Speaker 1: Get value you can't argue with at Tesco with their
Speaker 1: amazing club card prices. Serve up something special with our
Speaker 1: finest meal deal for two starring one main, two sides
Speaker 1: and dessert for only sixteen euro like succulent Board be
Speaker 1: approved Virus Shang the Strip loin Steaks with pepper corn
Speaker 1: butter or Delicious Virus Chicken Parmesana served with creamy potato
Speaker 1: gritam and our mix of rainbow root vegetables. And enjoy
Speaker 1: Goozillionaire or salted caramel cheesecake. Can't argue with that shop
Speaker 1: in store or online Tesco. Every Little helps available in
Speaker 1: most doores, prices very and express.
Speaker 2: Do you know what real power is? It's knowing you're
Speaker 2: on the same rate for energy all day, every day
Speaker 2: with a smart all day plan from Board Gosh Energy,
Speaker 2: save up to eight hundred and eighty euro on dual
Speaker 2: fuel plus get a two hundred and thirty five euro
Speaker 2: welcome bonus switch today at Boardgosh Energy, dot Ie Board
Speaker 2: Gosh Energy. Know your Power.
Speaker 3: Estimation Annuel bill of twenty six hundred and twenty nine
Speaker 3: euro new customers only Thurship centis kent off Smart all
Speaker 3: Day Electricity unitrates in twenty nine percent of gas us.
Speaker 3: See porcosh Energy dot E for fullties and ceas Oh hey.
Speaker 4: It's your friend's older sister who taught you to swear
Speaker 4: in French. Ali ward back with an episode. I have
Speaker 4: waited most of my life for no exaggeration. When I
Speaker 4: first came up with ologies as a concept, it was
Speaker 4: partly just to drink an expert into talking to me
Speaker 4: about cicadas. If this weren't the thirteenth month of a
Speaker 4: global pandemic, I would have recorded this in an Ohio
Speaker 4: backyard instead of over the internet. I would have hitchhiked
Speaker 4: there in a bug costume, holding a brood ten or
Speaker 4: bust sign, and I would have meant it. So this
Speaker 4: is the spring that bug lovers have waited seventeen years for.
Speaker 4: But before we cover ourselves in discarded exoskeletons, let's say
Speaker 4: some thanks to the backbone of the show. Patrons, thank
Speaker 4: you so much. You can submit questions to Theologists by
Speaker 4: joining patreon dot com slash ologies. It costs as little
Speaker 4: is twenty five cents an episode, Folks one dollar a month.
Speaker 4: My heart is not expensive. You can also support the
Speaker 4: show just by texting links of episodes to your neighbors
Speaker 4: or friends or enemies if you'd like, on your podcast
Speaker 4: app or you know. You can leave a review if
Speaker 4: you like. I have read every review ever left, including
Speaker 4: this one this week by Neutral Viking, who said I
Speaker 4: applied to a PhD program because of Ologies. They say.
Speaker 4: I started listening to Ologies in twenty nineteen, during one
Speaker 4: of the lowest points of my life. I had never
Speaker 4: been one for science, but decided to give the podcast
Speaker 4: a shot after a friend recommended it to me. Maybe
Speaker 4: it will be a good distraction, I thought. Half a
Speaker 4: dozen episodes later, I realized how much I actually loved science,
Speaker 4: but never had it presented in a way that I
Speaker 4: connected with because of Ologies. I went back to school
Speaker 4: one day hope to study volcanos on other planets. Neutral Viking, Hell, yes,
Speaker 4: astro volcanology. That episode is all yours. Okay, so leave
Speaker 4: one see if I read it next week, I dare you. Okay,
Speaker 4: let's get to cicadology. Cicada in Latin means tree cricket,
Speaker 4: but your Appalachian friends may call them jarflies. I just
Speaker 4: found out I have only seen a cicada in the
Speaker 4: wild maybe three times in my life. And each time
Speaker 4: I crowded around it and gasped and took pictures like
Speaker 4: an American at the Eiffel Tower. I have never even
Speaker 4: seen a periodical cicada, the ones that emerge in the
Speaker 4: trillions every thirteen or seventeen years in the US, But
Speaker 4: at their last emergence in two thousand and four, I
Speaker 4: was so envious. So this year we're getting ahead of
Speaker 4: their emergence. After the Forest Entomology episode last October, I
Speaker 4: asked Kadubs the hiking scientist aka doctor Kristen Wickert, for
Speaker 4: a cicada hookup, and she started an email thread full
Speaker 4: of my secret internet science crushes, including Dan mosguy who
Speaker 4: runs cicadamania dot com What's up Dan? And this ologist
Speaker 4: who is the authority on periodical cicadas. He hails from
Speaker 4: North Dakota. He got his bachelor's in biology from Indiana
Speaker 4: University and his masters and PhD in entomology from the
Speaker 4: University of Illinois. He's now a professor and the dean
Speaker 4: of Behavioral and Natural Sciences at Mount Saint Joseph University
Speaker 4: in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the editor of American Entomologist. He's
Speaker 4: written multiple bug books and authored scores of papers on insects.
Speaker 4: He is the cicada guy, so he typically appears in
Speaker 4: the news sometimes maybe you've seen him in all khaki
Speaker 4: field gear and a tan sun hat, and he has
Speaker 4: a gentle silver beard with kind of a tidy upturned mustache,
Speaker 4: like a friendly smile. And we hopped on a call
Speaker 4: to record, and I just screwed it up so bad,
Speaker 4: Like immediately I dropped off the connection and I could
Speaker 4: not log back in, and there were all these tech hiccups.
Speaker 4: So I texted our wonderful assistant scheduler, Noel Dilworth. I said, hey,
Speaker 4: I sent him a new link, but he hasn't shown up,
Speaker 4: but I hope he's not mad. And then I got
Speaker 4: the reply, I am not distressed, And I had texted
Speaker 4: him that instead of Noell. So, between wanting to do
Speaker 4: this episode for seventeen years and then talking to the
Speaker 4: world expert in it and texting him about him, my
Speaker 4: level of body sweat was clinically dangerous, but regardless, we
Speaker 4: figured it out. We got on the line to ch
Speaker 4: about life cycles and ghostly remains, cicada chasing, insect cuisine,
Speaker 4: the decibel levels of our springtime friends, and what you
Speaker 4: should do if you see a cicada, the app Cicada Safari,
Speaker 4: their cultural and pop cultural influence and what they are
Speaker 4: doing underground for nearly two decades while we missed them
Speaker 4: with icon legend and cicadologist doctor Jean Kritsky, who may
Speaker 4: or may not already be mad at me? Are you
Speaker 4: mad at me?
Speaker 5: Why?
Speaker 4: I felt so mad?
Speaker 1: I was like, oh.
Speaker 4: No, maybe he just left forever. I was mortified when
Speaker 4: I realized that I went to you but secrets out.
Speaker 4: I'm a human being, that's all right, it's all my
Speaker 4: all right, down to business.
Speaker 5: I'm Jeene Kritzky and I use he him.
Speaker 4: And now you are, from what I can understand, a cicadologist.
Speaker 4: Do you ever call yourself that?
Speaker 5: I consider myself an entomologist. Although I work with cicadas,
Speaker 5: I also do a lot of work with honeybees.
Speaker 4: Okay. For more on his bee work, you can start
Speaker 4: with the Tears of Ray bee Keeping in Ancient Egypt.
Speaker 4: And while you're buying his book, he has a new
Speaker 4: book that came out this week. It's called Periodical Cicadas,
Speaker 4: the Brood ten Edition and it's thirteen bucks with a paperback.
Speaker 4: The link is in the show notes treat yourself, get it.
Speaker 4: He literally wrote the book on these gorgeously loud, mysterious creatures.
Speaker 4: So can you tell me a little bit about what
Speaker 4: we can expect this year from the cicada population in
Speaker 4: the United States.
Speaker 5: Sure, this year we're going to experience an emergence of
Speaker 5: brood ten. I say brood ten. That's capital B with
Speaker 5: the Roman numeral for ten, which is an X, and
Speaker 5: so some people that I want to make a little
Speaker 5: sexier than it really is brood x. But it's brood ten.
Speaker 5: And we're already beginning to see signs of it here
Speaker 5: in the Midwest. People are reporting lots of moles in
Speaker 5: their yards, mounds from where the moles have been feeding
Speaker 5: because the cicada nymphs are right now about four to
Speaker 5: six inches below the surface. And we'll start seeing our
Speaker 5: first sign of cicadas in late April after a big,
Speaker 5: heavy rain. Some of the cicado, especially the soil is
Speaker 5: a very heavy clay soil. They'll actually extend their tunnels
Speaker 5: above ground, and they're called chimneys or turrets firm similar
Speaker 5: to what grayfish will sometimes do.
Speaker 4: News flash to me that crowdads aka crayfish emerge sometimes
Speaker 4: out of tall, lumpy turrets they build. And also I
Speaker 4: googled cicada tunnels and one image taken under a deck
Speaker 4: look like a damn coral reef, or like big tall
Speaker 4: stacks of dirty poker chips, or like the tallest birthday
Speaker 4: cake ever, out of which a beautiful ghoul pops up
Speaker 4: to say happy seventeen year's Day, surprise.
Speaker 5: And they'll crawl way to the top of these things.
Speaker 5: They get as large as a twelve inches high, and
Speaker 5: then as the water seeps down through the soil and
Speaker 5: gets out of the tunnel, they move back down. But
Speaker 5: you'll see these little chimneys that'll be under things like
Speaker 5: people's decks, or under the large overhang of a roof line,
Speaker 5: for example, or an outbuilding of some kind. I've even
Speaker 5: seen them under pallets. So people but have a wooden
Speaker 5: palate that's not solid wood but gets nice and super wet,
Speaker 5: and you lift it up in They' filled with these
Speaker 5: little chimneys underneath. But that's the first sign that we'll see.
Speaker 5: That'll be usually this in late April, we could see,
Speaker 5: especially in some of the southern States and northern Georgia,
Speaker 5: for example, we could see a few cicadas emerging around
Speaker 5: the first of May. They come out of the soil
Speaker 5: when the soil temperature reaches sixty four degrees fahrenheit and
Speaker 5: then specific well, these are cicadas, you know. They they
Speaker 5: got things to do. They got to come out in
Speaker 5: seventeen years. They keep track of numbers and what have you.
Speaker 5: Once you hit that temperature for sixty four degrees farenheit
Speaker 5: and then you have a really nice soaking rain that
Speaker 5: just sort of saturates everything, then they really pop. I mean,
Speaker 5: it's just it's amazing. The highest density I've ever seen
Speaker 5: was three hundred and fifty six per square yard. Wow,
Speaker 5: and that was over the course of about a two
Speaker 5: week period. They came up. But the first even they
Speaker 5: come up. By the they come up by the hundreds
Speaker 5: and thousands. Some of the things I've noticed. I remember
Speaker 5: the first time I experienced this one evening, I thought
Speaker 5: it was I thought it had to go in because
Speaker 5: it's starting to rain, and what it was with the
Speaker 5: cicada and it was falling from the trees, a bubby
Speaker 5: landing on the dried leaves, and it just sounded like
Speaker 5: a heavy rainstorm. I remember seeing a yard where so
Speaker 5: many cicades were crawling it blades of grass. The grass
Speaker 5: looked like it was in a heavy wind, which is
Speaker 5: sort of like moving around. It's really quite amazing. And
Speaker 5: then the weirdest one. You know, I do a lot
Speaker 5: of work in cemeteries, and so I've been in cemeteries.
Speaker 5: When these things start crawling out of the ground, it's
Speaker 5: it's almost like a scene from some kind of a
Speaker 5: B fifties movie, horror movie. You will these things, I'm
Speaker 5: crawling out of the ground. They are under the ground.
Speaker 4: They're under the ground.
Speaker 5: If there was as much larger you could probably have
Speaker 5: a really good sci fi movie.
Speaker 4: When they leave those exuvia behind, they look kind of
Speaker 4: like ghosts that have been frozen.
Speaker 5: To me, it does. It's a it's a hollow shell
Speaker 5: reminder of what was. There was an article I remember
Speaker 5: reading from the early nineteenth century talking about the only
Speaker 5: the cicadas have left. I they called them locus at
Speaker 5: the time. The cicadas have left, and all we see
Speaker 5: are their ghostly reminders.
Speaker 4: Oh that's beautiful. I was going to ask this if
Speaker 4: it ever kind of gets your goat that they're called
Speaker 4: locusts because a locust is a type of like grasshopper morph.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, Cicadas are insects have belonged to the sorry
Speaker 5: to get technical, let we love it, the insect order hemipter,
Speaker 5: which are sucking insects like bedbugs and stink bugs and
Speaker 5: leaf hoppers and aphids and so on. They belong to
Speaker 5: the suborder that includes the tree hoppers and leaf hoppers
Speaker 5: what have you. They have sucking mouth parts in the
Speaker 5: case of the periodical skates, red eyes, orange veined wings,
Speaker 5: black body as adults, whereas locusts, on the other hand,
Speaker 5: are essentially a form of grasshopper. It's really interesting the
Speaker 5: very first time they were seen, and you know, our
Speaker 5: history of these things goes back to sixteen thirty four.
Speaker 5: Oh dang, that's when William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth Colony,
Speaker 5: reported them in his History of the Colony. And he
Speaker 5: actually may have gotten the date wrong. He actually at
Speaker 5: the top of the page wrote sixteen thirty three. And
Speaker 5: then what he wrote, which is kind of neat, he
Speaker 5: wrote to and in the spring before, especially all the
Speaker 5: month of May, there was such a great quantity of
Speaker 5: a great sort of flies, like for bigness to wasps
Speaker 5: or bumblebees, which came out of holes in the ground
Speaker 5: and replenished all the woods, and ate the green things,
Speaker 5: and made such a constant yelling noise as made all
Speaker 5: the woods ring of them and ready to death the hearers.
Speaker 5: They have not, by the English been heard or seen before.
Speaker 5: Orse sits now. The reason I say he had the
Speaker 5: date wrong is it turns out sixteen thirty three there
Speaker 5: is not a brood of cicadas that it would emerge
Speaker 5: if you go back in time in sixteen thirty three today.
Speaker 4: So you had to kind of backtrack and figure out
Speaker 4: okay minus seventeen minus thirteen.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it but creditors that there were cicadas that should
Speaker 5: have emerged the following year in sixteen thirty four. And
Speaker 5: it turns out he didn't write that passage in that
Speaker 5: that same year. He did it a few years later,
Speaker 5: so he might have gotten the notes mixed up or
Speaker 5: what have you. And so I think he probably got
Speaker 5: the date wrong. But they called them flies until the
Speaker 5: early eighteenth century.
Speaker 4: Well, you know that was going to be one of
Speaker 4: my questions because they're in Hymiptera, But are there a
Speaker 4: lot of Jmiptera bugs that have the kind of robust
Speaker 4: wings that they do.
Speaker 5: Oh, there are a lot of numbers. A lot of
Speaker 5: cicadas do it. And then they're the lantern flies. They
Speaker 5: have large wings as well, so there are some.
Speaker 4: I was trying so hard to impress him by knowing
Speaker 4: what a hymiptera is. It means half wing, and I
Speaker 4: did not realize cicadas were among them.
Speaker 5: Okay, and there are some strong flyers, not as strong
Speaker 5: as dragonflies per se. But some of the Regivians have
Speaker 5: our strong flyers as well. Some of us are bumbling
Speaker 5: along it. Periodical skadis. If you've seen them, they don't
Speaker 5: look like they're savvy insects. I mean, they're sort of
Speaker 5: tumbling around, and I've seen them get picked off by birds.
Speaker 5: You know. They just seem very clumsy at times.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, what's the difference between a periodical cicada that
Speaker 4: might come out every seventeen years like breuten or thirteen
Speaker 4: years and annual cicadas.
Speaker 5: They belong to different genera, But if you want to
Speaker 5: look at it, if you look at them, you'll find
Speaker 5: that the annual cicadas sometimes some are called dog day
Speaker 5: cicadas because they come on the dog days of summer.
Speaker 5: They're much larger their head is more flat, their eyes
Speaker 5: or are black, sometimes green. Many of them are black
Speaker 5: with brown markings, are black with green markings that were camouflaged.
Speaker 5: And as I say, they're about a half inch to
Speaker 5: an inch larger than the periodicals.
Speaker 4: So the annual ones come out in the heat of
Speaker 4: summer every year, and although they are more chunk, you
Speaker 4: won't see their camouflaged bods as readily, and you will
Speaker 4: not witness anything near the numbers of the periodical cicada.
Speaker 4: The annual ones are just all in all more low.
Speaker 5: Key and behaviorally, they are much more cryptic. They look
Speaker 5: like little camouflage insects. And if you stand under a tree,
Speaker 5: let's say in late August, and hear the annual cicadas
Speaker 5: singing away, you can stare at them and stare at
Speaker 5: that tree, and you can't see them, because, yeah, their
Speaker 5: whole survival strategy is totally different. It's to be cryptic.
Speaker 5: And when the male starts singing, of course he then
Speaker 5: is very vulnerable to a bird if the bird can
Speaker 5: find it, but he's up in the shadows of the tree.
Speaker 5: A couple of years ago, my wife and I were
Speaker 5: in Greece and we heard cicadas in the trees, and
Speaker 5: we must have looked for twenty five minutes to find
Speaker 5: a couple of them. We were less than three feet away,
Speaker 5: but it was really hard to pick them out. But
Speaker 5: on the other hand, the periodical skater, they're in your face. Yeah,
Speaker 5: it's not so much that you need to look for them.
Speaker 5: It's like where can you look that they're not present
Speaker 5: to And they come out in big numbers.
Speaker 4: Is that part of their evolutionary strategy is just a
Speaker 4: ton of them at once? How does that work?
Speaker 5: Well, it's works well for them. It's called predator satiation,
Speaker 5: is what we think is happening. They come out in
Speaker 5: these large numbers, you know, and some of the birds
Speaker 5: are major predators of them, but their little crops can't
Speaker 5: hold many more cicadas. And the analogy I like to
Speaker 5: use is imagine walking outside and all of a sudden,
Speaker 5: you see the whole world is inundated with flying Hershey's kisses.
Speaker 5: I'm fond of Hershe's kisses. And you tend to eat
Speaker 5: and eat and eat and eat and eat these, but
Speaker 5: eventually you will get tired of them. And in nineteen
Speaker 5: ninety one and run fourteen emerge, I was over in
Speaker 5: a little Marrimuntain area, a little suburb of Cincinnati. It
Speaker 5: was really kind of cool to watch. I saw this
Speaker 5: dog the first say. They're coming out, snapping out all
Speaker 5: over in the yard. It's just going at him. Five
Speaker 5: days later, go back to see how the emergency is
Speaker 5: going on at some of my test sites, and that
Speaker 5: dog is just lying on the porch, paws folded and
Speaker 5: cicada's walking all around him.
Speaker 4: Does not carry over it. I'm over these things.
Speaker 5: And that's why a lot of people like to collect
Speaker 5: cicadas in cicada years, but not to use this fish
Speaker 5: bait this year, but to use for next year. And
Speaker 5: they'll freeze them. And I've seen people collect ten five
Speaker 5: gallon containers of these things and free them for the
Speaker 5: course of a decade.
Speaker 4: So periodical cicadas are in the genus Magicicata, and they
Speaker 4: make a splash. They are smaller than the annual cicadas,
Speaker 4: but they have such style in the form of blood
Speaker 4: red eyes, and there's billions, maybe trillions of them. In fact,
Speaker 4: their genus looks like magic cicada, but Magi actually comes
Speaker 4: from the Latin for many or just a staggering as load.
Speaker 4: But not from the word magic, okay, but you will
Speaker 4: have a magic spring and summer if you live in Delaware, Illinois, Georgia, Indiana,
Speaker 4: New York, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia,
Speaker 4: West Virginia, Michigan, as well as Washington, DC, and you
Speaker 4: can witness the party. And if you miss it, you're
Speaker 4: going to have to set your calendars for twenty thirty
Speaker 4: eight to see these hordes of beauties. Now, Breod ten
Speaker 4: is the largest group of the seventeen year cicadas. They
Speaker 4: emerged this year, but there are over a dozen seventeen
Speaker 4: year broods and a small handful of thirteen year broods.
Speaker 4: And I'm going to link on my website to a
Speaker 4: US map to see which broods might be in your area. Now,
Speaker 4: elsewhere in the world, you can always gaze at an
Speaker 4: annual cicada. If you have them, you can tell you
Speaker 4: love it if you can find it. But if you
Speaker 4: have periodicals in your area, they're hard to miss because
Speaker 4: they blanket everything. How old were you when you saw
Speaker 4: your first emergence?
Speaker 5: I was pretty old. You thought I was born with
Speaker 5: a cicada year. I'm from North Dakota, so we don't
Speaker 5: have periodical skaters there.
Speaker 4: Oh, you were born in a cicada year, though, that's auspicious.
Speaker 5: Brewed ten year it was nineteen fifty three, and then
Speaker 5: in nineteen seventy I was living in northern Illinois, and
Speaker 5: of course they have Brewod thirteen, they're not Brood ten.
Speaker 5: So I missed that one, and then finally in nineteen
Speaker 5: eighty seven I was able to witness my first brewed
Speaker 5: ten emergence. However, I did a lot of field work
Speaker 5: in nineteen seventy six with Brood twenty three, a thirteen
Speaker 5: year cicada that emerged in eastern Illinois.
Speaker 4: Had you already been studying them previously or was this
Speaker 4: kind of like a chance field work assignment and then
Speaker 4: you started getting into them?
Speaker 5: Well, I became an entomologist in part because of periodical cicadas.
Speaker 5: My undergraduate professor at Indiana University, Frank Young, wonderful man.
Speaker 5: He's deceased now, but in that second week of that
Speaker 5: course and he starts talking about these things, and I thought, whoa, yeah,
Speaker 5: this is just wild. And he was the cicada specialist
Speaker 5: for Indiana, and so I knew within two weeks of
Speaker 5: listening to this man, my life is in bugs. And
Speaker 5: so I went to the University of Illinois, where I
Speaker 5: didn't work on cicadas as my major PhD work, But
Speaker 5: my advisor was also Illinois cicada special doctor Lewis Standard
Speaker 5: and another wonderful guy. Between Lou and Frank, these guys
Speaker 5: love life. My dad he loved life, but he sold insurance. Yeah,
Speaker 5: but these guys just loved coming to the office every day,
Speaker 5: and I found that infectious.
Speaker 4: Jean told me about being in coll and taking on
Speaker 4: a mapping project and researching old letters from eighteen sixty
Speaker 4: three to track down where in the county the brood
Speaker 4: may emerge. Back in the eighteen hundreds, scientists had to
Speaker 4: dispatch grad students on horseback. But in the late nineteen seventies,
Speaker 4: Jane just cracked open a window and let the wind
Speaker 4: through his hair, following his bliss to mud tunnels and
Speaker 4: still wet wings. Yeah, did you get into a Chevy
Speaker 4: nova and just like ramble around the country looking for
Speaker 4: different emergencies.
Speaker 5: You could say that although it wasn't a Chevy nova,
Speaker 5: it was a Chavette.
Speaker 4: Close And can you tell me a little bit about
Speaker 4: what one of the worlds, if not the world's biggest
Speaker 4: authorities on periodical cicadas. What is your job like When
Speaker 4: people ask you, Oh, nice to meet you, Jane, what
Speaker 4: do you do? What are you doing them?
Speaker 5: What? Actually? The cicadas usually won't pay the bills. Okay,
Speaker 5: I'm a dean of Behavioral and Natural Sciences at Mount
Speaker 5: Saint Joseph University, and I'm the longest serving faculty member there.
Speaker 5: But I'm an anemologist who works on that. I'm a
Speaker 5: frustrated historian. And so while I was in Illinois, I
Speaker 5: was able to use the fantastic library resources at Illinois.
Speaker 5: I think it's now the largest state university library in
Speaker 5: the US, and I was able to find mimeographed staple
Speaker 5: papers that had all the USDA records on them. And
Speaker 5: to me, when every time there's an emergency, you make observations,
Speaker 5: you come with hypotheses, But with cicadas, it's not like
Speaker 5: looking in checking every year. You've got seventeen years between
Speaker 5: these emergencies. So I decided to start looking through newspapers,
Speaker 5: any kind of publication I could find for old historic
Speaker 5: records of cicadas. And I'd gathered about seven to eight
Speaker 5: thousand by the time I was done. And then I
Speaker 5: found this is getting back down into the eighties. I
Speaker 5: found a computer program for the Macintosh at the time
Speaker 5: that was primarily used for demographic marketing and where to
Speaker 5: put golf courses, but it had a great mapping program.
Speaker 5: And so I literally took all eight thousand of these
Speaker 5: things and put into it the Phipse code, which is
Speaker 5: a coding based on the alphabetical order of the state
Speaker 5: and in the alphabetical order of the county in that state.
Speaker 5: And then from there I could map out these cicada
Speaker 5: brudes seventeen years apart and see how the patterns changed
Speaker 5: and how we are knowledge built up, and then you
Speaker 5: know where are there areas where we had emergence records
Speaker 5: go back to the beginning and so on.
Speaker 4: Do golf courses, by the way, side note, do golf
Speaker 4: courses see a lot of emergence as well?
Speaker 5: Some do? Yes, Yeah, I've been in several golf at
Speaker 5: several golf courses where there's a decent a cicada emergency,
Speaker 5: especially the ones where they've that are near other areas
Speaker 5: where ciccadoes are heavy. They've just planted some new trees
Speaker 5: and the ends of the fairways along the rough.
Speaker 4: And you know, this is one thing I think that
Speaker 4: still mystifies us. But can you describe a little bit
Speaker 4: of the life cycle. What are they doing that whole time.
Speaker 5: Let's start when the adults emerge from the ground. Okay,
Speaker 5: and that's going to happen here in Cincinnati, somewhere in
Speaker 5: early May. I have a formula that developed a few
Speaker 5: years ago which will allow you to predict when in
Speaker 5: May they should come out within a forty eight hour
Speaker 5: plus or minus forty hour period. But we need to
Speaker 5: have all the April temperatures that do that. So around
Speaker 5: the twenty fifth of April, I take the long range
Speaker 5: forecast that I calculated when the cicada should come out,
Speaker 5: so that'll be here in around the twelfth of the
Speaker 5: fifteenth of May. You might see them a week earlier
Speaker 5: in Georgia because of being further south. But what will
Speaker 5: happen is I mentioned the soil will be sixty four
Speaker 5: degrees fahrenheit, nice soaking rain, and that causes the nymphilens
Speaker 5: cicadas to come out of the ground. They start wandering
Speaker 5: on trying to find a vertical surface to crawl up
Speaker 5: because they get. Their whole purpose now is to shed
Speaker 5: their nymphile skin and transform to the adult. I've seen
Speaker 5: them crawl up trees, brick walls, fence walls, tombstones, blades
Speaker 5: of grass, whatever going up. They climb up that surface
Speaker 5: and they lock their little legs into the tree trunk.
Speaker 5: It's a tree with their tarsal claws getting nice solid purchase.
Speaker 5: And then all of a sudden, the back of the
Speaker 5: thorc splits open like somebody wearing a black coat under
Speaker 5: with a white shirt underneath it. And that's just too small,
Speaker 5: and they split the seam. They see this thing open up,
Speaker 5: and then it goes up and cracks the head capsule.
Speaker 5: And then slowly the adult cicada wriggles its way out
Speaker 5: and pulls itself out to the point where it's saying
Speaker 5: upside down, being held in place just by the little
Speaker 5: tension of the old nymphile skin holding onto the abdomen.
Speaker 5: And you see these white string like things coming out.
Speaker 5: Those are the breathing tubes.
Speaker 4: I looked up a time lapse of this, and yes,
Speaker 4: those tracheal tubes are like little white threads, kind of
Speaker 4: like the final rip chord that detaches from its old self.
Speaker 4: And also as I watched the wings inflate on this
Speaker 4: one video, started to cry and how beautiful and emerging
Speaker 4: cicada is crying. So pretty.
Speaker 5: The trachion that the cicada breathes by and those are
Speaker 5: mostly are made of kite as well, So when it transforms,
Speaker 5: it's literally pulling its trachial tubes inside it. You know,
Speaker 5: the old ones are being pulled out because it's made
Speaker 5: new ones on the inside. Oh wow, if you thought
Speaker 5: puberty was rough, yes, interesting what this is like. So
Speaker 5: it's hanging there for a few minutes, and then eventually
Speaker 5: it'll start doing what I like to call a cicada
Speaker 5: sit up. It starts trying to sit forward but just
Speaker 5: can't make it. And then it finally can gravel hold
Speaker 5: of the old nymphal skin and it wriggles its the
Speaker 5: labdoone free and by this time it's out. It's clear.
Speaker 5: It's it's white in color, it's got red eyes, two
Speaker 5: black patches behind the head. But the wings are all shriveled.
Speaker 5: And the next thing it has to do is expand
Speaker 5: its wings, So it starts pumping fluid through the wings.
Speaker 5: They slowly expand to where they look like a typical
Speaker 5: cicada with the wings held tent like over the abdomen.
Speaker 5: But they're still creamy white because the their exoskeleton hasn't
Speaker 5: hardened yet. Now this has taken about ninety minutes, depending
Speaker 5: on air temperature. Now they have to start hardening the
Speaker 5: exo skeleton and they'll slowly start turning dark over the
Speaker 5: next ninety minutes again, and then they'll eventually look like
Speaker 5: the typical adults cicada with the red eyes and the
Speaker 5: black body and the remembranous wings, with the orange color
Speaker 5: on the major wing banes at the base. And then
Speaker 5: the thing I want to do now is basically climb
Speaker 5: to the tops of the trees. It's even though it's dark,
Speaker 5: it's not completely hard. It's gonna take a couple more days,
Speaker 5: two to three, four, five days somewhere before they complete
Speaker 5: this process of hardening. But they want to get farther
Speaker 5: up so their hidden as from some of the major predators.
Speaker 5: And then they start flying, and that's when you'll see
Speaker 5: the birds really attuned to them. I've seen this many times,
Speaker 5: a cicada flying from one tree to another and a
Speaker 5: blue jay grabs it right out of the air. You know,
Speaker 5: because they're not strong fliers per se. And at this
Speaker 5: time more males emerged the first couple of days than females.
Speaker 5: That vanguard there is going to give its light so
Speaker 5: other they're lives, so that others could live. Then eventually
Speaker 5: the numbers start to equal out and the females. Then
Speaker 5: more females come out and grow your numbers towards the end.
Speaker 5: But that emergence process is going to take about two weeks.
Speaker 5: They don't They all don't come out in one night.
Speaker 5: It's like, not like this massive thing. This good, but
Speaker 5: this is about a two week rolling period, and if
Speaker 5: you have some cool days in there, we might slow down.
Speaker 5: It can be a little longer, but on the average
Speaker 5: about two weeks.
Speaker 4: So the early male gets the acts just first on
Speaker 4: the scene, horn up looking for ladies. They are delicious.
Speaker 4: They're like the first French fry you eat out of
Speaker 4: the drive through, just the least likely to survive, and
Speaker 4: males and females will sprout out over the next couple
Speaker 4: of weeks, all looking for springtime, summer loving.
Speaker 5: And after about five days or so after they've emerged,
Speaker 5: the males can start singing.
Speaker 4: Yes, I had so many questions about this. When you
Speaker 4: say singing, what would you say that it sounds like
Speaker 4: it's beautiful?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I remember these things got me tendier.
Speaker 4: I love it. I think it sounds kind of otherworldly
Speaker 4: to me, just this really kind of high pitched buzzing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's very much so. There are three species that
Speaker 5: are calls who are different from the three species. The
Speaker 5: large one, sept in decim, has a sort of like
Speaker 5: and it sounds like when you hear a whole course
Speaker 5: of these things, it sounds like some nineteen fifties science
Speaker 5: fiction movie. And that's the sound of the flying saucers
Speaker 5: flying in.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And then the smaller species, cast and eye, which is
Speaker 5: very common in some of the areas that have been
Speaker 5: turned into suburbs here and since, is more of a
Speaker 5: constant sound. And it doesn't all stay constant and sound
Speaker 5: and levels. It'll get louder and then drop off louder,
Speaker 5: drop off. The highest I've measured is ninety six decibels.
Speaker 4: Ooh oh gosh. That's about as loud as like a
Speaker 4: rock band playing right as a rock band. I've never
Speaker 4: been more like your old uncle. But yes, different calls
Speaker 4: like the ones on the wonderful, incredible website Cicadamania run
Speaker 4: by Dan mos Guy hit different decibel levels and some
Speaker 4: are said to approach one hundred and twenty decibels, which
Speaker 4: I looked it up, and that is a volume of
Speaker 4: an ambulance siren. So man bugs screaming for love.
Speaker 5: I'd say Joe is on the flight path. This is
Speaker 5: a international airport and skados will drowned out the jets.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 5: And if you get the chance to go into a
Speaker 5: major Cicada area, when you're done, after about a half
Speaker 5: hour collecting and recording and taking measurements, whatever, you get
Speaker 5: in the car and the windows are up, you feel
Speaker 5: like you've been to a concert.
Speaker 2: Damn you, Tonitis, You're a cruel mistress.
Speaker 5: It just keeps you. You just it just keeps ringing.
Speaker 4: How are they making that loud of a sound.
Speaker 5: The sound is made by a timble, and there are
Speaker 5: two timbles on the first abdominal segment of the mail,
Speaker 5: and then the male's abdomen is mostly hollow, and so
Speaker 5: that acts almost like a resonator to get a little louder.
Speaker 4: Think of the belly of a stringed instrument. So there
Speaker 4: is a reason a violin or acoustic guitar is hollow,
Speaker 4: it's probably also horny.
Speaker 5: And you put ten twenty thousand of these in one tree,
Speaker 5: m it's going to add up. And the sound if
Speaker 5: you've ever taken the Bendi's straw, you know the one
Speaker 5: that has yeah, and you can you pull it out.
Speaker 5: You hear that old snapping sound, Do that about one
Speaker 5: hundred and fifty too hundred times in a second, and
Speaker 5: that's that's your call for that mail amplified with the
Speaker 5: abdomen being hollow, and then multiply that by twenty thousand
Speaker 5: and you might have a good example of a course.
Speaker 4: Yeah, oh my gosh, oh, I know that there is
Speaker 4: an aside here about hollow males being the loudest, but
Speaker 4: I'm just going to let you write that one in
Speaker 4: your head. I prefer to think of cicadas as just
Speaker 4: croonique for love, a symphony of sexual aspiration giving us
Speaker 4: outdoor ambiance as the weather and maybe our love lives
Speaker 4: heat up, but also maybe not so. Yeah, it's a chorus,
Speaker 4: just a huge course, and it's a that.
Speaker 5: We actually refer to chorusing centers. Males will gather, large
Speaker 5: numbers of males gather in a tree. The ecological term
Speaker 5: is often uses a lech l e k And that's
Speaker 5: where large aggregations of males curve and then the females
Speaker 5: fly in. And there are three types of calls that
Speaker 5: the large piece of Dessa makes. The first one is
Speaker 5: that that fair. Then there's a gap, and just as
Speaker 5: he gets to the oh, the downs the downturn, the
Speaker 5: female will flick her wings. She does not have timbles,
Speaker 5: so she cannot make a call like the male does,
Speaker 5: so she'll flick her wings at that moment. And if
Speaker 5: the male sees that or here's that notices it, he'll
Speaker 5: turn and walk towards her. Seeing again she she flicks
Speaker 5: her wings, he'll walk closer. Then he'll go into a
Speaker 5: second call that doesn't have that space, that quiet phase,
Speaker 5: but it just keeps going well fair or fair, that
Speaker 5: type of thing. Then he'll actually start tapping her with
Speaker 5: his fore leg and they do the nasty. Now, if
Speaker 5: you're a male sit nearby and you hear this female
Speaker 5: that flicks her wings at the right time, you could
Speaker 5: steal her by capturing her attention. So when the first
Speaker 5: male gets to the lower fair and he guess that
Speaker 5: old portion, another male might start singing before he gets there,
Speaker 5: so she doesn't hear the end of the call to
Speaker 5: flick her wings.
Speaker 1: What a dick.
Speaker 4: And also apparently, if you are hosting a boys cicada
Speaker 4: on your hand and you want to prompt it to perform,
Speaker 4: try snapping your fingers at it. It will mistake the
Speaker 4: sound for a lady and then try to impress you
Speaker 4: by screaming.
Speaker 5: And so I mean, it's really it's like a gigantic
Speaker 5: cicada singles bar with a lot of competition.
Speaker 4: So you might someone might literally swoop in and steal
Speaker 4: your girl.
Speaker 5: Yep. When the sound gets loud and then drops off
Speaker 5: in intensity, that's because if a male has been unsuccessful,
Speaker 5: he will probably fly to another branch, treat another tree.
Speaker 5: Maybe the luck is better over there. So that's why
Speaker 5: you can hear this. This is very loud up to
Speaker 5: ninety six decimals, then it drops down to like seventy
Speaker 5: five to eighty, depending on the numbers of ciccadoes that
Speaker 5: are there. And if you watch the trees, you'll see
Speaker 5: this flight going from branch to branch between trees.
Speaker 4: When that happens, Oh that's so, that's gonna be so
Speaker 4: great just to pull up a lawn chair and like
Speaker 4: crack a beer and just to watch them jumping around.
Speaker 5: Oh it is last year and brew nine emerged. My
Speaker 5: wife Jesse and I we went out to check on
Speaker 5: the cicadas and we didn't realize that we were there
Speaker 5: just as Tropical Storm Bertha was coming in. So we
Speaker 5: had a good cicada experience, but we didn't have that
Speaker 5: magical experience where you're in it, where you just your
Speaker 5: ears are ringing of them. And so we went back
Speaker 5: in front of another two days. It was COVID time,
Speaker 5: so we had to arrange to go hotels that had
Speaker 5: COVID cleaning regimens, and we took our own food with
Speaker 5: us and whatever, and we went and we had a
Speaker 5: great cicada fix that you need to get. And as
Speaker 5: we were driving back to Cincinnati, we stopped at a
Speaker 5: rest stop in West Virginia and invade our dinner and
Speaker 5: they had just started emerging at the at the rest stop.
Speaker 5: That was just so pleasant to be there as the
Speaker 5: you know one one's Sayinara, glad he came. And just
Speaker 5: to sort of end that.
Speaker 4: That should I drive to the Midwest? Should I rent
Speaker 4: a van and just f off and drive to the
Speaker 4: Midwest and let these things crawl in my face. I
Speaker 4: want you so bad. And as we started recording this,
Speaker 4: Jarrett was like, let's go see them. And I am
Speaker 4: in the sound booth in the closet and I started
Speaker 4: to cry. So it might happen.
Speaker 5: And now what.
Speaker 4: Happens when she is gravid or preggers, She gets not
Speaker 4: as knocked up as a cicada can get.
Speaker 5: What happens, well, then she's got to find a place
Speaker 5: to lay her eggs, okay, and she will lay her
Speaker 5: eggs in the new growth of trees. That's the terminal
Speaker 5: at the ends of the branches of the new leaves
Speaker 5: are and she will find a tree and they they
Speaker 5: are over twohundred species of witty plants that cicadas have
Speaker 5: been shown to ovalposit or lay their eggs in.
Speaker 4: Oh wow.
Speaker 5: And she has a structure called an overpositor, which is
Speaker 5: a structure at the tip of her abdumen which she
Speaker 5: pulls out of a slit the tip of araben and
Speaker 5: then literally it's it has a central raw and on
Speaker 5: each side are two structures that are serrated and they
Speaker 5: move opposite and literally cut into the wood. And a
Speaker 5: colleague of mine. At ken State University Star Campus, Matt
Speaker 5: Leonard and I and his students examined the chemical composition
Speaker 5: of cicada ovipositors, and it turns out they are also
Speaker 5: like we see with a canuoned wasp that lay their
Speaker 5: eggs in a bark and so on, also reinforced with metals.
Speaker 5: And these metals are increase along the side of the serrations,
Speaker 5: so they're armored.
Speaker 4: Again. Wow, oh that's amazing. I'm just going to restate
Speaker 4: that for all of us. So Cicada ladies. Ovipositors are
Speaker 4: serrated like knives and reinforced with metal also like a knife.
Speaker 4: So imagine your crotch is a knife and you wait
Speaker 4: seventeen years to pierce tree bark with this a baby shank.
Speaker 5: She'll lay between ten to twenty eggs, and each little
Speaker 5: egg nesser it's about a quarter of inch long. Walking
Speaker 5: out of the corners down, puncture the tree twig again,
Speaker 5: lay more eggs and so on, and she keeps doing
Speaker 5: that until she either runs out of a branch that
Speaker 5: she has to fly at another one and eventually runs
Speaker 5: out of eggs. I've had a student, Kayleas Stalworth, for
Speaker 5: her research project decided to help find out exactly how
Speaker 5: many cicada eggs does a female have, and so we
Speaker 5: sampled females from four different broods and she counted sixteen
Speaker 5: thousand eggs.
Speaker 4: Oh wow, so many babies.
Speaker 5: They averaged five hundred and six Wow. But there was
Speaker 5: a range. It could be between four and six hundred,
Speaker 5: but was right right around five hundred eggs, just a
Speaker 5: little over five hundred. Then you start realizing that think
Speaker 5: of all the cicadia to see how many you are reproducing,
Speaker 5: how many are in the trees laying eggs, and then
Speaker 5: multiply that by five hundred.
Speaker 4: Oh, that's so many. But they still have quite a
Speaker 4: trek to make, right they do.
Speaker 5: After she lays her eggs, they die and both the
Speaker 5: male is dead and the female then drops dead and
Speaker 5: that's it. And it takes six to eight weeks after
Speaker 5: they were laid that they all start hatching, and that's
Speaker 5: usually the end of July first of August. Again, talking
Speaker 5: about sitting in near lawn chair with a beer watching this.
Speaker 5: If you're at the right time, in the right place,
Speaker 5: when the eggs are hatching and the nymphs crawl out
Speaker 5: of there, the egg nests and the sun is the
Speaker 5: right ankle. You can actually see these things drop like
Speaker 5: little little flecks to the ground, and that's when they're
Speaker 5: extremely vulnerable. Spiders, ants, ground beetles go after these things
Speaker 5: like crazy. So as soon as they hit the ground,
Speaker 5: they've got to find a crack in the soil and
Speaker 5: it's usually along a blade of grass, and they get
Speaker 5: underground immediately as fast as they can.
Speaker 4: So, yes, eggs are laid in slits in tree twigs
Speaker 4: and then they emerge and once on the ground, they
Speaker 4: start looking for thirteen or seventeen year real estate.
Speaker 5: Not all make it, but that's why we're laying five
Speaker 5: hundred eggs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so.
Speaker 5: They feed on grassroots for the first few weeks, and
Speaker 5: then by New Year's Day they're ten to twelve inches
Speaker 5: below the surface, latched onto a tree root sucking. And
Speaker 5: I know it because on New Year's Day I went
Speaker 5: out and dug up cicadas.
Speaker 4: Really, so they've already latched on there. So do they
Speaker 4: spend those cold winters just sucking up sugars from the
Speaker 4: tree roots?
Speaker 5: Well, yes, but although they're feeding on the Xylum tissue
Speaker 5: and oh okay, as you remember from biology, Xylum is
Speaker 5: the water conducting tissue that brings water and minerals from
Speaker 5: the soil up to the leaves. The floam has the
Speaker 5: sugars coming down, so they they're feeding on this nutrient
Speaker 5: poor fluid for the next seventeen years and not moving
Speaker 5: probably more than a yard or a meter any direction
Speaker 5: during that time.
Speaker 4: In all my bug lust, I realized I forgot to
Speaker 4: ask does this hurt the trees, and most arborous say
Speaker 4: not really. So the main peril is in younger trees,
Speaker 4: whose slim little twigs are the bulk of their branches.
Speaker 4: So it's recommended not to plant young trees a couple
Speaker 4: of years before a cicada brood emerges. So for everyone
Speaker 4: in brood ten territory who just spent their quarantine gardening,
Speaker 4: I'm so sorry, but just think you will have a
Speaker 4: lot of tiny friends to hang out with for the
Speaker 4: next seventeen years in the backyard.
Speaker 5: It thought that the law life cycle might be a
Speaker 5: response to their evolving and adapting to the ice ages.
Speaker 4: Really yeah, okay, So tell me a little bit about
Speaker 4: that and about these long life cycles and how they
Speaker 4: know when to come out.
Speaker 5: The life cycles. Well, there's two life cycles. Seventeen years
Speaker 5: and thirteen years, and the idea is that the thirteen
Speaker 5: year cicade has evolved south of the glaciers. And if
Speaker 5: you look at the thirteen year cicada distribution, they're mostly
Speaker 5: in the southern part of the eastern United States. They
Speaker 5: don't get into Florida, but they're in Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama,
Speaker 5: what have you. They cop up up the Mississippi ver
Speaker 5: Valley in Illinois and Missouri, and they get up into
Speaker 5: South Carolina and parts of North Carolina on the east.
Speaker 5: But then the seventeen year skaters are generally more north
Speaker 5: than that, although they are some of that in eastern
Speaker 5: Oklahoma that get a little far south. In general, it's
Speaker 5: thought that the ancestor of the periodical skate is split
Speaker 5: into two.
Speaker 4: So Gene explained that cicadas are creatures of climate evolving
Speaker 4: and separating into different species and broods and groups relatively
Speaker 4: recently in the last ice ages, adapting to ice sheets
Speaker 4: and going further south and then advancing north again when
Speaker 4: they receded. And the thirteen and seventeen year periodical cicadas
Speaker 4: separated over the last three hundred thousand years, which geologically
Speaker 4: speaking is pretty recently and then further split into the
Speaker 4: three thirteen year broods and twelve seventeen year broods and
Speaker 4: brood X or ten is about to have its moment.
Speaker 4: How do you handle it? When people say brute X?
Speaker 4: Do you correct them?
Speaker 5: Oh? Yeah, I have to have a teacher.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 5: It's attributed in part to Confucius. But there's a phrase
Speaker 5: the first steps towards wisdom is calling things by the
Speaker 5: correct names.
Speaker 4: Okay, that makes you feel better. I called it brute
Speaker 4: X forever because I thought it was a Generation X.
Speaker 4: I thought it was even named after Generation X.
Speaker 5: Well, that's that's what generations are like it, I know.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh. Can I ask you questions from a listeners?
Speaker 5: Certainly?
Speaker 4: Okay, they know you're coming on and they're very excited.
Speaker 4: But before we do a quick note about sponsors of
Speaker 4: the show. Because of them, we can toss a cicada
Speaker 4: load of money at a worthy cause each week, and
Speaker 4: this week, doctor Kritzky requested it to go to Mount
Speaker 4: Saint Joseph's University in Cincinnati, School of Behavioral and Natural Sciences,
Speaker 4: and Gene says, you can designate it for cicada research.
Speaker 4: Our VP will be shocked, So let's do that now.
Speaker 4: If you feel like tossing a few bucks that way,
Speaker 4: There's going to be a link in the show notes.
Speaker 4: And thank you to the following sponsors for allowing this
Speaker 4: podcast to donate.
Speaker 1: Get value. You can't argue with at Tesco with their
Speaker 1: amazing club card prices. Serve up something special with our
Speaker 1: finest Meil deal for two starring one main, two sides
Speaker 1: and dessert for only sixteen year owd like succulent board
Speaker 1: be approved by rushined the striploind Stakes with peppercorn butter
Speaker 1: or delicious Iris Chicken Parmegama served with creamy potato gretam
Speaker 1: under a mix of rainbow root vegetables, and enjoyed Goozillionaire
Speaker 1: or Soldier Caramel cheesecake. Can't argue with that shop in
Speaker 1: store or online. Tesco. Every little helps available to most doores.
Speaker 1: Prices very in express.
Speaker 4: Okay your questions. If there's anyone on planet Earth that
Speaker 4: can answer these questions, it's going to be you. Miranda
Speaker 4: Halsey Vincent. First time question asker wants to know why
Speaker 4: are their eyes so big and why are they the
Speaker 4: best bug ever?
Speaker 5: Well, the eyes of the whole subgroup to which the
Speaker 5: cicadas and their relatives belong to are called the alcon
Speaker 5: rinca because that the eyes are quite noticeable. The eyes
Speaker 5: are very noseble because of the red pigmentation. But they
Speaker 5: are a visual insect in the sense that they need
Speaker 5: to see their mate and look where we are they're going. Also,
Speaker 5: they'll have a behavior. They'll they'll feed on fluids under
Speaker 5: tree bark and sometimes they'll spray it at potential predators.
Speaker 5: I've been at a Bradford pears, for example, and I
Speaker 5: thought it was raining because these scades were sort of
Speaker 5: shooting honeydew at me.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, and.
Speaker 5: So they need to know what's going on. They can
Speaker 5: aid these things pretty well. I don't know how accurate
Speaker 5: they could be, but they were hitting me. But I'm
Speaker 5: a pretty big target compared to a cicada ps.
Speaker 4: I looked up this sprinkling and there's a page on
Speaker 4: cicadamania dot com that explains reassuringly, you may have been
Speaker 4: under a cicada filled tree on a sunny day and
Speaker 4: felt a sprinkler or two. Don't worry, it's just watery tree.
Speaker 4: Sap xylum passed through a cicada under which Dan has
Speaker 4: embedded a video of cicadas doing this, and y'all, it
Speaker 4: looks like a super soaker fight in the suburbs in
Speaker 4: the heat of August. It is just juicy water sports
Speaker 4: from a bug rump. Pretend it's a blessing. Wipe it off,
Speaker 4: move on, you get me fine, Ryan g. Carter Hildebrand,
Speaker 4: first time question asker Ashley Burdett. In Ashley's words, I
Speaker 4: would love to know what they do underground. Do they
Speaker 4: hibernate until the next in star or is there just
Speaker 4: a whole cicado world like society. Megan daw cold and
Speaker 4: do it? A bunch of people had the same question.
Speaker 5: Sure, well, they're not hybernating. They're down there feeding. They're
Speaker 5: to below the frost line. And if anybody's ever gone
Speaker 5: into a cave like Mammoth Cave, whatever, once you get
Speaker 5: in there, it's about fifty six degrees fahrenheit below the
Speaker 5: frost line. Even though it's cold here and it's been
Speaker 5: cold for the last couple of weeks, you gotta get
Speaker 5: below the frost lighted it's gonna be in the fifties.
Speaker 5: So if you go down a foot, so it's not
Speaker 5: going to be that bitter cold and solid. I was
Speaker 5: out digging up cicadas back in November when it was
Speaker 5: a few cold days, and I was surprised that some
Speaker 5: of the scades that I expected to see four and
Speaker 5: six inches below the surface, we're already eight to ten
Speaker 5: inches down. So they're down there. They're sucking on a
Speaker 5: tree route, they're making a tunnel. They're not scooting around
Speaker 5: very fast you dig them up. They're ectotherm animals, so
Speaker 5: they're going to be moving slowly, but they're not hybridy
Speaker 5: per se, and they grow at different rates. One of
Speaker 5: the differences between the thirteen and seven years cicadas is
Speaker 5: that the thirteen year cicadas molt an extra time within
Speaker 5: that first five years of life. Oh okay, and that
Speaker 5: triggers they're coming out four years early. But you can
Speaker 5: find seven years into the life cycle. I've dug these.
Speaker 5: I have found third, fourth and fifth star cicadas at
Speaker 5: seven years underground, and by the time they reached for
Speaker 5: seventeen year scades, by the time they reach thirteen years old,
Speaker 5: they're almost all of them are in the last in star,
Speaker 5: and then by usually by the fourteenth year they are,
Speaker 5: but they don't Baltimore. They're just hanging around down there,
Speaker 5: feeding and getting ready for the Magical seventeen.
Speaker 4: It's bananas that when you see periodical cicados, at least
Speaker 4: in pretend that they are old enough to drive a car. Technically,
Speaker 4: that is true.
Speaker 5: I've never thought of it quite.
Speaker 4: That way, but yes, Many patrons such as Katie Timothy Luke,
Speaker 4: Earl of gramblekin A, Laura Smith, Angelicus Carduzzio, Zwelf, Juniper Brooke,
Speaker 4: Nikki Debarco, Barti Goodwin, and first time question askers Molly
Speaker 4: Cousins and Alex Bowman wanted to know how are they
Speaker 4: better at time management than people? Essentially? How do they
Speaker 4: know when to come out? Is there a stage manager underground?
Speaker 4: What's happening? Do you have any idea to do Scientists
Speaker 4: know if there's something chemical that triggers that emergence, how
Speaker 4: do they sense it?
Speaker 5: Oh, that's one of the things that there's some federal
Speaker 5: work going on now that I'm involved with with my colleagues,
Speaker 5: that we're trying to determine what's the true We know
Speaker 5: that they can determine year passages by the changes in
Speaker 5: fluid flow in the asylum. You know when the tree
Speaker 5: goes dormant. There seems to be some they can detect
Speaker 5: that leaf sets and flower sets can trigger, because that
Speaker 5: you'll see more fluid flow. But what we don't know
Speaker 5: is how do they remember what year it is?
Speaker 4: Hm.
Speaker 5: We did have an event happened here in Cincinnati in
Speaker 5: two thousand and six. We had a December that reached
Speaker 5: seventy degrees and it continued into January, and the maple
Speaker 5: tree in my backyard leafed out. I thought I wasposes
Speaker 5: to me, this is January, and then we had a
Speaker 5: hard freeze in February. All the leaves fell off. Come
Speaker 5: the late March early April, the trees started leafing out again,
Speaker 5: and in parts of Cincinnati where BREWD fourteen was expected
Speaker 5: to come out the following year, they came out. So
Speaker 5: for those cicadas they thought they thought seventeen years had
Speaker 5: passed even though they had two leaf sets, it occurred
Speaker 5: in one year.
Speaker 4: For more on how leaves come and go, by the way,
Speaker 4: check out the phonology. Episode also heads up to Hannah Noos,
Speaker 4: I'm about to pronounce your name wrong and I am sorry.
Speaker 4: And so this devetails into a question from several listeners.
Speaker 4: A first time question asker David Ortonoff, first timer, hunter Elliott,
Speaker 4: Hannah Newst, and Earl of Graymulkin all wanted to know,
Speaker 4: in well, in Earl's words, not to be depressing, but
Speaker 4: to be depressing. How is climate change affecting cicadas? And
Speaker 4: a hunter wanted to know could their hibernation cycles be
Speaker 4: altered because of it?
Speaker 5: That's one of these that we're looking into, and it
Speaker 5: seems possible. As I mentioned, they are climate insects, if
Speaker 5: you will, they emerge when the soil temperature reaches sixty
Speaker 5: four degrees fahrenheit, and prior to nineteen fifty, the average
Speaker 5: for Cincinnati was May twenty eighth, twenty ninth. Since nineteen fifty,
Speaker 5: and in the last few years, they're now coming round
Speaker 5: between the thirteenth and the sixteenth of May, so spring
Speaker 5: is now two weeks warmer than we were back in
Speaker 5: the first half of the twentieth century. And that's not surprising.
Speaker 5: Anybody that goes to a garden store sees these growing
Speaker 5: season charts and they'll notice that the planning zones are
Speaker 5: moving northward from that. What that could do, for example,
Speaker 5: if you had continuous like what happened in two thousand
Speaker 5: and six and two thousand and seven, if you had
Speaker 5: a year event happened where there was like trees that
Speaker 5: seemed to the cicadative a two year things had passed,
Speaker 5: they might molt in that first five years, which would
Speaker 5: trigger a four year early acceleration and emerging off cycle.
Speaker 5: And that's actually happened in nineteen ninety one. My students
Speaker 5: in my ecology and evolution classes, which was an alternating
Speaker 5: course I taught at the time, know that we would
Speaker 5: go out to the orchard at the university and we'd
Speaker 5: dig up cicadatives. To sort of drive home the scientific method,
Speaker 5: I gave this wonderful paper written by Monte Lloyd and
Speaker 5: joe Enne White. It talked about this between thirteen year
Speaker 5: scades and seventeen year cicadis and it said what stage
Speaker 5: or growth they should be at each year. And I said, okay,
Speaker 5: these cicadas laid their eggs, they hatched in nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 5: this is nineteen ninety one. What stage should they be
Speaker 5: at if their brew tend cicadas? And to drive the
Speaker 5: point home, I had to write it out a card.
Speaker 5: They put the card in an envelope they sealed the end,
Speaker 5: they signed the seal and then we go and then
Speaker 5: we got shovels and went out and dug up cicadas,
Speaker 5: and the cicadas were bigger and they should have been.
Speaker 5: So what that meant to me was they're going to
Speaker 5: come out four years early.
Speaker 4: So in nineteen ninety nine, the year before they were
Speaker 4: supposed to emerge early, doctor Chrisky presents a paper like
Speaker 4: the Nostro Damis of Cicada Wizards. So much is on
Speaker 4: the line. He's making a huge prediction y two k
Speaker 4: rolls around cicadas should pop out early according to his forecast.
Speaker 4: Were they right? Did they come out?
Speaker 5: And they came out, oh, and massive numbers. It was
Speaker 5: mind boggling. At that time, we didn't have an app
Speaker 5: to use to help us map these things. We didn't
Speaker 5: have the Wi fis to help I used then answering machine.
Speaker 5: And the one woman called and said, why are all
Speaker 5: the cicadas in my front yard? And so my students
Speaker 5: and I went out to look for him, and sure
Speaker 5: enough her yard was packed with these things. But what
Speaker 5: was exciting was they were singing. Usually when cicadas emerge
Speaker 5: off cycle like that, they all get eaten by predator
Speaker 5: because they don't come out in large enough numbers. They
Speaker 5: were singing, they were mating, they were laying eggs.
Speaker 4: What's going to happen to that one? Is it going
Speaker 4: to get off cycle now or is it going to
Speaker 4: step in line with the rest?
Speaker 5: Oh, that's what we wanted to know. So, of course,
Speaker 5: working with cicadas, that's the problem. This is to the
Speaker 5: year two thousand. Yeah, So I went back in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 5: My wife and I went to the study site and
Speaker 5: by the way, this is one of five places and
Speaker 5: since ay where that happened into the year two thousand
Speaker 5: and they started coming out. They were coming out. We
Speaker 5: found shells all over the place. We went out there
Speaker 5: and even the hundreds of them came out. We'd go
Speaker 5: back the next day. We couldn't find a single adult cicada.
Speaker 5: Those cicadas did not survive predation to reproduce in twenty thirteen. Wow,
Speaker 5: wait four more years now, you remember this is out
Speaker 5: seventeen years later. If I worked on fruitflies, i'd have
Speaker 5: this done in two months. But no.
Speaker 4: So this last early emergence happened in twenty seventeen, and
Speaker 4: adult cicadas who were just little baby eggs in that
Speaker 4: early two thousand emergents made it all around Cincinnati and
Speaker 4: their babies were on time seventeen years later, and not
Speaker 4: in one backyard, but thirty three different locations recorded. So
Speaker 4: what happens to all these early bird cicadas things are out.
Speaker 5: Of sinc What we've seen now is the origin of
Speaker 5: a new population of brood six.
Speaker 4: Oh wow.
Speaker 5: And we thought that would be what would be happening
Speaker 5: because if you look at certain places here in Cincinnati,
Speaker 5: we have Brewed fourteen adjacent to Brew ten four years apart.
Speaker 5: Now six is there. In the Eastern States, we got
Speaker 5: Brewed nine adjacent Brew five adjacent to Brew one. And
Speaker 5: so this some kind of a genetic switch that triggers
Speaker 5: a four year cycle maybe coming to play. We see
Speaker 5: these patterns that corresponded. So I feel like the cicadas
Speaker 5: revealed one of their secrets.
Speaker 4: That you can kind of start to tease out the
Speaker 4: mechanism of that, like chronobiology.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and get a sense to what what's really happening.
Speaker 5: And it's just so cool. It's neat to have people
Speaker 5: realize that evolution is happening in your very backyard.
Speaker 4: Mm hmmm. Would you say that you're a patient person overall.
Speaker 4: Do you think that's what enables you to deal with
Speaker 4: these long stretches?
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, I am patient. I also have other things
Speaker 5: I like to talk about work on.
Speaker 4: So okay, you're a multitasker, so yes, Gene has many
Speaker 4: professional obligations and publishing deadlines and pet projects. Oh, speaking
Speaker 4: of pets, listeners Red took first time question asker Miranda
Speaker 4: Halsey Vincent, who was very excited about this episode. Rachel
Speaker 4: Kasha first time are Gracie Van Derver, Victoria Boat right.
Speaker 4: A lot of them wanted to know about Cicada's as pets.
Speaker 4: Miranda asked, can you keep them as pets or do
Speaker 4: they make good pets or not at all?
Speaker 5: Well, if you don't mind a pet that you don't
Speaker 5: have to play with because it's underground, you can't dig
Speaker 5: them up and playing back, that's not going to work.
Speaker 5: So yes, I have a lot of Cicada pets in
Speaker 5: the woods behind my house here. But it's not that
Speaker 5: they're not like a dog. It'll be that, you know,
Speaker 5: it's like it's like, what's the vision of dog and
Speaker 5: his cats? You know? For example, dogs need a lot
Speaker 5: of attention, They demand a lot. Some cats do as well,
Speaker 5: but cats are like having an older uncle or aunt
Speaker 5: hanging around. That's nice, mellow, But cicada's uh. And as
Speaker 5: you can, you can certainly use them as yet of
Speaker 5: his pets when they come out as adults. But you've
Speaker 5: got to be prepared for early disappointment because they will
Speaker 5: die in about a month.
Speaker 4: And maybe if there were boys, they might be just
Speaker 4: singing their heads off. Yep, okay. On the topic of heads,
Speaker 4: let's talk about mouth holes and yours and putting cicadas
Speaker 4: into them. So many listeners on Patron including Lauren Duberglass,
Speaker 4: Rachel Kasha, Mitch Hughes, Crystal just Swan, Monica Rasmussen, mal Lucas,
Speaker 4: Meghan MacLean, Heather Densmore, Kathleen Sachs, Daniel Saltana, Zoe Jane,
Speaker 4: Emily z Hollis, Aaron mcglessick, Katie Timothy Meredith, Lloyd's cicada
Speaker 4: loving partner, Evan Robertson, Samantha Mitz, Alison Ewald, Sheila Lutewiler.
Speaker 4: First time question askers Gigi who once accidentally ate one
Speaker 4: while playing volleyball, Gavin eve Ross, Paul Smith, Tim Dodge,
Speaker 4: shellfish allergic Kevin Biemer and Leah Darple, who wrote in
Speaker 4: are they safe to eat? I asked because I once
Speaker 4: watched a friend's dad smear a live one with peanut
Speaker 4: butter and pop it in his mouth. Well, some people
Speaker 4: wanted to know why their dogs like to eat them,
Speaker 4: and others were curious, if you have ever eaten cicadas?
Speaker 5: Well, I think dogs like to eat a lot of things.
Speaker 5: They're gears. I actually by cat Budeno was probably maybe
Speaker 5: the only cat in history to have fresh, live periodical
Speaker 5: skaters for five consecutive years. Jesse, and I'm a drive
Speaker 5: all around to all the bruds coming out in the cycle.
Speaker 5: When you get to brood water, there's a skater brood
Speaker 5: almost every year in the next ten years, and so
Speaker 5: I made it a point to bring him home some
Speaker 5: cicadas to play with an eat. Now answer you that, yes,
Speaker 5: I have eaten cicadas. I don't make a habit of it,
Speaker 5: because one of the things I'm really actively concerned about
Speaker 5: this year is our cicadas under threat. But with betting
Speaker 5: out to the colony experience, I've had them deep fat fried,
Speaker 5: I've had them sauteed, I've had them in salads and
Speaker 5: stir fries. If you feel like you need to eat cicadas,
Speaker 5: you want to collect them rise they're e merging from
Speaker 5: their shells, because they're nice and white and soft. If
Speaker 5: you should eat them when they're all dark, it's like
Speaker 5: eating you know, the tail end of the shrimp, the
Speaker 5: part that you hold and dip the shrimp into the
Speaker 5: cocktail sauce. You don't. You can't eat that sort of papery,
Speaker 5: parchment like stuff. Just it's just too solid. That's what
Speaker 5: it's like eating an adult cicada. That's that's mature. You
Speaker 5: should want to also females because they're filled with eggs,
Speaker 5: whereas the male is mostly hollow, so you get more
Speaker 5: nutrition from the female.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, Eve Ross, a first time question asker says
Speaker 4: that they know some entomologists who shake the trees and
Speaker 4: have cicada eating contests. Have you witnessed this ever?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 4: Okay, I was like, that's got to be You've got
Speaker 4: to really just gorge yourself on that. Every year that
Speaker 4: periodical cicada broods emerge, there are people eating them, so
Speaker 4: make no mistake. There's even a cookbook called Cicada Delicious,
Speaker 4: and some folks say they taste like lobster, popcorn or shrimp,
Speaker 4: or are nutty and buttery. And for more on eating insects,
Speaker 4: check out the episode we did Entomophagy Anthropology in January
Speaker 4: twenty nineteen, and I'll link it on my website. But
Speaker 4: different indigenous groups have varying relationships to the cicada in diet.
Speaker 4: It can represent eternal life or even hardship, as the
Speaker 4: Unendoga nation located in what's now upstate New York, relied
Speaker 4: on them for sustenance after their people were attacked and
Speaker 4: crops were torched by colonists. So the bugs can be
Speaker 4: symbolic now of resilience and sacrifices made by their ancestors.
Speaker 4: But patron David Ordinoff asks are we looking at dwindling populations?
Speaker 4: I experienced the last brood ten emergents in Baltimore where
Speaker 4: I grew up, and it was a wild experience. And
Speaker 4: Hunter Elliott says, I need there to be as many
Speaker 4: cicadas as possible all my life. They are the beautiful,
Speaker 4: bug eyed, screaming monsters that sparked my interest in insects
Speaker 4: as a child. So what kind of head count are
Speaker 4: we talking?
Speaker 5: It's sort of. It's interesting the eighteen nineties, entomologists at
Speaker 5: the USDA were getting kind of worried with all the
Speaker 5: deforestation for agriculture, thinking that would have an impact on cicadas,
Speaker 5: and that's mentioned in the USDA works by Marlott in
Speaker 5: the eighteen nineties. In nineteen nineteen, headlines and the and
Speaker 5: newspapers around the country talked about Brood ten's emerging, it's
Speaker 5: probably on its way out. There's concerned about it's going extinct.
Speaker 5: As crazy as that sounds, it's happened. Brute eleven, which
Speaker 5: emerged in massive numbers in sixteen ninety nine just outside
Speaker 5: of Boston, went extinct in nineteen fifty four. Wow, Brood seven,
Speaker 5: which occurs in upstate New York is just only found
Speaker 5: in two counties. That's going to probably be next for it.
Speaker 5: It's on protected lands, so maybe that'll that'll that'll help it.
Speaker 5: But one of the things that graduate advisor Frank was
Speaker 5: really concerned about and talked about this in the nineteen
Speaker 5: fifties and then he and I worked on it in
Speaker 5: nineteen eighty seven was are we seeing signs of periodical
Speaker 5: ccade to brew ten decline? And we are Brewed ten
Speaker 5: was known to occur in every county the state of Indiana,
Speaker 5: and now it is in the upper third of the state.
Speaker 5: It's highly fragmented. You have to sometimes drive miles between
Speaker 5: emergence zones. There are parts of the southern part of
Speaker 5: the states that have massive numbers who are still there.
Speaker 5: But that's been going on here in Ohio. In northwest
Speaker 5: of Ohio, several counties that reported cicadas in the late
Speaker 5: nineteenth century early twentieth century no longer have cicadas. So
Speaker 5: one of the things I'm hoping that we do with
Speaker 5: people helping us with the Cicada Safari app, is to
Speaker 5: really give us a good picture what's the status of
Speaker 5: brew ten.
Speaker 4: But before everyone had cameras and omniscions and global connectivity
Speaker 4: in our pockets, folks sent out letters. So in nineteen
Speaker 4: oh two, scientists sent out fifteen thousand letters to schools
Speaker 4: and postmaster and railroad conductors asking, Hey, if you see
Speaker 4: or hear this beautiful shrieking bug, just give us a
Speaker 4: heads up. But these days, with the Cicada Safari app
Speaker 4: that they made, Jean's team was able to capture nearly
Speaker 4: eight thousand recorded sightings of an early emergence of Brewed nine,
Speaker 4: something they could have never done with grad students on
Speaker 4: horseback or dusty letters handed out across the nation. So
Speaker 4: if you are underwhelmed with dating app options, just go
Speaker 4: on an insect safari in a local park and upload
Speaker 4: some horny bugs. Maybe wear an Ology shirt and you'll
Speaker 4: find your soulmate also looking for hornybugs, and I will
Speaker 4: officiate your wedding. Maybe just saying. And so now people
Speaker 4: can download Cicada Safari and what they take a picture
Speaker 4: and let you know where they took it, like geotagged it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we want to do two things. We want to
Speaker 5: help people have more enjoyment with the cicadas. So after
Speaker 5: you've downloaded the app and it's free, there's no mighty cost,
Speaker 5: no money. We don't collect the data to sell to people,
Speaker 5: none of that. With the Center, I Engagement develops apps
Speaker 5: to engage a user to provide the research data I
Speaker 5: need so that I can map out cicadas. And so
Speaker 5: we encourage people to go on their own cicada safari
Speaker 5: and if they see one, they take a photograph and
Speaker 5: submit it. I've got a group of colleagues who are
Speaker 5: volunteering and working to help us identify and examine every photograph,
Speaker 5: and we are expecting fifty thousand photographs. That's great, and
Speaker 5: so we're hoping for that if we can get you know,
Speaker 5: I've been told to expect maybe sixty five thousand, So
Speaker 5: we're not sure how this is, how this is going
Speaker 5: to do, what's going to go into but we're looking
Speaker 5: forward to be overwhelmed.
Speaker 4: Great US ologites. Do your thing Cicadasafari app, So.
Speaker 5: Each photo is a voucher specimen that what they're looking
Speaker 5: at is a real periodical cicada. That's important. We want
Speaker 5: to verify that the observations are accurate. If they are,
Speaker 5: they're put on our live map, and so users of
Speaker 5: the app can follow the emergence when it starts in
Speaker 5: northern Georgia and slowly see it move north as spring
Speaker 5: moves northward in April and May and June. We've also
Speaker 5: with the new version that we've put out last year,
Speaker 5: can also receive eleven second videos, and from the videos,
Speaker 5: we can hear the calls. When you hear the calls,
Speaker 5: you can identify the species.
Speaker 4: Nice so everyone in the US where there are cicadas,
Speaker 4: like get your cameras, get your phones ready.
Speaker 5: The cicadas are unique to the eastern United States. They
Speaker 5: don't occur any further west than eastern Kansas and Nebraska.
Speaker 5: Our friends in Philadelphia, our friends in Washington, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Louisville, Nashville,
Speaker 5: those metropolitan areas. That's important. Get cicadasafari and help us,
Speaker 5: help us find out what's really going on with this
Speaker 5: massive brood.
Speaker 4: Oh that's great. A few more questions from listeners. Zoe
Speaker 4: wanted to know how do people's feelings and associations about
Speaker 4: cicadas very in different cultures and places? And also a
Speaker 4: lot of listeners are I personally, if I see one,
Speaker 4: I want to hug it. I get so excited, But
Speaker 4: some listeners are scared of them. So how do feelings
Speaker 4: differ and what's the best way to embrace cicadas in
Speaker 4: your heart?
Speaker 5: Well, the culture first of cicadas our amazing animals, as
Speaker 5: we've been talking about, but there's some really interesting culture differences.
Speaker 5: In China. During the Han dynasty, you'd find cicada ambulets,
Speaker 5: pieces of jade carved in the shape, and adult cicada
Speaker 5: placed on the tongue of the deceased as a means
Speaker 5: of ensuring a resurrection or birth. When I visited the
Speaker 5: Jade Buddha Temple in Shanghai when I was selecturing in
Speaker 5: China in nineteen eighty six, they had a little store
Speaker 5: right next door to the temple that sold religious artifacts
Speaker 5: for what have you. And it's much like we see
Speaker 5: here in czel At around some of the Catholic churches
Speaker 5: have little shops that sell crushes and ambulets and what
Speaker 5: have you. And they had these large wooden carved cicadas.
Speaker 5: And it turns out when the cicada nimb crawls out
Speaker 5: of the ground, up the tree, this dark out of
Speaker 5: the dirt and everything else, and sheds its skin, that's
Speaker 5: symbolic of the Buddha reaching the next level of understanding.
Speaker 4: Oh wow, that's beautiful. Who doesn't love a makeover, especially spiritually.
Speaker 4: So these ghostly shells that they leave behind are called EXSUVII,
Speaker 4: and truth be told, I almost named my company Exsuvia
Speaker 4: because I love them so much. So it's just such
Speaker 4: a cool reminder that you can chill and get ready
Speaker 4: and then boom blast out and be like fabulous and
Speaker 4: then hopefully no one puts peanut butter on you and
Speaker 4: eats you and talks about it for seventeen years.
Speaker 5: We have found now just sketches by Van Goll of cicadas.
Speaker 5: We've got a couple of da Vinci cicadas. They're not
Speaker 5: very big, they're on rebuses. And in Japan there's wonderful
Speaker 5: examples of cicadas in those scrolled paintings and watercolors, just gorgeous.
Speaker 5: Here in the United States, Copopelli, for example, it's thought
Speaker 5: by many to be a cicada. Oh, if you know
Speaker 5: the flute player, So if that flutes, the proboscis of
Speaker 5: the insect, it's got a big hump on the behind
Speaker 5: the eyes, so it's got dumblings like it's bent over
Speaker 5: and it sings. I'm trying to think of of other
Speaker 5: cool examples. In nineteen seventy, Bob Dylan and got an
Speaker 5: honorary degree from Princeton University. And while he's there receiving
Speaker 5: his degree, the cicadas are screaming at the distance. And
Speaker 5: what does he do. He goes home and writes a song.
Speaker 5: The locusts sang for me.
Speaker 4: Oh beautiful, that's a beautiful thing. Did any get stuck
Speaker 4: in his hair?
Speaker 5: H No, blugedly. The story goes that he went there
Speaker 5: with David Crosby, who sat in the front row with
Speaker 5: the dignitaries, and he made small talk with Greta Scott King,
Speaker 5: who also received an honorary doctorate that year. He got
Speaker 5: his cap and gown. He didn't address the group, He
Speaker 5: just got his honorary doctorate, walked off stage, took off
Speaker 5: his cap and gown, gave it to somebody, and drove away.
Speaker 5: So you wonder then how close he did to listen,
Speaker 5: because he was actually really tuning in on the cicadas.
Speaker 4: So to patron Emir Kaku, who asked, is there any
Speaker 4: music that was inspired by cicadas singing in the summer,
Speaker 4: there's at least one, and Cicada Mania also has a
Speaker 4: whole page devoted to cicada theme songs. And again there
Speaker 4: are indigenous nations who are said to have paid homage
Speaker 4: to them and their drum rhythms. And so when you
Speaker 4: hear them, just think of them serenading you because they're
Speaker 4: so happy to see you after all this time, and
Speaker 4: unless you're a tree, they do not want to bite you.
Speaker 4: So all the patrons, such as Rainbow Warrior Emma Parks.
Speaker 4: Amy Miller first time question askers Taylor Noel and Sterling
Speaker 4: Macki and Katie Rampy, who would like to be assured
Speaker 4: that they're not a baby, would like to know how
Speaker 4: not be I scared? What's a way to maybe get
Speaker 4: over your fear of them? They don't bite us, do they? No?
Speaker 5: And some people if you grab them, and if you're
Speaker 5: afraid of me, you're not gonna be grabbing them per se.
Speaker 5: But they're lovely little animals. You should always face your fear.
Speaker 5: So go out there and really get yourself involved with
Speaker 5: the cicadas. Watch this slow motion dance they do as
Speaker 5: they shed their skin and turn into adults. Listen to
Speaker 5: the coursing. When Gideon Smith, this individual from the eighteen
Speaker 5: forties wrote in eighteen fifty one, he was talking about
Speaker 5: brewd ten and he said, I'm paraphrasing here. You know,
Speaker 5: while some people find this sad son, I enjoy hearing,
Speaker 5: but I was melancholy as I heard it, because I
Speaker 5: wondered if I'd lived to hear it again.
Speaker 4: Mm oh.
Speaker 5: He died one year before breudt Ten emerged the next time,
Speaker 5: in eighteen sixty. He died in eighteen sixty seventy or
Speaker 5: year before.
Speaker 4: Wow, I could have sworn that Earl of Gramblekin wasn't
Speaker 4: the only one who asked this, but a few people
Speaker 4: wanted to know if moth man exists? Is there a
Speaker 4: cicada man somewhere?
Speaker 5: Not officially, although this sounds self serving, there was a
Speaker 5: headline in nineteen eighty seven that referred to be a
Speaker 5: cicada man in Cincinnati. Oh that's amazing. I've been called
Speaker 5: a lot of things in my life.
Speaker 4: That was a first And what about last two questions?
Speaker 4: I always ask worst thing about cicadas. Don't worry, I'll
Speaker 4: ask the best. But the thing about your job that
Speaker 4: is the most annoying or difficult or irksome, anything really sticking.
Speaker 5: Your craw well irks them is a good way. It's
Speaker 5: not that it angers me by any means, but I
Speaker 5: do don't like them. When people just step on a
Speaker 5: Willia Nelly, that bothers me.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, it looks like a huge M and M.
Speaker 4: Anyone see the nineteen eighty six Corey Haynes vehicle. Lucas
Speaker 4: Jane didn't, but if you did, you might remember a
Speaker 4: young wynowna writer, and a Charlie sheen and a subplot
Speaker 4: of emerging locusts, which for some reason they did not
Speaker 4: call cicadas. But either way, my sisters and I can
Speaker 4: quote entire scenes of that movie, a lot of great bugshots.
Speaker 4: Just got to say, but what else irks?
Speaker 5: Gane and I do get a lot of questions about
Speaker 5: eating them, okay, And that's understandable because the whole reason
Speaker 5: they're called they were called locusts, and part was related
Speaker 5: to people looking at these insects and trying to interpret
Speaker 5: their what these things were using the King James version
Speaker 5: of the Bible, and John the Baptist sate locus. We
Speaker 5: knew that the indigenous people of New England date locus
Speaker 5: when they've came out in seventeen fifteen, the report from
Speaker 5: a reverend Philadelphia said the English split them open, eat
Speaker 5: them because they said they're the locus they eating. By
Speaker 5: John the Baptist, I can't eat right now. If indeed
Speaker 5: the cicadas are in decline, then I really don't like
Speaker 5: killing them per se, because I want them to be
Speaker 5: around for many centuries.
Speaker 4: That makes tons of sense every you know, thirteen seventeen years,
Speaker 4: hopefully someone will write in a journal about their experience.
Speaker 5: You know, Oh yeah, I you'd be surprised the number
Speaker 5: letters I get. I'm informed about it. I'll do to
Speaker 5: hear of somebody that's got a letter archive. I'll give
Speaker 5: them dates and what to look for and see if
Speaker 5: there's any mention of cicadas or locus depending on the
Speaker 5: time period.
Speaker 4: That's great that you can say, like look in spring
Speaker 4: ish and this year.
Speaker 5: And one thing people can do if they want to
Speaker 5: have the fund themselves. The Library of Congress has a
Speaker 5: wonderful website called Chronicling America, and they've been digitizing newspapers
Speaker 5: from the late seven teen hundreds to nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 5: And if you're in a cicada area and you can
Speaker 5: you can find the thought in my book Periodical Ciccade's
Speaker 5: the Brouten edition. You can look up what year if
Speaker 5: you got cicadas in your area based on the distriution maps.
Speaker 5: You can look at what brood they are, look at
Speaker 5: what year they came out, and then go back into
Speaker 5: the Chronically America for May through June and look for
Speaker 5: stories on locus if it's early or cicadas. Do both,
Speaker 5: because a lot of times they were talking about even
Speaker 5: in the seventeen sixties, they were talking about these things
Speaker 5: aren't locus, they're cicadas.
Speaker 4: But yeah, oh that's so cool. There's going to be
Speaker 4: so many people going through back in time into history, and.
Speaker 5: They should talk to their grandparents. And they're lucky to
Speaker 5: have their grandparents around m hm oh or or some
Speaker 5: of the older If they got grandparents that they were
Speaker 5: around for cicadas, what do they remember them? And they
Speaker 5: may remember what their grandparents told them about the cicadas.
Speaker 5: So it's a multi generational insect, that's for sure.
Speaker 4: I know that there's so much that you love about them,
Speaker 4: But is there something that is your favorite thing about cicadas?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 5: Wow, I know it's there is something about when they
Speaker 5: first start coming out. I will go out with my tripod,
Speaker 5: my iPhone flashlight, and I'll set this thing up and
Speaker 5: I'll sit there for hours photographing a cicada as it goes.
Speaker 5: I've got probably twenty thousand pictures of this now. But
Speaker 5: it never gets old. It never gets old. And that's
Speaker 5: almost like a zen moment when you can do when
Speaker 5: that happens. And then the opposite extreme but still but
Speaker 5: still fun, is when the numbers are really big and
Speaker 5: they're screaming, and it is It is just fun. It
Speaker 5: is just great.
Speaker 4: So ask world renowned experts basic questions, even if you
Speaker 4: have to wait seventeen years to do so, and you
Speaker 4: screw it up for the first couple of minutes. At
Speaker 4: the link in the show notes, you will find Jean's fresh,
Speaker 4: newly emerged, soft and squishy book, Periodical Cicada is the
Speaker 4: ten edition. It's thirteen bucks in paperback and it's available
Speaker 4: on e reader two and it'll make your whole year.
Speaker 4: And you can get the app Cicada Safari, and you
Speaker 4: can help Jean's lab track these suckers. Also, Jean's wife, Jesse,
Speaker 4: is a silversmith and a fellow bug nerd and sells
Speaker 4: her gorgeous entomological creations via the silver Spot Studio and
Speaker 4: I will link them in the show notes as well.
Speaker 4: Cool stuff. You can learn more about cicadas from Dan
Speaker 4: Mosguy's website Cicada Mania, which is wonderful and he has
Speaker 4: an Instagram, Instagram, dot com slash Cicada Mania. Highly recommend
Speaker 4: following them, and I am Ali Ward on Twitter and
Speaker 4: Instagram with just one L and the show is at
Speaker 4: ologies on Twitter, Instagram, Thank you to Aaron Talbert who
Speaker 4: admins the Incredible Ologies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to
Speaker 4: Cicada Obsessed, Shannon and Bonnie of the podcast You Are That,
Speaker 4: who manage Ologies merch at Ologiesmarch dot com. Thank you
Speaker 4: to all the patrons at patreon dot com, slash Ologies, Hello,
Speaker 4: Ologies subreditors. Also thank you to Noel dil Worth for
Speaker 4: scheduling this, including when I got locked out and you
Speaker 4: had to send a new link. And thank you to
Speaker 4: Emily White and all the transcribers for making transcripts available
Speaker 4: and free. Those are on my website, they're linked in
Speaker 4: the show notes. Thank you to Caleb Patten for leaping them.
Speaker 4: Bleeped versions safe for kids are also on my website
Speaker 4: and links in the show notes. And thank you to
Speaker 4: assistant editor but show producer, Jarrett Sleeper, who took the
Speaker 4: first crack at this week's edit for me because I
Speaker 4: have had a bananas few weeks with Innovation Nation shoots. Jarrett,
Speaker 4: You're the wind beneath my wrinkley and Soggy Cicada winks.
Speaker 4: And of course to editor and Magic Cicada Stephen Ray Morris,
Speaker 4: who hosts the per cast see Jurassic Wright and everything
Speaker 4: with the movie A Star Wars book Club podcast. Nick
Speaker 4: Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music, And if you
Speaker 4: stick around to the end of the episode, I tell
Speaker 4: you a secret. And this week's secret is that I've
Speaker 4: recorded a secret like fifteen times when I keep losing
Speaker 4: my train of thought or I changed a secret. One
Speaker 4: of the secrets I recorded for this was like, you know,
Speaker 4: what's really good instead of iced coffee is just putting
Speaker 4: hot espresso over ice because it is not too watery.
Speaker 4: And I was like, that's not a good secret. And
Speaker 4: then I recorded a secret about how this is coming
Speaker 4: out later on a Tuesday because Grem spent Sunday projectile
Speaker 4: vomiting on clean bedding and it turned out we had
Speaker 4: to take her to the emergency event and she got
Speaker 4: X rays and she had just eaten some rocks because
Speaker 4: she's like, whoa rocks, She's gonna be fine. Also, I
Speaker 4: have to be downtown on a shoot camera ready in
Speaker 4: twenty nine minutes, and I am in my pajamas. My
Speaker 4: pajamas are pulled up well past my navel. And this
Speaker 4: morning the garage door fell off its hinges. There was
Speaker 4: an owl hooting a garbage truck Anyway, I'm having a
Speaker 4: real Monday of a Tuesday. But we're here and I
Speaker 4: want to see cicadas this year. Okay, pyevide, pacadermastology, homeology,
Speaker 4: doo zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, old parapology, nampology, ceriology, selenology.
Speaker 4: It's okateous season, so keep your mouth shut.