Hi, I'm Stephen Ray, UNISEF ambassador. What's next on your bucket list? Imagine adding something extraordinary to your list and changing a child's life. Join me in leaving a gift in your will to UNISEF and help bring safe water, education and hope to children across the world. Visit UNISEF dot ie forward slash bucket to receive your free bucket list journal, or call zero one eight seven eight three thousand. Thank you.
Oh hello, this is smologies If you're like, what is that? Smologies are digests of classic episodes. We've taken a classic episode that was for adults. Sometimes we've cut them down so they're shorter, they're kids safe, they're g rated. Okay, they're just for you. This one about Skatas love, this one Cicatas are back and so we're making this asmologies
for you, so do enjoy. If you want the full length all the details, including some swearing, you can find the original full length version at the link in the shutouts, But for now, this is just a shortyologies. Oh hey, it's your friend's older sister 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. 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. So this year we're getting ahead of
their emergence. And this ologist who is the authority on periodical cicadas, he hails from North Dakota. 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 chat about life cycles and ghostly remains, cicada chasing the decibel levels of our spring time I'm friends, and what you should do if you see a cicada, the app Cicada Safari, 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, Algyge, I like.
That, are you mad at me? Why?
Would I be mad?
I felt so mad. I was like, oh no, maybe he just left forever. I was mortified when I realized that went to you. But uh, secrets out. I'm a human being's all right? So am I all right? Down to business.
I'm Jean Kritsky and I use here him.
And now, can you tell me a little bit about what we can expect this year from the cicada population in the United States.
We'll start seeing our first sign of cicadas in late April after a big heavy rain. Some of the cicada, especially the soil is a very heavy clay soil. They'll actually extend their tunnels above ground. They're called chimneys or turrets, firm similar to what crayfish will sometimes do.
Newsflesh 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 looked like a 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. But that's the first sign that we'll see. That'll be usually this in late April. They come out of the soil when the soil temperature reaches sixty four to grease fahrenheit. And then very specific, well, these are cicadas, you know, they got they got things to do. They gotta come out in seventeen years. They to keep track
of numbers and what have you. Once you hit that temperature for sixty four degrees fahrenheit 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 at the first even they come up by the hundreds and thousands were If there was as much larger, you could probably have a really good sci fi movie.
Well, what's the difference between a periodical cicada that might come out every seventeen years 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. Some are called dog day cicadas, be could it come on the dog days of summer. They're much larger, their head is more flat, their eyes 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 cicadas. The annual ones are just all in all more low key. 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. 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 Hershey's kisses. And you intend to eat and eat and eat and eat and eat so these, but eventually you
will get tired of them. In nineteen ninety one and fourteen, Emerginal I saw this dog the first say they're coming up, snapping out all over in the ark. You'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.
Does not carried over it. I'm over these things. 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, not from the word magic. 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 it 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. 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. But what will happen is I mentioned the soil will be sixty four degrees fahrenheit, nice soaking rain, and that causes the nymph in cicadas to come out of the ground. They start wandering on trying to find a vertical surface to crawl up, because our 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. Let's say it's a tree, and then all of a sudden, the back of the thorc splits open like somebody wearing a black coat o 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 by this time
it's out. It's white in color, it's got red eyes, two black patches behind the head. And then they'll eventually look like the typical adult cicada with the red eyes and the black body and the numbertous wings with the orange color on the major wing mates at the base. And then the thing I want to do now is basically climb to the tops of the trees and then they start flying, and that's when you'll see the birds really attuned to them. And at this time more males
emerged the first couple of days than females. That vanguard there is going to give their lives so that others can live.
So the early male gets the axe just first on the scene 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 merged, the males can start singing.
Yes, many questions about this. When you say singing, what would you say that it sounds like it's beautiful? Yeah, I love it. I think it sounds kind of otherworldly to me. Just this really kind of high pitched buzzing y.
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 b and it sounds like when you hear a whole chorus 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, cass and eye, 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 n six decibels.
Ooh my 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 skatos will drowned out the jets.
Wow, how are they making that loud of a sound?
The sound is made by a timble. 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.
And you put ten twenty thousand of these in one tree, it's going to add up. And the sound if you've ever taken the bendy straw, you know the one that has yeah and you can you pull it out? You hear that little snapping sound? Do that about one hundred and fifty to hundred times in a second. And 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. And also apparently, if you are hosting a boys to kana 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 now what happens when she is gravid or peggers.
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. And she has a structure called an ovipositor, which is a structure at the tip of her abdomen which she pulls out of a slit the tip of arabuen and then literally it has a central rod and on each side are two structures that are serrated and they move opposite and literally
cut into the wood. And it turns out they are also like we see with a nuoned wasp that lay their eggs in her 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.
She'll lay between ten to twenty eggs, and each little egg nesser it's about a quarter in is 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.
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 the eggs were laid that they start hatching, and that's usually the end of July first of August if you're at the right time, in the right place. When the eggs are hatching and the nymphs crawl out of their the egg ness 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, as usually a long 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.
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, and as you remember from biology, xylem 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're feeding on this nutrient poor fluid for the next seventeen years and not moving probably more than a yard or a meter in any direction during that time.
Got everything I need right here with me.
It thought that the long 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 they grow at different rates. One of the differences between the thirteen and seven years cicadas is that the thirteen year cicadas moult an extra time within that first five years of life. Oh okay, and
that triggers they're coming out four years early. But the idea is that the thirteen year cicada 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. But then the seventeen year ciccadaes are generally more north than that, although there are some of that in eastern Oklahoma that get a little far south.
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. Can I ask you questions from listeners, certainly, 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 Kritsky 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.
Hi, I'm Stephen Ray, UNISEF ambassador. What's next on your bucket list? Imagine adding something extraordinary to your list and changing a child's life. Join me in leaving a gift in your will to UNISEF and help bring safe water, education and hope to children across the world. Visit UNISEF dot ie forward slash bucket to receive your free bucket list journal or call zero one eight seven eight three thousand. Thank you.
Okay. Many patrons, such as first time question askers Molly Cousins and Alex Bowman, wanted to know how are they better at time management than PA? 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.
We know that they can determine year passages by the changes in fluid flow in the xylum. You know, when the tree goes dorm it. There seems to be some they can detect that leaf sets and flower sets can trigger that because that you'll see more fluid flow. But what we don't know is how do they remember what year it is?
M 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 was opposes to me, this is January. 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 Breod fourteen was expected
to come out the following year, they came out. So for those cicadas, they thought seventeen years had passed even though they had two leaf sets that 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 details into a question from several listeners, A first time question asker David Oronoff, 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 emerged 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. 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 cicada d if 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 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 Joeanne White. It talked about this between thirteen year scades of seventeen year cicadas, and it said what stage of growth they should be at each year. And I said, okay, what stage should they be at? And then we got shovels and went out
and dug up cicadas. And the cicadas were bigger they should have been. So what that meant to me was they're going to come out four years early. And they came out, oh and massive numbers. It was mind boggling.
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 they started coming out. They were coming out. We found shells all over the place. Who 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've remember this is out seventeen years later.
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, Patron David Ordinoff asks, are we looking at dwindling populations? So what kind of head count are we talking?
It's sort of It's interesting. In nineteen nineteen, headlines and newspapers around the country talked about brood ten's emerging. It's probably on its way out. There's concern about it's going extinct. As crazy as that sounds, it's happened Brood eleven, which emerged in massive numbers in sixteen ninety nine just outside of Boston. What extinct in nineteen fifty four.
Wow.
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 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, 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.
Us ologites do your thing Cicada Safari app. 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 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 as cicada as it goes. I've got probably twenty thousand pictures of this.
Now.
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 to the opposite extreme but still is but still fun, is when the numbers are really big and they're screaming, and it is just 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 screwed up for the first couple of minutes. At the link in the show notes, you will find the app Cicada Safari, and you can help Jeans Lab track these suckers. 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. Also linked is aliward dot com slash smologies, which has dozens more kids safe and shorter episodes you can blaze through and thank you Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio for editing those and says we like to keep
things small around here. The rest of the credits are in the show notes, and if you stick around until the end of the episode, you know that I give you a piece of advice. And this piece of advice is that if you love bugs and you love taking pictures of them, you might want to ask it grown up. Maybe if your next birthday for like a little macro lens that you can clip on to a phone or an iPad. You can take up close pictures and bugs. Even the smallest patch of dirt becomes fascinating with that.
But you can also just get up close with any kind of camera and check out and see what's under leaves, what's on the underside of a branch. There's so many bugs hanging out everywhere, and you'd be surprised. You can go on a bug safari with the smallest little patch of lawn, so enjoy. I love doing that. I'll sit in the garden. I'll just be like, who's out here? Boom? I got ten new friends in a second. All right, bye bye, so alergy slogy.
Thoutin.
Hi. I'm Stephen Ray, UNISEEF Ambassador. What's next on your bucket list? Imagine adding something extraordinary to your list and changing a child's life. Join me in leaving a gift in your will to UNICEF and help bring safe water, education and hope to children across the world. Visit uniseev dot I e forward slash bucket to receive your free bucket list journal or called zero one eight seven eight three thousand. Thank you,