Speaker 1: Welcome this Tuesday afternoon at the Tri States Baseball kicks
Speaker 1: off tonight about six oh five with Lance mcgallis of
Speaker 1: the Reds. In the last ten games are the best
Speaker 1: record in the Central Division in baseball. The Twinkies are
Speaker 1: in town for three. Then we'll see what happens there
Speaker 1: is the Reds drive toward the All Star breaking more
Speaker 1: plus later on today at two oh five, it is
Speaker 1: alleged that Prosecutor County Pillage is going to hold a
Speaker 1: news conference to determine whether or not there should be
Speaker 1: criminal charges and the shooting of Ryan Hinton, that eighteen
Speaker 1: year old boy who was shot having stolen a vehicle
Speaker 1: and had a gun in his hand, ran away. There's
Speaker 1: speculation whether the prosecutor's office here in Hamlet County will
Speaker 1: indict or not. And now that's going to be announced
Speaker 1: sometime after two o'clock today. We're going to cover it
Speaker 1: for you live, I believe, according to Tony benderho's putting
Speaker 1: his qualifications and credibility on the line saying we will
Speaker 1: broadcast it live sometime after two o'clock as it begins.
Speaker 1: But until then, there's more important matters, which are cicadas.
Speaker 1: Cicadas and cicadas, And I think we all can agree
Speaker 1: world to recognize renowned expert on cicadas's professor gen Kritsky,
Speaker 1: recently retired from Mount Saint Joe, who's written at least
Speaker 1: five books on the subject, and where do they come from?
Speaker 1: Why are they here? Et cetera. Professor Kritsky, welcome again
Speaker 1: to the Bill Cunningham Show. And first of all, Professor,
Speaker 1: how many years have you spent studying cicadas?
Speaker 2: Oh, I'm at fifty one years though.
Speaker 1: How many books have you written on the subject of cicadas.
Speaker 2: I've written five books on them, I have another one planned,
Speaker 2: and I've written probably about a dozen research publications. And
Speaker 2: you and I have been talking about cicadas for thirty
Speaker 2: eight years.
Speaker 1: Now, Well, do we have time to do it in
Speaker 1: seventeen years from now? What do you think I'm going
Speaker 1: to try? I'll try to then, thirty eight years ago
Speaker 1: we started with cicadas. At that point, once you're at
Speaker 1: Mount Saint Joe, Am I correct about that?
Speaker 2: I was? I I working on that interview in the studio.
Speaker 1: That's so we don't do that much anymore. But that's
Speaker 1: a different issue. Professor Krisky, tell me what is the cicada. Basically,
Speaker 1: what is the cicada? And then we'll get onto more
Speaker 1: particular issues. What is a cicada?
Speaker 2: Well, we're talking about the periodical cicadas. The cicadas are
Speaker 2: insects BLO. They're belonging to They're like true bugs. They
Speaker 2: have a sucking mouth part. They're related to aphids and
Speaker 2: stink bugs. But the periodical skaters, the ones that we're
Speaker 2: talking about this morning, are these strangers like that have
Speaker 2: these very long life cycles. And what we're seeing right
Speaker 2: now is brood fourteen. It's a seventeen year cicada. And
Speaker 2: the last time I visited Cincinnati was in two thousand
Speaker 2: and eight.
Speaker 1: How many different broods are there? Because every now and
Speaker 1: then you get a little bit of minor eruptions. Right
Speaker 1: now there's a major one kind of dying out at
Speaker 1: this point. How many different broods are there?
Speaker 2: There are fifteen different broods, twelve different broods of seventeen
Speaker 2: year skatus and three thirteen year broods. That's the exciting
Speaker 2: thing the I discovered in part because if your help
Speaker 2: helping us get the word out there, we have a
Speaker 2: thirteen year cicada in Ohio. It's brewed twenty two, and
Speaker 2: it'll emerge in twenty twenty seven.
Speaker 1: So in twenty twenty seven we may do this again.
Speaker 2: Well, it's going to be mostly in Brown and Claremont
Speaker 2: County in Ohio and then ten counties in northern Kentucky.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 1: Why do cicadas exist? What is the purpose? What is
Speaker 1: the purpose of life? The purpose of cicada life? Why
Speaker 1: do they exist?
Speaker 2: Well, the purpose of just life in general is to reproduce,
Speaker 2: But for periodical scad is they do a lot of
Speaker 2: good for the ecosystem. For example, when the nymphs come
Speaker 2: out of the ground those holes. Those holes persist until
Speaker 2: December and January, and during the hot summer when the
Speaker 2: ground gets really hard and a range that rain water
Speaker 2: goes down those holes and helps water the trees. When
Speaker 2: the adults come out and start flying around their food
Speaker 2: for all sorts of opportunity predators, that allows their populations
Speaker 2: to rebound. When the females lay their eggs in the
Speaker 2: terminal growth of trees, it causes them time sometimes that
Speaker 2: branch to break. We call it flagging, and that's like
Speaker 2: a natural pruning. So it looks ugly this year, but
Speaker 2: next year there'll be a bigger flower set on those
Speaker 2: trees that had that davage. And then finally, when that's
Speaker 2: all done, both the males and the females die and
Speaker 2: their carcasses collect the base of trees. Let's got a
Speaker 2: little bit of dew and rain in June and July
Speaker 2: and August. Then they'll start to decay and rot. And
Speaker 2: that is a scent memory. However, all that smells because
Speaker 2: they're decaying and all those nutrients from their carcasses are
Speaker 2: going around the trees where the carcasses gathered to nurture
Speaker 2: that tree for the next seventeen years.
Speaker 1: Are they harmful to human beings in any way?
Speaker 2: No, they're not. They I don't bite, they don't sting,
Speaker 2: they don't carry disease. They won't even carry away small children.
Speaker 1: Tom brennanman likes to eat cicadas. I didn't know this
Speaker 1: till recently, but Tom told me he goes out in
Speaker 1: his yard and marry Mont often picking up a handful
Speaker 1: with cicadas at nine and starts eating them. Is that
Speaker 1: a good idea?
Speaker 2: Probably not, because multi for humans eat cicadas, it's more
Speaker 2: of a of a of a bad They're not a
Speaker 2: sustainable food source, so you can't have one meal once
Speaker 2: every seventeen years. But what we're seeing, especially in Merrimont
Speaker 2: in other areas, is the amount of trees where they're
Speaker 2: reproducing us is being declined, has declined. So back for example,
Speaker 2: that that median strip of Marmont where they removed all
Speaker 2: those trees in two thousand and eight, replaced two thousand ten,
Speaker 2: excuse me, and replaced them with the valves. The cicadas
Speaker 2: didn't merge there this year, but not in the numbers
Speaker 2: they did back in two thousand and eight. So what
Speaker 2: they are telling us looking at the distribution that we're
Speaker 2: germing with Cicada savari is the impact of deforestation urban
Speaker 2: development on cicada populations. That sort of gives us a
Speaker 2: little temperature of what we're doing to our own urban environment.
Speaker 1: Professor Kritzko, are you saying it's like a genocide against
Speaker 1: the cicad when you cut down trees? Because I belong
Speaker 1: to Kenwic Country Club. We've cut down five hundred trees,
Speaker 1: magnificent oak and elm and other trees. Is Chemic country
Speaker 1: Club kind of committing a genocide against the cicadas?
Speaker 2: Well, as long as our more cicadas than than the
Speaker 2: mile of those trees. They will disperse back in not necessarily.
Speaker 2: It might take fifty one years for them to get
Speaker 2: back to the same population size that they can disperse
Speaker 2: and fly about a mile per emergence.
Speaker 1: When does cicadas begin? When to their life cycle? It
Speaker 1: was in the eighteenth century that the birth of the
Speaker 1: christ When did cicadas first emerge?
Speaker 2: But we know from DNA studies that the genus Magines Cicada,
Speaker 2: which is our the periodical scatus, goes back at least
Speaker 2: three point ninety five million years and then two and
Speaker 2: a half million years ago the large species suffering into
Speaker 2: the small speci, so you have two species dead and
Speaker 2: then half a million years ago the small species species against.
Speaker 2: So there's now three distinct species of seventeen year cicadas.
Speaker 2: So they go back by the bit that the broods
Speaker 2: what we're talking about now, they all originated since the
Speaker 2: last ice.
Speaker 1: Age, which was about ten thousand years ago.
Speaker 2: About twenty thousand years ago, the ice sheet was just
Speaker 2: north of Tri County Mall. So it's been in the
Speaker 2: last twenty thousand years that they moved north into the
Speaker 2: areas where the ice ice sheet was, and as they
Speaker 2: were doing that, that's when they were going to these
Speaker 2: usual accelerations and what have you. And that formed all
Speaker 2: the broods that we see today. You know.
Speaker 1: And Tony Bender spends a lot of time in the
Speaker 1: Tri County Mall, which is now closed. He's crying out
Speaker 1: in front almost every day. But if he would have
Speaker 1: been there about twenty thousand years ago and the ice
Speaker 1: flow the glacier came from the north Pole and stopped
Speaker 1: around Try County Mall, if it was at the edge
Speaker 1: of the Tri County Mall and looked up, how high
Speaker 1: was that ice flow? How high was that glacier?
Speaker 2: I don't recall the actual number offhand, but it was noticeable.
Speaker 2: It wasn't like a little skim of ice. It was
Speaker 2: several meters.
Speaker 1: And that's why did it stop there? Why didn't it
Speaker 1: keep going all the way to the High River. It
Speaker 1: did stop, and that created the Great Lakes when it
Speaker 1: when it receded. But why did it stop there?
Speaker 2: We A lot of that has to do is just uh,
Speaker 2: the overall temperatures that were going on and the tobography. Uh. Fortunately,
Speaker 2: as it's where it stopped, and then I feel further
Speaker 2: east in the in the Pennsylvania. It didn't stop as
Speaker 2: far south, so it's all reads the local conditions. But
Speaker 2: uh that uh uh that had a significant impact on
Speaker 2: the evolution of cicadas. We were now based on the
Speaker 2: what you see from uh ecological studies in genetic studies,
Speaker 2: that warming trend after the ice Age, that that continental
Speaker 2: warming that occurred actually enhanced the cicadas accelerating by four
Speaker 2: years in these different gaps, and that's what created the
Speaker 2: different broods.
Speaker 1: So, Professor, as far as cicadas, they've been here a
Speaker 1: long time before human beings are here, and they're going
Speaker 1: to be here a long time after human beings are gone.
Speaker 1: Is that correct?
Speaker 2: Probably?
Speaker 1: So, So the whole life is I get this trait.
Speaker 1: The male and the female cicadas are like in the
Speaker 1: ground beginning about three or four weeks ago, and when
Speaker 1: the temperature gets their certain degrees, they say, every seventh
Speaker 1: how did you know it's seventeen years this Brewe did
Speaker 1: they ever miss it by a few years and you're
Speaker 1: in the thirte seventeen years there's no clock.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we discovered stragglers all the time. And one of
Speaker 2: the things that we discovered media cicada safari is that
Speaker 2: a lot of times. Well, for example, in two thousand
Speaker 2: and twenty one, when brew teneburged here, in addition to
Speaker 2: Brewed ten emerging, we had fourteen coming up four years early,
Speaker 2: we had some, We had some early brewed thirteen cicadas,
Speaker 2: we had some brewed nineteen. Scats are off cycle. And
Speaker 2: now that we have the ability with smartphones and all
Speaker 2: and tens of thousands of people's hands, we're getting some
Speaker 2: information ut cicadas we never never even dreamed of before.
Speaker 1: That's where the sixth book is coming on cicadas. But
Speaker 1: if you're a normal cicada, believe me, there's derelics all
Speaker 1: over the place. I see them all the time, in fact,
Speaker 1: I work with some. But as soon I mean, you're
Speaker 1: a regular cicada and you're on the ground for seventeen years,
Speaker 1: how do you know it's time? How do you know
Speaker 1: it's the seventeenth year?
Speaker 2: Well, that's a part a subject of a paper which
Speaker 2: I'm co author on that's currently in the press. But
Speaker 2: it turns out they have they count to four and
Speaker 2: when they after they count to four, they can then
Speaker 2: molt again, and then they after they've done sixteen there's
Speaker 2: one more year added on to that. And so for example,
Speaker 2: and if we were to dig up cicadas in Mary
Speaker 2: Mounts and Kenwood in that area and the deer last November,
Speaker 2: we would have found cicadas in the ground with red
Speaker 2: eyes as ice turned red the fall before they emerge.
Speaker 2: And then so they seem to be able to count
Speaker 2: these blocks four, but they don't always get that right either,
Speaker 2: because I've been digging up these things almost every year
Speaker 2: between emergencies, and they grow at different rates after they're eight.
Speaker 2: After eight years in the ground, you might find two
Speaker 2: to three different stages of life sidewise in the ground
Speaker 2: on the same tree. And so there's a lot that
Speaker 2: we have to still understand about cicadas. But that's all underground.
Speaker 2: So that's a little heart of the study.
Speaker 1: So these billions of cicadas are there, they wait for
Speaker 1: they go through four molts. I'm not sure what a
Speaker 1: mota is, four molts of four years each underground, and
Speaker 1: then they add one year. Then it's time to erupt
Speaker 1: and they come out. Tell me what I guess. There's
Speaker 1: a male and a female cicada, right, yes, there are. There's
Speaker 1: no like transgender cicadas nothing like.
Speaker 2: That, not that we're aware of.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you got male and female and they come
Speaker 1: out of the ground together and say it's time to
Speaker 1: get it on. Is that Is that what happens?
Speaker 2: That's pretty that's pretty much it. When they come out
Speaker 2: of the ground there there with it's the last immature
Speaker 2: stage and that's when they transformed to the adult. That
Speaker 2: that day they come out of the ground, and they've
Speaker 2: got about a month on the for the average cicada
Speaker 2: to to do the business. We get we get ready
Speaker 2: to reproduce for the next seventeen years. And so it
Speaker 2: seems to us, you know, the the adults only above
Speaker 2: ground on the average a month each unless they're eaten
Speaker 2: by a predator, and it takes two weeks for them
Speaker 2: all to come out of the ground. So that's a
Speaker 2: six week window that we're seeing right now. And it's
Speaker 2: it's all about sex.
Speaker 1: Well I've said that before, but the male and the
Speaker 1: female's like it's like they're in heat. They got to
Speaker 1: get it on quickly because you've been in the third
Speaker 1: for seventeen years kind of waiting for this moment to arise,
Speaker 1: and so you're ready to go.
Speaker 2: That's pretty much it. And the males gather in large
Speaker 2: numbers in trees and they all start singing. They call
Speaker 2: it a chorusing center. Females hear the singing, they fly
Speaker 2: into the tree and one thing in the tree. Then
Speaker 2: they'll respond to an individual male call and if they
Speaker 2: are If the male's unsuccessful at getting the notice of
Speaker 2: a female, he'll fly to another tree or another branch.
Speaker 2: And if you are out an area with the cicada singing,
Speaker 2: you'll notice it gets really loud, and then it drops.
Speaker 2: The loudness drops a little bit, and then allow it again.
Speaker 2: That when it drops, that's when the cicadas are flying
Speaker 2: to another tree or another branch. The male cicatas because
Speaker 2: they were unsuccessful attracted the attention of a female.
Speaker 1: Am I going from bar to bar in Witnessville something
Speaker 1: like that? Do you find the right female in the
Speaker 1: right leather chaps?
Speaker 2: That's that's kind of right. These coursing centers, like one
Speaker 2: giant cicada singles bar.
Speaker 1: Well, are they monogamous? Once you find your right cicada
Speaker 1: with the right kind of configuration? Does the male and
Speaker 1: female cicadas Marvin Gay, let's get it on. That's kind
Speaker 1: of it? Or do they get a little bit polyamorous.
Speaker 2: Well, it depends. We know that from a racial studies
Speaker 2: that the typical male cicada will mate eighty five percent
Speaker 2: of mate once, ten percentle mate twice, and five percent
Speaker 2: of mate three times.
Speaker 1: And like married men, something like that. And so the
Speaker 1: great majority say, I got my woman. That's it. I
Speaker 1: asked this question. Did they do it like dogs? How
Speaker 1: do they do it?
Speaker 2: Well? They actually it's called they. If you can see
Speaker 2: this as the sidewalk in the trees right now, they
Speaker 2: are they genitalia are at tips of the abdomen, and
Speaker 2: so they often have found tail to tail as they're
Speaker 2: doing the nasty.
Speaker 1: All right, now, what the nasty is done? Then what happens?
Speaker 1: Did they have a cigarette? Hold a glass of wine?
Speaker 1: What do you do?
Speaker 2: No? They After a few hours, few days, the female
Speaker 2: will start to lay her eggs. The male's out of
Speaker 2: the question. Now the female searches for the terminal end
Speaker 2: of a tree branch where she'll lay her eggs. She
Speaker 2: has them up on average on five hundred eggs to lay. Wow,
Speaker 2: And she lays them in batches of twenty to forty
Speaker 2: in about a oh maybe a quarter inch to a
Speaker 2: half inch to slit in the tree. She's laid that block,
Speaker 2: she walks about a few another quarter inch to whatever
Speaker 2: pierces the branch and lays more eggs and doesn't. And
Speaker 2: she does that until she either a runs out of
Speaker 2: eggs or b runs out of branch, and then she
Speaker 2: flies to another branch and continues the process until she
Speaker 2: exhaust her egg supply.
Speaker 1: What happens during the male what's the male during? During
Speaker 1: this time? Getting with the guys, explaining what's going on?
Speaker 1: What do the guys do? When the females laying the
Speaker 1: eggs sit.
Speaker 2: They they're sort of bubbling around and eventually they'll die.
Speaker 1: That's the way life is anyway. So and at this point,
Speaker 1: all right, we're at the end of the cycle. The
Speaker 1: eggs are there, the female's done. What happens to the female.
Speaker 2: After she lays her eggs she dies too.
Speaker 1: Then what happens to the eggs.
Speaker 2: Well, the eggs will hatch in six to ten weeks.
Speaker 2: And when they hatch, they crawl out of the egg
Speaker 2: nest in the branch and literally drop to the ground.
Speaker 2: And as soon as they hit the ground, and I've
Speaker 2: seen this many times, they get underground. Within thirty seconds,
Speaker 2: the vast majority of them, because they are quite vulnerable
Speaker 2: to spiders, ants and beetles, which have the feast they
Speaker 2: could get to them, and so it's once underground, they'll
Speaker 2: feed on grassroots for the next few weeks in the fall,
Speaker 2: in the in the fall, and then by New Year's
Speaker 2: Day they're eight to ten inches bowl of the ground,
Speaker 2: sucking on the tree roots. And that's what will be
Speaker 2: for the next seventeen here.
Speaker 1: What kind of life is that? What kind of life
Speaker 1: sucking on a tree route for seventeen years, waiting for
Speaker 1: that moment to come? Well, professor jen Krisky, you're the
Speaker 1: best there is. Have a title for your new book.
Speaker 1: Come up with something yet.
Speaker 2: Well, the current book that's out, it's called the Pillgrim's
Speaker 2: Promise because the cicadas that are emerging this year were
Speaker 2: first noticed by the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony in sixteen
Speaker 2: thirty four.
Speaker 1: How about that? Well, no one knows more about it
Speaker 1: than you. How do you pass on your knowledge? Has
Speaker 1: got to be a professor Jean Chrisky to be here
Speaker 1: for the rest of this century, maybe the next one.
Speaker 1: Is there another Jen Kritsky?
Speaker 2: I certainly hope. So there are a number of people
Speaker 2: coming up in the working in entomology that I have
Speaker 2: that had the interest. Even my wife Jesse's coordinating the
Speaker 2: Idaturalist project. So we've got a lot of good people
Speaker 2: following us along.
Speaker 1: I don't want your information to die with you. May
Speaker 1: you live long and prosper. Professor Jen Kritsky. We first
Speaker 1: did this thirty eight years ago. Let's get together in
Speaker 1: seventeen more years and see what happens.
Speaker 2: Sounds like a plan. I'll be there.
Speaker 1: God bless Jean Kritsky, Cicada King. Thank you once again.
Speaker 1: Professor gen Kritzky, formerly a Mount Saint Joe, now retired
Speaker 1: writing books on the sex life of a cicada. Let's
Speaker 1: continue with more. Bill Cunningham Big announcement after two o'clock
Speaker 1: and more coming up on news radio seven hundred ww