Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Stephen Ray, UNISEF ambassador. What's next on your
Speaker 1: bucket list? Imagine adding something extraordinary to your list and
Speaker 1: changing a child's life. Join me in leaving a gift
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Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Oh hello, this is smologies If you're like, what is that?
Speaker 2: Smologies are digests of classic episodes. We've taken a classic
Speaker 2: episode that was for adults. Sometimes we've cut them down
Speaker 2: so they're shorter, they're kids safe, they're g rated. Okay,
Speaker 2: they're just for you. This one about Skatas love, this
Speaker 2: one Cicatas are back and so we're making this asmologies
Speaker 2: for you, so do enjoy. If you want the full
Speaker 2: length all the details, including some swearing, you can find
Speaker 2: the original full length version at the link in the shutouts,
Speaker 2: But for now, this is just a shortyologies. Oh hey,
Speaker 2: it's your friend's older sister Ali Ward back with an
Speaker 2: episode I have waited most of my life for no exaggeration.
Speaker 2: When I first came up with ologies as a concept.
Speaker 2: It was partly just to drink an expert into talking
Speaker 2: to me about cicadas. Okay, let's get to cicadology. Cicada
Speaker 2: in Latin means tree cricket, but your Appalachian friends may
Speaker 2: call them jarflies. I just found out I have only
Speaker 2: seen a cicada in the wild maybe three times in
Speaker 2: my life, and each time I crowded around it and
Speaker 2: gasped and took pictures like an American at the Eiffel Tower.
Speaker 2: I have never even seen a periodical cicada, the ones
Speaker 2: that emerge in the trillions every thirteen or seventeen years
Speaker 2: in the US. So this year we're getting ahead of
Speaker 2: their emergence. And this ologist who is the authority on
Speaker 2: periodical cicadas, he hails from North Dakota. He's written multiple
Speaker 2: bug books and authored scores of papers on insects. He
Speaker 2: is the cicada guy. So he typically appears in the
Speaker 2: news sometimes maybe you've seen him in all khaki field
Speaker 2: gear and a tan sun hat. And he has a
Speaker 2: gentle silver beard with kind of a tidy upturned mustache,
Speaker 2: like a friendly smile. And we hopped on a call
Speaker 2: to record, and I just screwed it up so bad,
Speaker 2: Like immediately I dropped off the connection and I could
Speaker 2: not log back in, and there were all these tech hiccups.
Speaker 2: So I texted our wonderful assistant scheduler, Noel Dilworth. I said, hey,
Speaker 2: I sent him a new link, but he hasn't shown up,
Speaker 2: but I hope he's not mad. And then I got
Speaker 2: the reply, I am not distressed, and I had texted
Speaker 2: him that instead of Noell. So, between wanting to do
Speaker 2: this episode for seventeen years and then talking to the
Speaker 2: world expert in it and texting him about him, my
Speaker 2: level of body sweat was clinically dangerous, but regardless, we
Speaker 2: figured it out. We got on the line to chat
Speaker 2: about life cycles and ghostly remains, cicada chasing the decibel
Speaker 2: levels of our spring time I'm friends, and what you
Speaker 2: should do if you see a cicada, the app Cicada Safari,
Speaker 2: and what they are doing underground for nearly two decades
Speaker 2: while we missed them with icon legend and cicadologist doctor
Speaker 2: Jean Kritsky, who may or may not.
Speaker 3: Already be mad at me, Algyge, I like.
Speaker 2: That, are you mad at me? Why?
Speaker 4: Would I be mad?
Speaker 2: I felt so mad. I was like, oh no, maybe
Speaker 2: he just left forever. I was mortified when I realized
Speaker 2: that went to you. But uh, secrets out. I'm a
Speaker 2: human being's all right? So am I all right? Down
Speaker 2: to business.
Speaker 4: I'm Jean Kritsky and I use here him.
Speaker 2: And now, can you tell me a little bit about
Speaker 2: what we can expect this year from the cicada population
Speaker 2: in the United States.
Speaker 4: We'll start seeing our first sign of cicadas in late
Speaker 4: April after a big heavy rain. Some of the cicada,
Speaker 4: especially the soil is a very heavy clay soil. They'll
Speaker 4: actually extend their tunnels above ground. They're called chimneys or turrets,
Speaker 4: firm similar to what crayfish will sometimes do.
Speaker 2: Newsflesh to me that crowdads aka crayfish emerge sometimes out
Speaker 2: of tall, lumpy turrets they build. And also I googled
Speaker 2: cicada tunnels and one image taken under a deck looked
Speaker 2: like a coral reef, or like big tall stacks of
Speaker 2: dirty poker chips, or like the tallest birthday cake ever,
Speaker 2: out of which a beautiful ghoul pops up to say
Speaker 2: Happy seventeen Year's Day.
Speaker 4: Surprise. But that's the first sign that we'll see. That'll
Speaker 4: be usually this in late April. They come out of
Speaker 4: the soil when the soil temperature reaches sixty four to
Speaker 4: grease fahrenheit. And then very specific, well, these are cicadas,
Speaker 4: you know, they got they got things to do. They
Speaker 4: gotta come out in seventeen years. They to keep track
Speaker 4: of numbers and what have you. Once you hit that
Speaker 4: temperature for sixty four degrees fahrenheit and then you have
Speaker 4: a really nice soaking rain that just sort of saturates everything,
Speaker 4: then they really pop. I mean, it's just it's amazing.
Speaker 4: The highest density I've ever seen was three hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty six per square yard. Wow, and that was over
Speaker 4: the course of about a two week period. They came up.
Speaker 4: But at the first even they come up by the
Speaker 4: hundreds and thousands were If there was as much larger,
Speaker 4: you could probably have a really good sci fi movie.
Speaker 2: Well, what's the difference between a periodical cicada that might
Speaker 2: come out every seventeen years or thirteen years and annual cicadas.
Speaker 4: They belong to different genera, But if you want to
Speaker 4: look at it, if you look at them, you'll find
Speaker 4: that the annual cicadas. Some are called dog day cicadas,
Speaker 4: be could it come on the dog days of summer.
Speaker 4: They're much larger, their head is more flat, their eyes
Speaker 4: are black, sometimes green. Many of them are black with
Speaker 4: brown markings, are black with green markings that were camouflaged.
Speaker 4: And as I say, they're about a half inch to
Speaker 4: an inch larger than the periodicals.
Speaker 2: So the annual ones come out in the heat of
Speaker 2: summer every year, and although they are more chunk, you
Speaker 2: won't see their camouflaged bods as readily, and you will
Speaker 2: not witness anything near the numbers of the periodical cicadas.
Speaker 2: The annual ones are just all in all more low key.
Speaker 2: Is that part of their evolutionary strategy is just a
Speaker 2: ton of them at once. How does that work?
Speaker 4: Well, it's works well for them. It's called predator satiation,
Speaker 4: is what we think is happening. They come out in
Speaker 4: these large numbers. Some of the birds are major predators
Speaker 4: of them, but their little crops can't hold many more cicadas.
Speaker 4: And the analogy I like to use is imagine walking
Speaker 4: outside and all of a sudden you see the whole
Speaker 4: world is inundated with flying Hershey's kisses. I'm fond of
Speaker 4: Hershey's kisses. And you intend to eat and eat and
Speaker 4: eat and eat and eat so these, but eventually you
Speaker 4: will get tired of them. In nineteen ninety one and fourteen,
Speaker 4: Emerginal I saw this dog the first say they're coming up,
Speaker 4: snapping out all over in the ark. You's just going
Speaker 4: at him. Five days later, go back to see how
Speaker 4: the emergency is going on at some of my test sites,
Speaker 4: and that dog is just lying on the porch, paws folded,
Speaker 4: and cicada's walking all around.
Speaker 2: Does not carried over it. I'm over these things. So
Speaker 2: periodical cicadas are in the genus Magicicata, and they make
Speaker 2: a splash. They are smaller than the annual cicadas, but
Speaker 2: they have such style in the form of blood red eyes,
Speaker 2: and there's billions, maybe trillions of them. In fact, their
Speaker 2: genus looks like magic cicada, but magi actually comes from
Speaker 2: the Latin for many, not from the word magic. But
Speaker 2: there are over a dozen seventeen year broods and a
Speaker 2: small handful of thirteen year broods. And I'm going to
Speaker 2: link on my website to a US map to see
Speaker 2: which broods might be in your area. Now, elsewhere in
Speaker 2: the world, you can always gaze at an annual cicada.
Speaker 2: If you have them, you can tell it you love
Speaker 2: it if you can find it. But if you have
Speaker 2: periodicals in your area, they're hard to miss because they
Speaker 2: blanket everything. And you know, this is one thing I
Speaker 2: think that still mystifies us. But can you describe a
Speaker 2: little bit of the life cycle? What are they doing
Speaker 2: that whole time.
Speaker 4: Let's start when the adults emerge from the ground. But
Speaker 4: what will happen is I mentioned the soil will be
Speaker 4: sixty four degrees fahrenheit, nice soaking rain, and that causes
Speaker 4: the nymph in cicadas to come out of the ground.
Speaker 4: They start wandering on trying to find a vertical surface
Speaker 4: to crawl up, because our whole purpose now is to
Speaker 4: shed their nymphile skin and transform to the adult. I've
Speaker 4: seen them crawl up trees, brick walls, fence walls, tombstones,
Speaker 4: blades of grass, whatever going up. They climb up that
Speaker 4: surface and they lock their little legs into the tree trunk.
Speaker 4: Let's say it's a tree, and then all of a sudden,
Speaker 4: the back of the thorc splits open like somebody wearing
Speaker 4: a black coat o with a white shirt underneath it,
Speaker 4: and that's just too small, and they split the seam.
Speaker 4: They see this thing open up, and then it goes
Speaker 4: up and cracks the head capsule, and then slowly the
Speaker 4: adult cicada wriggles its way out, and by this time
Speaker 4: it's out. It's white in color, it's got red eyes,
Speaker 4: two black patches behind the head. And then they'll eventually
Speaker 4: look like the typical adult cicada with the red eyes
Speaker 4: and the black body and the numbertous wings with the
Speaker 4: orange color on the major wing mates at the base.
Speaker 4: And then the thing I want to do now is
Speaker 4: basically climb to the tops of the trees and then
Speaker 4: they start flying, and that's when you'll see the birds
Speaker 4: really attuned to them. And at this time more males
Speaker 4: emerged the first couple of days than females. That vanguard
Speaker 4: there is going to give their lives so that others
Speaker 4: can live.
Speaker 2: So the early male gets the axe just first on
Speaker 2: the scene looking for ladies. They are delicious. They're like
Speaker 2: the first French fry you eat out of the drive through,
Speaker 2: just the least likely to survive, and males and females
Speaker 2: will sprout out over the next couple of weeks, all
Speaker 2: looking for springtime, summer.
Speaker 4: Loving, and after about five days or so, after they've merged,
Speaker 4: the males can start singing.
Speaker 2: Yes, many questions about this. When you say singing, what
Speaker 2: would you say that it sounds like it's beautiful? Yeah,
Speaker 2: I love it. I think it sounds kind of otherworldly
Speaker 2: to me. Just this really kind of high pitched buzzing y.
Speaker 4: It's very much so. There are three species that are
Speaker 4: calls who are different from the three species. The large one,
Speaker 4: sept in decim, has a sort of like b and
Speaker 4: it sounds like when you hear a whole chorus of
Speaker 4: these things, it sounds like some nineteen fifties science fiction movie.
Speaker 4: And that's the sound of the flying saucers flying in.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And then the smaller species, cass and eye, is more
Speaker 4: of a constant sound, and it doesn't all stay constant
Speaker 4: and sound and levels. It'll get louder and then drop
Speaker 4: off louder, drop off. The highest I've measured is n
Speaker 4: six decibels.
Speaker 2: Ooh my gosh. That's about as loud as like a
Speaker 2: rock band playing right as a rock band. I've never
Speaker 2: been more like your old uncle, but yes, different calls
Speaker 2: like the ones on the wonderful incredible website Cicadamania run
Speaker 2: by Dan mos Guy hit different decibel levels and some
Speaker 2: are said to approach one hundred and twenty decibels, which
Speaker 2: I looked it up, and that is a volume of
Speaker 2: an ambulance siren. So man bugs screaming for love?
Speaker 4: I'd say Joe is on the flight path. This is
Speaker 4: a international airport and skatos will drowned out the jets.
Speaker 2: Wow, how are they making that loud of a sound?
Speaker 4: The sound is made by a timble. There are two
Speaker 4: timbles on the first abdominal segment of the mail, and
Speaker 4: then the male's abdomen is mostly hollow, and so that
Speaker 4: acts almost like a resonator to get a little louder.
Speaker 2: Think of the belly of a stringed instrument. So there
Speaker 2: is a reason a violin or acoustic guitar is hollow.
Speaker 4: And you put ten twenty thousand of these in one tree,
Speaker 4: it's going to add up. And the sound if you've
Speaker 4: ever taken the bendy straw, you know the one that
Speaker 4: has yeah and you can you pull it out? You
Speaker 4: hear that little snapping sound? Do that about one hundred
Speaker 4: and fifty to hundred times in a second. And that's
Speaker 4: your call for that mail amplified with the abdomen being hollow,
Speaker 4: and then multiply that by twenty thousand, and you might
Speaker 4: have a good example of a course.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh my gosh oh. And also apparently, if you
Speaker 2: are hosting a boys to kana on your hand and
Speaker 2: you want to prompt it to perform, try snapping your
Speaker 2: fingers at it. It will mistake the sound.
Speaker 4: For a lady.
Speaker 2: And then try to impress you by screaming. And now
Speaker 2: what happens when she is gravid or peggers.
Speaker 4: What happens, Well, then she's got to find a place
Speaker 4: to lay her eggs, okay, and she will lay her
Speaker 4: eggs in the new growth of trees. And she has
Speaker 4: a structure called an ovipositor, which is a structure at
Speaker 4: the tip of her abdomen which she pulls out of
Speaker 4: a slit the tip of arabuen and then literally it
Speaker 4: has a central rod and on each side are two
Speaker 4: structures that are serrated and they move opposite and literally
Speaker 4: cut into the wood. And it turns out they are
Speaker 4: also like we see with a nuoned wasp that lay
Speaker 4: their eggs in her bark and so on, also reinforced
Speaker 4: with metals, and these metals are increase along the side
Speaker 4: of the serrations, so they're armored again.
Speaker 2: Wow, oh that's amazing. I'm just going to restate that
Speaker 2: for all of us. So Cicada ladies' ovipositors are serrated
Speaker 2: like knives and reinforced with metal, also like a knife.
Speaker 4: She'll lay between ten to twenty eggs, and each little
Speaker 4: egg nesser it's about a quarter in is long. Walking
Speaker 4: out of the corners, down puncture the tree twig again, lay
Speaker 4: more eggs and so on, and she keeps doing that
Speaker 4: until she either runs out of a branch that she
Speaker 4: has to fly at another one and eventually runs out
Speaker 4: of eggs.
Speaker 2: But they still have quite a trek to make right
Speaker 2: they do.
Speaker 4: After she lays her eggs, they die and both the
Speaker 4: male is dead and the female then drops dead and
Speaker 4: that's it. And it takes six to eight weeks after
Speaker 4: the eggs were laid that they start hatching, and that's
Speaker 4: usually the end of July first of August if you're
Speaker 4: at the right time, in the right place. When the
Speaker 4: eggs are hatching and the nymphs crawl out of their
Speaker 4: the egg ness and the sun is the right ankle.
Speaker 4: You can actually see these things drop like little little
Speaker 4: flecks to the ground, and that's when they're extremely vulnerable. Spiders, ants,
Speaker 4: ground beetles go after these things like crazy. So as
Speaker 4: soon as they hit the ground, they've got to find
Speaker 4: a crack in the soil, as usually a long a
Speaker 4: blade of grass, and they get underground immediately as fast
Speaker 4: as they can.
Speaker 2: So, yes, eggs are laid in slits in tree twigs
Speaker 2: and then they emerge and once on the ground, they
Speaker 2: start looking for thirteen or seventeen year real estate.
Speaker 4: And so they feed on grassroots for the first few weeks,
Speaker 4: and then by New Year's Day they're ten to twelve
Speaker 4: inches below the surface, latched onto a tree root, sucking.
Speaker 4: And I know it because on New Year's Day I
Speaker 4: went out and dug up cicadas.
Speaker 2: Really, so they've already latched on there. So do they
Speaker 2: spend those cold winters just sucking up sugars from the
Speaker 2: tree roots?
Speaker 4: Well, yes, but although they're feeding on the xylum tissue
Speaker 4: and oh okay, and as you remember from biology, xylem
Speaker 4: is the water conducting tissue that brings water and minerals
Speaker 4: from the soil up to the leaves. The floam has
Speaker 4: the sugars coming down, so they're feeding on this nutrient
Speaker 4: poor fluid for the next seventeen years and not moving
Speaker 4: probably more than a yard or a meter in any
Speaker 4: direction during that time.
Speaker 2: Got everything I need right here with me.
Speaker 4: It thought that the long life cycle might be a
Speaker 4: response to their evolving and adapting to the ice ages.
Speaker 2: Really yeah, okay, So tell me a little bit about
Speaker 2: that and about these long life cycles and how they
Speaker 2: know when to come out.
Speaker 4: The life cycles. Well, there's two life cycles, seventeen years
Speaker 4: and thirteen years, and they grow at different rates. One
Speaker 4: of the differences between the thirteen and seven years cicadas
Speaker 4: is that the thirteen year cicadas moult an extra time
Speaker 4: within that first five years of life. Oh okay, and
Speaker 4: that triggers they're coming out four years early. But the
Speaker 4: idea is that the thirteen year cicada has evolved south
Speaker 4: of the glaciers, and if you look at the thirteen
Speaker 4: year cicada distribution, they're mostly in the southern part of
Speaker 4: the eastern United States. But then the seventeen year ciccadaes
Speaker 4: are generally more north than that, although there are some
Speaker 4: of that in eastern Oklahoma that get a little far south.
Speaker 2: So Gene explained that cicadas are creatures of climate, evolving
Speaker 2: and separating into different species and broods and groups relatively
Speaker 2: recently in the last ice ages, adapting to ice sheets
Speaker 2: and going further south and then advancing north again when
Speaker 2: they receded, and the thirteen and seventeen year periodical cicadas
Speaker 2: separated over the last three hundred thousand years, which geologically
Speaker 2: speaking is pretty recently, and then further split into the
Speaker 2: three thirteen year broods and twelve seventeen year broods. Can
Speaker 2: I ask you questions from listeners, certainly, but before we
Speaker 2: do a quick note about sponsors of the show. Because
Speaker 2: of them, we can toss a cicada load of money
Speaker 2: at a worthy cause each week, and this week doctor
Speaker 2: Kritsky requested it to go to Mount Saint Joseph's University
Speaker 2: in Cincinnati, School of Behavioral and Natural Sciences, and Gene says,
Speaker 2: you can designate it for cicada research. Our VP will
Speaker 2: be shocked. So let's do that now. If you feel
Speaker 2: like tossing a few bucks that way, there's going to
Speaker 2: be a link in the show notes, and thank you
Speaker 2: to the following sponsors for allowing this podcast to donate.
Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Stephen Ray, UNISEF ambassador. What's next on your
Speaker 1: bucket list? Imagine adding something extraordinary to your list and
Speaker 1: changing a child's life. Join me in leaving a gift
Speaker 1: in your will to UNISEF and help bring safe water,
Speaker 1: education and hope to children across the world. Visit UNISEF
Speaker 1: dot ie forward slash bucket to receive your free bucket
Speaker 1: list journal or call zero one eight seven eight three thousand.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Okay. Many patrons, such as first time question askers Molly
Speaker 2: Cousins and Alex Bowman, wanted to know how are they
Speaker 2: better at time management than PA? Essentially, how do they
Speaker 2: know when to come out? Is there a stage manager underground?
Speaker 2: What's happening? Do you have any idea to do? Scientists
Speaker 2: know if there's something chemical that triggers that emergence, how
Speaker 2: do they sense it.
Speaker 4: We know that they can determine year passages by the
Speaker 4: changes in fluid flow in the xylum. You know, when
Speaker 4: the tree goes dorm it. There seems to be some
Speaker 4: they can detect that leaf sets and flower sets can
Speaker 4: trigger that because that you'll see more fluid flow. But
Speaker 4: what we don't know is how do they remember what
Speaker 4: year it is?
Speaker 1: M hm.
Speaker 4: We did have an event happened here in Cincinnati in
Speaker 4: two thousand and six. We had a December that reached
Speaker 4: seventy degrees and it continued into January, and the maple
Speaker 4: tree in my backyard leafed out. I thought I was
Speaker 4: opposes to me, this is January. Then we had a
Speaker 4: hard freeze in February, all the leaves fell off. Come
Speaker 4: the late March early April, the trees started leafing out again,
Speaker 4: and in parts of Cincinnati where Breod fourteen was expected
Speaker 4: to come out the following year, they came out. So
Speaker 4: for those cicadas, they thought seventeen years had passed even
Speaker 4: though they had two leaf sets that occurred in one year.
Speaker 2: For more on how leaves come and go by the way,
Speaker 2: check out the Phonology episode. Also heads up to Hannah Noos,
Speaker 2: I'm about to pronounce your name wrong and I am sorry.
Speaker 2: And so this details into a question from several listeners,
Speaker 2: A first time question asker David Oronoff, first timer hunter Elliott,
Speaker 2: Hannah Newst, and Earl of Graymulkin all wanted to know,
Speaker 2: in well, in Earl's words, not to be depressing, but
Speaker 2: to be depressing, how is climate change affecting cicadas? And
Speaker 2: a hunter wanted to know could their hibernation cycles be
Speaker 2: altered because of it?
Speaker 4: That's one of these that we're looking into, and it
Speaker 4: seems possible. As I mentioned, they are climate insects, if
Speaker 4: you will. They emerged when the soil temperature reaches sixty
Speaker 4: four degrees fahrenheit, and prior to nineteen fifty, the average
Speaker 4: for Cincinnati was May twenty eighth, twenty ninth. Since nineteen fifty,
Speaker 4: and in the last few years, they're now coming round
Speaker 4: between the thirteenth and the sixteenth of May, so spring
Speaker 4: is now two weeks warmer than we were back in
Speaker 4: the first half of the twentieth century. What that could do,
Speaker 4: for example, if you had continuous like what happened in
Speaker 4: two thousand and six and two thousand and seven, if
Speaker 4: you had a year event happened where there was like
Speaker 4: trees that seemed to the cicada d if a two
Speaker 4: year things had passed, they might molt in that first
Speaker 4: five years, which would trigger a four year early acceleration
Speaker 4: and emerging off cycle. And that's actually happened in nineteen
Speaker 4: ninety one. My students in my ecology and evolution classes
Speaker 4: know that we would go out to the orchard at
Speaker 4: the university and we'd dig up cicadatives to sort of
Speaker 4: drive home the scientific method. I gave this wonderful paper
Speaker 4: written by Monte Lloyd and Joeanne White. It talked about
Speaker 4: this between thirteen year scades of seventeen year cicadas, and
Speaker 4: it said what stage of growth they should be at
Speaker 4: each year. And I said, okay, what stage should they
Speaker 4: be at? And then we got shovels and went out
Speaker 4: and dug up cicadas. And the cicadas were bigger they
Speaker 4: should have been. So what that meant to me was
Speaker 4: they're going to come out four years early. And they
Speaker 4: came out, oh and massive numbers. It was mind boggling.
Speaker 2: What's going to happen to that one? Is it going
Speaker 2: to get off cycle now or is it going to
Speaker 2: step in line with the rest?
Speaker 4: Oh, that's what we wanted to know. So of course,
Speaker 4: working with cicadas, that's the problem. This is to the
Speaker 4: year two thousand. Yeah, So I went back in twenty thirteen,
Speaker 4: my wife and I went to the study site and
Speaker 4: they started coming out. They were coming out. We found
Speaker 4: shells all over the place. Who went out there, and
Speaker 4: even the hundreds of them came out. We'd go back
Speaker 4: the next day. We couldn't find a single adult cicada.
Speaker 4: Those cicadas did not survive predation to reproduce in twenty thirteen. Wow,
Speaker 4: wait four more years now, you've remember this is out
Speaker 4: seventeen years later.
Speaker 2: So this last early emergence happened in twenty seventeen, and
Speaker 2: adult cicadas who were just little baby eggs in that
Speaker 2: early two thousand emergents made it all around Cincinnati and
Speaker 2: their babies were on time seventeen years later, and not
Speaker 2: in one backyard, but thirty three different locations recorded. So
Speaker 2: what happens to all these early bird cicadas?
Speaker 4: Things are out of sinc What we've seen now is
Speaker 4: the origin of a new population of brood six.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, Patron David Ordinoff asks, are we looking at
Speaker 2: dwindling populations? So what kind of head count are we talking?
Speaker 4: It's sort of It's interesting. In nineteen nineteen, headlines and
Speaker 4: newspapers around the country talked about brood ten's emerging. It's
Speaker 4: probably on its way out. There's concern about it's going extinct.
Speaker 4: As crazy as that sounds, it's happened Brood eleven, which
Speaker 4: emerged in massive numbers in sixteen ninety nine just outside
Speaker 4: of Boston. What extinct in nineteen fifty four.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 4: Here in Ohio in northwest of Ohio, several counties that
Speaker 4: reported cicadas in the late nineteenth century early twentieth century
Speaker 4: no longer have cicadas. So one of the things I'm
Speaker 4: hoping that we do with people helping us with the
Speaker 4: Cicada Safari app is to really give us a good
Speaker 4: picture what's the status of.
Speaker 2: Brew ten And so now people can download Cicada Safari
Speaker 2: and what they take a picture and let you know
Speaker 2: where they took it, like geotagged it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we want to do two things. We want to
Speaker 4: help people have more enjoyment with the cicadas. So after
Speaker 4: you've downloaded the app and it's free, we encourage people
Speaker 4: to go on their own Cicada Safari and if they
Speaker 4: see one, they take a photograph and submit it. I've
Speaker 4: got a group of colleagues who are volunteering and working
Speaker 4: to help us identify and examine every photograph.
Speaker 2: Us ologites do your thing Cicada Safari app. I know
Speaker 2: that there's so much that you love about them, but
Speaker 2: is there something that is your favorite thing about cicadas?
Speaker 4: Oh? Wow, I know there is something about when they
Speaker 4: first start coming out. I will go out with my tripod,
Speaker 4: my iPhone flashlight and I'll set this thing up and
Speaker 4: I'll sit there for hours photographing as cicada as it goes.
Speaker 4: I've got probably twenty thousand pictures of this.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: It never gets old. It never gets old. And that's
Speaker 4: almost like a zen moment when you can do when
Speaker 4: that happens, and then to the opposite extreme but still
Speaker 4: is but still fun, is when the numbers are really
Speaker 4: big and they're screaming, and it is just it is
Speaker 4: just fun. It is just great.
Speaker 2: So ask world renowned experts basic questions, even if you
Speaker 2: have to wait seventeen years to do so and you
Speaker 2: screwed up for the first couple of minutes. At the
Speaker 2: link in the show notes, you will find the app
Speaker 2: Cicada Safari, and you can help Jeans Lab track these suckers.
Speaker 2: You can learn more about cicadas from Dan Mosguy's website
Speaker 2: Cicada Mania, which is wonderful and he has an Instagram,
Speaker 2: Instagram dot com slash Cicada Mania. Highly recommend following them,
Speaker 2: and I am Ali Ward on Twitter and Instagram with
Speaker 2: just one L and the show is at Ologies on
Speaker 2: Twitter Instagram. Also linked is aliward dot com slash smologies,
Speaker 2: which has dozens more kids safe and shorter episodes you
Speaker 2: can blaze through and thank you Mercedes Maitland of Maitland
Speaker 2: Audio for editing those and says we like to keep
Speaker 2: things small around here. The rest of the credits are
Speaker 2: in the show notes, and if you stick around until
Speaker 2: the end of the episode, you know that I give
Speaker 2: you a piece of advice. And this piece of advice
Speaker 2: is that if you love bugs and you love taking
Speaker 2: pictures of them, you might want to ask it grown up.
Speaker 2: Maybe if your next birthday for like a little macro
Speaker 2: lens that you can clip on to a phone or
Speaker 2: an iPad. You can take up close pictures and bugs.
Speaker 2: Even the smallest patch of dirt becomes fascinating with that.
Speaker 2: But you can also just get up close with any
Speaker 2: kind of camera and check out and see what's under leaves,
Speaker 2: what's on the underside of a branch. There's so many
Speaker 2: bugs hanging out everywhere, and you'd be surprised. You can
Speaker 2: go on a bug safari with the smallest little patch
Speaker 2: of lawn, so enjoy. I love doing that. I'll sit
Speaker 2: in the garden. I'll just be like, who's out here? Boom?
Speaker 2: I got ten new friends in a second. All right,
Speaker 2: bye bye, so alergy slogy.
Speaker 3: Thoutin.
Speaker 1: Hi. I'm Stephen Ray, UNISEEF Ambassador. What's next on your
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Speaker 1: three thousand. Thank you,