What to know about this year’s cicadas in Massachusetts

Mark Herz: This is GBH’s Morning Edition.

Cicadas, those buzzing warm-weather bugs, are starting to emerge across New England.

And this year, you have a chance to see and hear a unique brood of them: Brood XIV crawls up out of the ground just once every 17 years. Meteorologist Dave Epstein spoke with two people who have been studying cicadas for nearly half a century.

Dave Epstein: Well, good morning. I’m here today with Chris Simon and Gene Kritsky. Chris is an evolutionary biologist and Gene is an entomologist. And we’re going to be talking cicadas. I am so excited to have both of you here. And you’ve actually both known each other for a really long time. Gene, why don’t you say how you guys met first?

Gene Kritsky: I first met Chris in 1976, which was the emergence of Brood XXIII. She was going around collecting specimens from wherever Brood XXIII was emerging. And she stopped by the Illinois Natural History Survey, where my lab was. And that’s where we first met.

Epstein: Really cool to have both of you here. And we do have Brood XIV emerging. And Chris, one of the things that when you and I were chatting earlier — you were sort of helping me out to understand — is some of the language that is misused. So I want to start there and just talk about the things that people may think. Like we hear things like ‘they’re alarming, they’re hatching, it’s an invasion, they’re just sleeping.’ Can you tell us actually what’s happening under the ground right now?

Chris Simon: Yes, the cicadas are — some of them have already come out of the ground in the far south of the distribution, but the ones who haven’t are sitting down in their tunnels waiting for the right temperature. And they’ve been underground for 17 years, and they’re growing underground, passing through five different stages, starting out about the size of a rice grain. So each time they have to shed their skin, in order to become larger.

Epstein: And as they emerge, what do they do? Like they come out, they’ve been down there for 17 years and I imagine they’re excited to be out. What are they going to start doing?

Kritsky: They initially start climbing up a vertical surface like a tree trunk, a brick wall, decking, tires, whatever — and they latch their little tarsal claws on their legs into the surface and that locks them into place. And then their nymphal skin starts to split open at the thorax and inside and then pulling out is the creamy white adult with its red eyes, as it starts the process of transforming into the adult cicada.

Epstein: So Gene, you’ve developed an app that can help you and other entomologists and other scientists, biologists kind of understand what’s going on. Can you tell us a little bit about the app and where here locally in Massachusetts might folks see what’s happening?

Kritsky: Certainly. Well, the app is called Cicada Safari, and it’s the latest evolution in citizen science for periodical cicadas, which started in the 1840s with Gideon B. Smith. People can download the app, it’s free, so the price is right. You can get it at the app store or Google Play. If you’re expecting cicadas in your area, and even if you’re not, go on a Cicada Safari, look for them. And if you see a cicada, there’s a little box on the camera screen — try to fill that box with the cicada, take its picture and send it to us. It will send successfully if you get your GPS turned on, or location service, [then] it’s examined and if it’s verified as a periodical cicada, it goes onto a live map. And right now we are seeing cicadas in large numbers in the [North Carolina] Asheville area. They’re already seeing — they’re already contracting the fungus. We have the cicadas that just started to emerge here in Cincinnati just on May the 12th, and I was getting about 500 uploads per day now. And in the Massachusetts area, we’re getting a lot of reports of the immatures — they haven’t emerged yet, but people are out working in their gardens and they’re digging up the nymphal cicadas.

Simon: And one thing to mention is that it’s really good if people also take a picture of the underside of the cicada, because that helps us tell what species it is.

Epstein: Chris, let’s sort of stick with some of this observation that you’re getting to. So you’ve been observing this Brood since 1974. Ford was president, and I looked it up. Elton John was rocking to “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me.” So it’s been a long time. What have you observed? How have things changed? Does climate change play a role in any of this?

Simon: Well, yes, as the climate gets warmer, the cicadas are coming out earlier. And in addition to that, we’re seeing more cicadas come out four years ahead of time. We’ve seen that in the past, but not in such numbers as we see now.

Epstein: If those four-year ones are coming out, they could, I assume, start mixing with the 13-year cycle cicadas and that’s going to sort of change genetics?

Simon: They can mix with the 13s, but they can also mix with other 17s. By coming out four years early, they could join another 17-year brood that they overlap with.

Kritsky: Two broods can come out in the same year, every 221 years, but in many cases, the overlap is not very great.

Epstein: We also hear cicadas just every summer. I hear them sort of making their noise in the summer. Can you talk a little bit about, and either of you could pick this up — the difference between an annual and a periodical cicada?

Simon: Annual cicadas don’t really have a one-year life cycle. They have a much longer life cycle, and often that life cycle’s not known because it’s harder to tell when they went in the ground if their life cycles are not synchronized.

Kritsky: Also, they come out later in the summer. Usually here in Cincinnati, in 1987, I heard the last periodical cicada on June the 30th, and I heard my first annual cicada July the 1st. And so they tend in areas to not necessarily overlap that much in time. However, I have now received a half a dozen photographs from Texas and upstate New York of annual cicadas already starting to emerge in some places.

Epstein: Can I hear the difference in their song at all?

Simon: Oh, yeah, they have different songs, every species, you know, there’s more than 3,000 species of cicadas in the world, and each one has a different song, although there are a couple who — I’ve heard one in Asia that sounds sort of like the periodicals, but each species has a song.

Epstein: That’s pretty cool. So folks may be wondering, are they dangerous at all to my yard? Are they going to eat my plants? Is there anything bad about these?

Kritsky: No. The periodical cicadas, they don’t bite, they don’t sting, they don’t carry away small children. They have piercing sucking mouthparts, so they’re not going to eat your garden, they are not going to hurt your trees. If you have cicadas coming up in your yard, they’ve been underground for the last 17 years and your trees probably don’t look any different at all. So they’re not dangerous for us at all, in fact, they do quite a lot of good for the ecosystem.

Simon: The cicadas in general are an amazing phenomenon, and we like to paint a really positive picture of them. It’s really nice to take children out to see them coming out of the ground in the evening. You can hear them walking through the leaf litter. You can see them climbing up the trees and coming out their shells. They’re really one of the wonders of nature.

Epstein: Thank you both for being here this morning. Appreciate it.

Simon: Oh, it was fun. Thanks for asking us.

Kritsky: Great to see you, Chris.

Simon: You too.

Herz: That was Meteorologist Dave Epstein speaking with Entomologist Gene Kritsky and Evolutionary Biologist Chris Simon.

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