Rise of the Cicadas, Part 2

We talked about finding their abandoned former exoskeletons after molting, or just finding random body parts, wings, legs, and stuff like that. Here and there, we talked about how cicadas fit into the insect class as a member of the so called true bugs, the Hymiptera, and we had a digression on the etymological history of the word bug in English referred to monsters and scarecrows before it actually referred to insects. We talked about the physical characteristics of cicadas.

They're piercing and sucking mouthparts. They have this needle like mouth called a rostrum, which they used to feed off of Xylum sap from plant roots and then stems in their adult stage. We talked about how they emit their famous song, not by rubbing together wings or legs like some other insects, but with dedicated organs called timbals, these kind of corrugated drumheads on the sides of their bodies that they can buckle and snap back and forth to

make a sound. We of course talked about their reproductive cycle, with an early developmental stage taking place underground where they feed on Xylum from plant roots, and then their emergence as an adult into the air or above where they mate. And then of course after they the females lay eggs with this wonderful knife like ovipositor that they gouge into twigs and soft tree branches to make little canyons for

their eggs to live in. And then finally we talked about the periodical cicadas of North America that we have here and we just recently had a big emergence in our area. The periodical cicadas which emerge not every year everywhere, as most cicadas do, but instead after bizarrely long periods of underground development, so some go thirteen years before emerging, some go seventeen years. And we discussed evolutionary pressures that

could have led to this adaptation. One hypothesis that we talked about, and to be clear, this is not the only one. There are other possible explanations in the mix, and we might try to get into them in a later part of the series. But one hypothesis we talked about is that it prevents local predators and parasitoids from adapting to cicadas as regular prey or host animals, because once they're out, as I've read in multiple places, everything

eats them. Cicadas are nutritious, they have almost nothing in the way of individual defenses, and there are a zillion of them, so it's nature's buffet. But the idea is if you only appear at weird, irregular time intervals, predators can't come to depend on you, and there won't be enough of them to eat all of you when you

do come out. So it's like if you had a buffet that you didn't want too many people eating at so you know, and it was delicious and you had lots of food, but instead you just like were very squirrely about what you're operating hours were.

or sting them. And then maybe if people know a bit more about their morphology, about the piercing and sucking mouthparts rather than the chewing and tearing arrangement some other bugs have, they might ask instead, will Cicada's stab their needle like rostra into my veins and drain all my blood? And yes, one historical newspaper article does discuss this possibility. The short answer is no, no, no, this does not happen.

But it is kind of interesting to explore the way this question keeps coming up over and over again, because it turns out recent generations are not the first to arrive at this question. People have been asking this for a long time. So I was looking for sources on this and I came across an article by an author whose name always fills me with delight when I see it, May Berenbaum. May Barnbaum is an American entomologist affiliated with

the University of Illinois. She has been recently and I think still is editor in chief of PNAS, and we've cross paths with her work a lot on stuff to blow your mind because she has written a lot of science based articles that cover I don't know, our kind of beat like strange and funny questions about insects, but with a scientifically informed perspective. And just one example is I think we did an article of hers that was talking about cases of bugs crawling inside people's bodies, stuff

like that. This particular article was called same Old Cicada Song, and it was published in the magazine American Entomologist in twenty twenty one, related to a big periodical cicada emergence that year, specifically brood Now do we say brood X or brood ten?

as follows the locust plague to reappear this year. You know that's classic headline flair all caps locust plague about insects that once again harm no one. So the article goes on. Mister Gideon B. Smith communicates the following unpleasant bit of entomological news through the National Intelligencer. The locusts or cicada septin decim will appear very extensively this year, occupying probably a larger surface of the country than those of any other year. Now a note about referring to

them as locusts. We talked in the last episode about how, of course cicadas are not locusts. Locusts are a type of swarming grasshopper, and cicadas are not even especially closely related to grasshoppers. They're both insects. But cicadas again are hymiptera. They are the true bugs. But many of the popular sources from the nineteenth century that discuss cicadas do refer to them as locusts or sometimes with other common names

like harvest flies. But locust is very common, and because of course locusts are associated with threats to crops, I think this sort of bleeds over that, like calling incorrectly calling cicada's locusts bleeds over into this idea that cicadas themselves are a threat to crops, which they are generally.

cicadas are not a threat to humans. And she includes a short quote that was so good I had to go look up the original article in full, and I'm glad I did so. I'm going to summarize a bit and read from some of it here. The article starts off with a vivid description from the point of view of a hypothetical new Yorker. They call them a townsfolk visiting the rural districts of New Jersey, and it describes the sites and sounds associated with a mass emergence of

periodical cicadas. It talks about their sound as similar to a chorus of tree toads, or to quote the shrilling of the railway track when the train is at a

distance and happens to enter a rock cutting. It describes going on a ramble through the woods, seeing characteristic holes in the ground as if someone had been stabbing the ground with a walking stick, especially near the roots of oaks, chestnut, cottonwood, and maple trees, and then finding leftover shells from cicada moltz clutching onto the lower branches of trees like festoons. And then I'm going to read a paragraph from the

article here. The author writes, quote, pretty soon one of these peculiar creatures will be found, having just freed itself from the grim, uncouth shape it has borne for so many years. The long, transparent double pair of wings have been shaken out from two limp close packed masses into their full expanse of brittle pinions. The body takes a darker tint, and the red eyes that distinguished this harvest fly gleam brightly. The insect is fully prepared for its apotheosis.

It knows exactly what to do, and before its wings can bear it, it begins to travel up the trunk of any tree nearby to join the frivolous band of its fellows that are making the upper air trimble with their love notes. You know, theaper, the newspaper reporting style was different back then.

from the article. It says, since the larva lives by sucking the juices from roots, and the fly has a large and strong sucking tube, there seems no reason why this locust, as we call it, should not divert its attention from the juices of plants to the red juices of animals and men like the just like the large horse flies before mentioned. Indeed, just as the small and

maddening mosquito itself. It seems a mere piece of luck, perhaps the result of their slow flight, or some arrangement of their sucking tubes, their defective digestive their defective digestive system, or even the fact that the ancestors of the present harvest fly have been invariably well conducted, that the Jerseymen of this year still exists in life instead of being reduced to a thoroughly pumped frame of flesh. Nothing short

of plate armor would have saved him. Or it may be that the extraordinary parsimony of nature which leads her to give the poor harvest fly, after seventeen or thirteen years of underground existence, only a few weeks in which to buzz in love and deposit the connubial egg. It may be the scantness of their allowance of paradise which

saves New Jersey from periodical depopulation. For if it were not for one or more of these counteracting causes, imagine the result of an appetite for blood aroused in the horny breasts of these gigantic horseflies. Instead of flying with comparatively harmless results about the tops of the trees, they would descend upon the helpless jerseyman and drive him forth, if it be possible to make that distinction with a

jerseyman to a foreign climb. Love the dig at New Jersey residents at the end there.

would depopulate all of New Jersey every thirteen years. I'm not quite sure exactly what this author is trying to respond to with this elaborate scenario, but either way, I love it. But in any case, it is It certainly is the case that people are concerned about the impact of cicadas, both on plants and on people. Whether or not they think, you know, people are actually going to be drained of their blood, they do at least think that cicadas are going to bite and sting them. So

Barenbaum finds more articles in the Times. The next one is once again seventeen years after this last one, so this would be in May eighteen ninety four, and it debunks what appear to be several common misconceptions banging around at the period. In the period, one is something we talked about in part one that you brought up, rob, the idea of prognostication via cicada wings that, like the wa means that a war is going to happen, though that's not really about cicadas, you know, it's just a

general superstition, so you know, the article attempts to address that. However, the second misconception addressed is the idea that the cicada can bite or sting, which the author says is not true.

It's like painting it in a very rosy picture. Now, something that people do wonder they're armed with this knowledge, like Okay, yeah, they don't have a stinger, they don't have biting mouth parts. Could they stab you with the beak if you threatened them? I've turned up a mixed

collection of answers on this. For example, I found an older book by the Field Museum entomologist William Josiah Gerhard, published in nineteen twenty three called The Periodical Cicada, in which Gearhard addresses these concerns by saying, quote, under favorable conditions, this insect could readily pierce the human skin by means of its beak, but apparently it rarely or never attempts to protect itself in such a manner.

The way I would think think about it is like if you are handling a cicada, like it does have a hard exoskeleton, in some parts of that exoskeleton can be kind of pokey. So it's conceivable that one of these pokey parts could give you a little scratch or a poke, but it's not going to get you like

other insects would. So even though it seems quite clear that the periodical cicadas of North America do not bite or sting, and any kind of poke you got from them, you would really have to be like sort of go in for it by handling them intentionally, and even then it seems like it would probably be accidental. There's just

not really anything to worry about. But I think these questions are going to keep coming up because one of the themes of me May Berenbaum's article is how writing about cicadas seems to be in a constant struggle to deal with myths and misconceptions that arise perpetually again and again.

She quotes another article from The New York Times from nineteen thirty six by Donald Peaty, which calls the periodical cicada the most misunderstood insect on our continent and talks about how it's necessary for the federal government to issue bulletins to people in the eastern United States to quell the misconceptions. Pd writs, quote and people may at last learn that the cicada does not eat crops, does not sting babies. No authentic case of baby stinging has come

to hand or invade gardens. But despite the fact that people with knowledge have been debunking this for over one hundred years, it never sticks. And she cites example after example of these articles over time over the decades, responding to reader concerns that cicadas are the same thing as locusts, that they eat crops in foliage, that they bite or sting people, especially children, And they don't do that. I mean they it's not that they can never cause any

harm to plants. They can when they lay their eggs in the you know, the young the greenwood of some plants that can sort of kill some of the tips of stems, but they're just generally not that harmful to plants. They certainly don't eat crops, and that they don't hurt people. And I was thinking about this, about these recurring misconceptions about the periodical cicadas. Of course, there are misconceptions about

all kinds of living creatures. We talk about talk about them on the show all the time, but it just seems they are especially prevalent about cicadas. Every time there is a new, local brewed emergence, people are baffled anew and prone to the same superstitions that we believed in

last time. And this struck me as very interesting because I started to think it's almost as if the periodical cicadas are preventing us from adapting to them in the same way and by the same method that they prevent predators and parasitoids from adapting to them by appearing in different areas on these staggered time schedules. Do you know what I mean?

news coverage every every so often. Yeah, so we have time to sort of forget and then and then to sort of grow hungry for new sensationalist headlines, which we still have, you know, as we discussed in the last episode that we did on cicadas, you know, we still have these kind of outrageous news coverage bits that occur that seem to even if they don't double down on the misinformation aspect of it, they kind of like get into the gleeful, ooh bugs aspect of it that is

almost kind of like the first step in getting to a they might suck my blood.

And then there's like even weirder stuff.

from Lancaster, Wisconsin. And what's interesting here is he includes full or most of the either the entirety or most of the article, and most of it seems to be rather logical, stressing that cicadas are only a threat to tree branches, you know, basically doing a good job of laying out the science. But then at the very end, it's like they felt like, well, we have to acknowledge the superstition in a little bit, so they include this last bit quote the insect has no sting and does

not seem to have the power to bite. It is possible then, that in exceedingly rare cases, it has attempted and succeeded in depositing an egg in the skull of a human being. So you know, once you add that at the end, if you're like, but there's still there's a non zero chance it could lay an egg in your skull, Like, it kind of undoes all that great work you just did at dispelling the superstition.

but really do not worry about it. These creatures have an agenda, and that agenda does not include sucking your blood, destroying your crops, landing Well, they may land on your baby, but they don't care about your baby, and they're definitely not interested in laying eggs and skulls.

don't have to worry about that. But they might possibly pee on you and the p The nature of the cicada urination is quite alarming actually if you see it, because it doesn't look like what you imagine insect urination would be, and in fact it's not very consistent with what pre existing models before just recently would have predicted of an insect like them. Because cicadas are insects and they are xylum feeders. They live by sucking xylum from

plants and creatures with these characteristics. The little insects and xylum feeders were pretty much thought to excrete by creating little droplets that they shake off essentially, And this is due to how fluid dynamics work at small scales. You know, We've talked about this a lot on the show because

of that essay. I love bringing up the on being the right size, you know, or like the way that your body interacts with water is very different if you are very small, Like the surface tension of water becomes a much more powerful and dangerous force to deal with in everyday life if you're very small. And it's also true that water flows differently at very small scales. So you know, larger mammals tend to produce a kind of

stream of urine that goes out of the body. But when you get down to smaller and smaller animals, what tends to happen is that they just kind of like do a weak, little kind of emission of droplets that they might shake off of the body somehow. But I was reading about new research published just this year in March twenty twenty four in p and As by L. Eoj Chalita and M. Sad Bombla, and the paper was called Unifying Fluidic Excretion across life from Cicadas to Elephants.

And so the authors write in their abstract, can insects weighing mirror grams challenge our current understanding of fluid dynamics in urination jetting fluids like the larger their larger mammalian counterparts. And the answer is yes, Yes, Insects can create jets just like mammals do. You don't often see it, but cicadas can do this. And they got some video footage of this, and they studied how the water, how the

excretion flows out of the cicadas. I would recommend looking up video of cicadas peeing because, as I said earlier, it's it looks alarming.

flows differently, liquids flow differently at smaller scales. But they say, quote, our findings defied this paradigm by demonstrating that cicadas weighing just two grams possess the capability for jetting fluids through remarkably small orifices. Using dimensional analysis, we introduce a unifying fluid dynamic scaling framework that accommodates a broad range of taxa, from surface tension dominated insects to inertia and gravity reliant mammals.

And then they go on to say, as we often get in studies like this, they go on to say, you know, this could be useful in designing better nozzles for you know, like tiny robots and machines that need

to jet things out at a micro scale. So maybe one day, maybe one day, some medical technology, like a little robot that swims inside your body and jets around, you know, needs to like squirt a jet of something inside your body, will be based on the design of a cicada's weird, kind of alarming urination.

his career. I believe he was a USDA researcher, and I was reading about him in the Legacy of Charles Marlott and Efforts to Limit Plant Pest Invasions by Leibhold et al. Published in the journal American Entomologist in twenty sixteen. So he's a pretty interesting fellow. A lot of his work for the USDA centered around the control of agricultural

pest insects, with a focus on invasive threats. The article mentions that in nineteen oh one and nineteen oh two Marlott and his wife went on honeymoon in China in Japan, which again nineteen oh one.

big problem at this point in California. But it was originally native to Siberia, northeast China, and I believe parts of the Korean Peninsula. I believe it has since spread to various places, not just you know, to to North America. But so anyway, this this vacation, this honeymoon, gave him a chance to investigate this organism's natural environment, to make note of its natural predators, and even bring back specimens, and all of this at his own personal expense. That's

just how devoted an entomologist he was. And this kind of line of work would ultimately lead to the introduction of the Italian ladybird beetle or lady bug, though it's not a true bug, the particular species being Chillcorus similis. This is the red spotted ladybird, so Charles Marlott would be the individual to orchestrate it being introduced to North America in order to combat the San Jose scale threat.

we do not engage in willy nilly. There are all sorts of things that can go wrong and do go wrong when we attempt to write a previous wrong.

This experience no doubt shaped Marlott's thinking and perhaps contributed to his strong concern about the dangers of accidentally importing species from overseas. So again, his wife seemingly caught some sort of a pathogen, and Marlott his work dealt with agricultural pests. But you could see how this could intensify his already pre existing concern about pest organisms from other

ecosystems being introduced into North America. And indeed, Marlott became very concerned about the threat of invasive organisms that had already entered the US through soil and trade, as well as the potential for future invasive exposures. He was key in urging Congress to enact plant quarantine legislation to help deal with this threat, and I was The article gets into it here. It was a pretty polarizing topic because on one hand, you had plenty of people who are

already like thinkers on this. You know, they could point directly at problems with invasive pests in agriculture in North America, like with the San Jose scale, and say, yeah, this is terrible. We need to combat this and figure out ways to prevent it from happening. But on the other hand, you had individuals who were saying, no, no, no, no,

you can't stand in the way of free trade. You can't get in the way of American horticulture because it depends on introducing plant species from around the world, and you just need to stand back and let us do it. And so we end up with another really interesting and very newsy and political situation that occurs. And none of this involves cicadas, but I thought it was too fascinating. It all concerns Marlin, so I do want to go

into it, at least briefly. Here Basically, what happens is in the year nineteen oh nine, you have a number of cherry trees, some two thousand cherry trees that are gifted from Japan to the United States. It's a gift that involved. Basically, there's kind of like a back and forth between a prominent Japanese chemist of the time, doctor Takamini Jokichi, and the first lady of the time Hell

and heron taft. So you know, she'd expressed interest in the cherry trees of Japan, and the good doctor Here's like, well, yeah, I've got some connections here, and lo and behold, now we get a state offering of two thousand cherry trees. They are sent on their way across the ocean, and then they're put on a train and travel across the continent to Washington, d c. M. And this is where Marlott enters the picture, because a USDA team led by him ends up inspecting the trees and he's like, instantly

he pulls a total ripley on all of this. He's like, no, no, no, no, you cannot do this, Like we just checked. These things are infested, they have scale insects, they have root gall What we need to do is just burn them all.

national plant quarantine law. So thirty nine states had already passed such laws, but with this they were able to roll out the Plant Quarantine Act of nineteen twelve, which went into effect August twentieth, nineteen twelve, and the establishment of the Federal Horticultural Board, and also you know future plant quarantine efforts, so you know, they're able to spin it off and do some additional good, you know, broader

good outside of you know, state offerings of gifts. And there's even I guess a happy ending to the whole cherry tree gift tobacco here as well, because Japan ended up offering replacements. These were fumigated before shipment, and ultimately the first lady and the wife of the jap these ambassador like oversaw the planting of these trees, and the Washington d c. Cherry trees remain in iconic aspect of the nation's capital. Anyway, none of that involves cicadas, but

it all involves Charles Lester Marlott. So I thought we'd mention it. But if invasive pests were Charles Lester Marlott's hated foes, his best friends, his most beloved insects were, without a doubt, periodical cicadas. He studied them, immensely, published about them. He loved them so much that when he had a house built in Washington, d C. This mansion, this big brick mansion, he had cicadas carved into various features of the home. Huh. And the paper here includes

some images. I've included them here for you to look at, Joe. This home apparently still is still around it currently, I believe houses the Institute of World Politics. I intentionally did not look them up. I don't know what their world politics happened to be, and I'm going to remain blissfully ignorant of whatever they are. But it is my understanding that the cicadas are still there, like on the banisters of the staircases and so forth.

his work was just foundational. Gene Kritsky, of course, cites him numerous times in a Tale of Two Broods, saying quote, he designated the seventeen year cicadas that emerged in eighteen ninety three as brood one. The cicadas that emerged in eighteen ninety four were called brood two. The cicadas emerging in eighteen ninety five were to be called brood three,

and so on. And then he adds for just to drive everything at home, he says, quote, Marlott's system greatly reduced the confusion surrounding the study of periodical cicadas, and it has stood the test of time. It was particularly helpful in areas where there were overlapping broods, enabling observers to determine precisely where and when cicadas would again emerge.

sometime after eighteen seventy. So you know that there have been changes. And also it does drive home that you know, even though when these broods emerge, it is just overwhelming and it just seems like they're a juggernaut that can't be stopped. They are vulnerable, you know, there are you know, changes to their environment can impact them and they can

just go away forever. Now, you know, we can't go into everything like again, I'll just summarize by saying Marlott was the man of his time in laying out much of the foundational work for our understanding of periodical cicadas. But of course, given the time he was active, and given just the pervasive superstitions around cicadas, he of course also had to do a little myth busting here and there concerning their you know, consumption of flesh and so forth.

So here's one more quote from gene Kritsky's A Tale of Two Broods quote. Reports of periodical cicadas attempting to lay eggs in humans popped up in several newspapers during the nineteenth century. Marlott settled the question, writing, with every general outbreak of this insect our associated accounts in local papers of its stinging human beings, the sting often resulting, it is stated more or less seriously to the person stung.

So far as investigation of the reports have been possible, they have proved to be either utterly without fandebt foundation or much exaggerated. So nothing that nothing that we haven't already covered, and that that scientists aren't having to again reiterate for the public. But it's it's interesting that, yeah, here's this guy who did so much work on cicadas, but he would also have to chime in and just say no, no, no, they are not going to drink

your blood. They're not going to lay eggs in your brain. They ultimately don't care about you. You are not part of the cicada agenda. All right, Well, we're going to go ahead and close out this episode right there, but we're going to return to the world of cicadas in the next episode. There's still a lot we didn't get to discuss. There are whole area's mythological yet to be

to be discussed here on the show. We haven't really gotten into the culinary question of cicadas, so there's a lot to discuss, and of course in the meantime, we would love to hear from everyone out there. You undoubtedly have experiences with cicadas, annual or periodical, and we would like to hear about them. Do you fancy yourself a cicada photographer? Oh, we'll send your photos. We will look at them. Do you have any thoughts on cicada urination? Yes,

we want to know about that as well. And if you have any second, third, fourth, fifth hand accounts of cicada's biting people, sucking blood, or laying eggs and the skull, yes, right in with that as well. We will of course

discuss that in future episodes of Listener. Made just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes publishing on Tuesdays and Thursdays, listener mail on Monday's short form episode on Wednesdays and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.