, and they've been digitizing newspapers from the late seven teen hundreds to nineteen sixty three. And if you're in a cicada area and you can you can find the thought in my book Periodical Ciccade's the Brouten edition. You can look up what year if you got cicadas in your area based on the distriution maps.
You can look at what brood they are, look at what year they came out, and then go back into the Chronically America for May through June and look for stories on locus if it's early or cicadas. Do both, because a lot of times they were talking about even in the seventeen sixties, they were talking about these things aren't locus, they're cicadas.
But yeah, oh that's so cool. There's going to be so many people going through back in time into history, and.
They should talk to their grandparents. And they're lucky to have their grandparents around m hm oh or or some of the older If they got grandparents that they were around for cicadas, what do they remember them? And they may remember what their grandparents told them about the cicadas. So it's a multi generational insect, that's for sure.
I know that there's so much that you love about them, But is there something that is your favorite thing about cicadas?
Oh?
Wow, I know it's there is something about when they first start coming out. I will go out with my tripod, my iPhone flashlight, and I'll set this thing up and I'll sit there for hours photographing a cicada as it goes. I've got probably twenty thousand pictures of this now. But it never gets old. It never gets old. And that's almost like a zen moment when you can do when that happens. And then the opposite extreme but still but still fun, is when the numbers are really big and
they're screaming, and it is It is just fun. It is just great.
So ask world renowned experts basic questions, even if you have to wait seventeen years to do so, and you screw it up for the first couple of minutes. At the link in the show notes, you will find Jean's fresh, newly emerged, soft and squishy book, Periodical Cicada is the ten edition. It's thirteen bucks in paperback and it's available on e reader two and it'll make your whole year. And you can get the app Cicada Safari, and you
can help Jean's lab track these suckers. Also, Jean's wife, Jesse, is a silversmith and a fellow bug nerd and sells her gorgeous entomological creations via the silver Spot Studio and I will link them in the show notes as well. Cool stuff. You can learn more about cicadas from Dan Mosguy's website Cicada Mania, which is wonderful and he has
an Instagram, Instagram, dot com slash Cicada Mania. Highly recommend following them, and I am Ali Ward on Twitter and Instagram with just one L and the show is at ologies on Twitter, Instagram, Thank you to Aaron Talbert who admins the Incredible Ologies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to Cicada Obsessed, Shannon and Bonnie of the podcast You Are That, who manage Ologies merch at Ologiesmarch dot com. Thank you to all the patrons at patreon dot com, slash Ologies, Hello,
Ologies subreditors. Also thank you to Noel dil Worth for scheduling this, including when I got locked out and you had to send a new link. And thank you to Emily White and all the transcribers for making transcripts available and free. Those are on my website, they're linked in the show notes. Thank you to Caleb Patten for leaping them. Bleeped versions safe for kids are also on my website
and links in the show notes. And thank you to assistant editor but show producer, Jarrett Sleeper, who took the first crack at this week's edit for me because I have had a bananas few weeks with Innovation Nation shoots. Jarrett, You're the wind beneath my wrinkley and Soggy Cicada winks. And of course to editor and Magic Cicada Stephen Ray Morris, who hosts the per cast see Jurassic Wright and everything
with the movie A Star Wars book Club podcast. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music, And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this week's secret is that I've recorded a secret like fifteen times when I keep losing my train of thought or I changed a secret. One of the secrets I recorded for this was like, you know, what's really good instead of iced coffee is just putting hot espresso over ice because it is not too watery.
And I was like, that's not a good secret. And then I recorded a secret about how this is coming out later on a Tuesday because Grem spent Sunday projectile vomiting on clean bedding and it turned out we had to take her to the emergency event and she got X rays and she had just eaten some rocks because she's like, whoa rocks, She's gonna be fine. Also, I have to be downtown on a shoot camera ready in twenty nine minutes, and I am in my pajamas. My
pajamas are pulled up well past my navel. And this morning the garage door fell off its hinges. There was an owl hooting a garbage truck Anyway, I'm having a real Monday of a Tuesday. But we're here and I want to see cicadas this year. Okay, pyevide, pacadermastology, homeology, doo zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, old parapology, nampology, ceriology, selenology. It's okateous season, so keep your mouth shut.