LITTLE ROCK — Silent cicada,
did you cry until you had
nothing left inside?
Nice image, but not exactly timely. The cicadas have only just begun to yell.
In a phenomenon seen once every 13 years, a massive cicada brood has begun emerging from the ground in southern Arkansas. Great numbers of red-eyed, 1-inch, orange-and-black bugs are expected to appear in more northerly counties this month, filling trees with their thrumming,undulating drone.
If you’re thinking it’s a little early in the year for cicada noise, you’re right.
These are not the usual dog-days cicadas (sih-kay-das) that Arkansans hear buzzing on summer afternoons. Those should emerge, as usual, in July and August. This is the Great Southern Brood of “periodical” cicadas, members of the genus Magicicada, whose life cycle takes 13 to 17 years - 17 in Northern states, 13 here - to complete. Their most recent mass emergence was spring 1998.
Susan Andrews can hear the male cicadas’ chorus from the front porch of the Visitor Center at Cossatot State Park-Natural Area.
“They are all over the place,” she says. “It’s a loud roar down by the river. There are probably thousands of them down there.”
Potentially a million to 1.5 million per acre, says Jeffrey K. Barnes, curator of the University of Arkansas’ Arthropod Museum. “Throughout Arkansas, we can expect billions,” he says.
All the cicadas singing now are members of a regional group that researchers call “Brood XIX” - using Roman numerals for the number 19. Brood XIX includes four similar-looking species of Magicicada that live in woodsy parts of a 15-state area of the Southeast, excluding Florida. (Crowley’s Ridge hosts another, smaller, 13-year periodical cicada brood, Brood XXIII, last seen in 2002 and expected to re-emerge in 2015.)
The Great Southern Brood is crawling to light here and there as soils warm during this dank, cool spring. “There have been reports already from Sevier County and Ashley County,” Barnes says, noting that the average soil temperature required to nudge nymphs from their burrows is 64 degrees.
“You can see the holes where they’ve come out,” Andrews says, adding Howard County to the list.
A BUG’S LIFE
Their life cycle began in 1998 when they were eggs deposited inside twigs by female cicadas, which have sharp little knife parts on their ovipositors and can really slash into green wood. “That can cause the tips of the twigs to dip and bend over, a condition that’s called flagging,” Barnes says. Twigs that can’t bend just break and fall off.
Eggs hatched into nymphs, which look somewhat like adult cicadas but don’t fly. They dropped to the dirt and burrowed to the roots of the trees, where they passed their long juvenile period sipping xylem fluids and slowly growing.
Their emergence creates an all-you-can-eat buffet for birds, fish, copperheads, box turtles, spiders, dragonflies, assassin bugs .... On the other hand, moles and centipedes will go begging as their recently abundant supply of fattened cicada nymphs suddenly ups and leaves the soil - headed for daylight on a mission to molt, mate, stab the next generation of eggs into the tips of trees and die.
“That’s their only purpose,” Barnes says.
And they work hard at it, with males gathering in groups called chorus centers to vibrate and buzz from 7 or 8 in the morning until dusk daily for two to three weeks. Their racket lures females into the center, where they add to the din by clicking their wings as they select their mates.
“By late June” when dogdays cicadas appear, “the periodical cicadas should be all rotting on the forest floor, helping to re-nourish the trees that they damaged,” Barnes says.
NEON RED EYES
Periodical cicadas are smaller than the run-of-every summer, 2-inch green-and-black cicadas that Arkansans sometimes mistake for locusts.Those big cicadas belong to a different genus, Tibicens, and their one- to four-year lives overlap so that some of their kind emerge every year to freak out squeamish people who find the bug-eyed husks they leave behind when they molt.
Just an inch long, periodical cicadas have lurid red eyes, Andrews says. “Their wings are orange-colored. They look like aliens.”
Their deafening noise comes from males’ vibrating the tymbal, a drum-skin-like membrane on the first abdominal segment. “Exactly how they do it I don’t know,” Barnes says, “but they vibrate that drum like skin to make the sound. Most of the male abdomen is hollow, an air chamber, and it reverberates and amplifies the sounds.
“And because there are millions of them singing all together it becomes extremely loud.”
RANDOM QUESTIONS
Will cicadas appear everywhere?
“This emergence is going to happen throughout the state of Arkansas but it will be patchy,” Barnes says. “It wouldn’t happen in every neighborhood. Areas where trees have been removed, where constant plowing has taken place, where things have been paved over won’t see much emergence.
“It will be mostly forest edges in areas where the forests have existed for some time.”
What about the flooded forests? Are those cicadas drowning?
“I suppose it would depend upon how long the water stands,” Barnes says. “Insects are pretty tough when it comes to stuff like that. They have air bladders in their bodies .... It depends upon the metabolism of the insect how long it’s going to live when it’s submerged, but certainly it’s possible for them to drown. It’s just not going to happen as instantly as it would for a human being.”
Do they bite?
No, and they don’t sting. “All the reports I’ve read is that they contain no poisonous compounds and they are quite edible,” Barnes says.
What do they taste like?
“They say they taste like canned asparagus,” Barnes says. He has never witnessed a mass emergence and has never sampled cicada, but “if you are going to eat them, I would eat the ones that are freshly emerging from the ground or the adults that are just emerging ....”
What does Magicicada mean?
Barnes was unable to find “magi” listed as a prefix in a dictionary of scientific words. He did find “magic,” explained to be from the Greek and meaning to “bewitch, charm, enchant ... groaner, howler, wizard ... all kinds of charms, spells.” So he speculates that the genus name relates the insect’s long underground period to an enchantment, like Sleeping Beauty or Rip van Winkle.
“Typically entomologists who name insects don’t really explain why they came up with that crazy name,” he says, laughing, “so you can make up any scenario you want.”
Where can people report sightings (or “hearings”)?
The website magicicada. org collects reports as well as audio files.
Barnes’ article about the insects is at uark.edu/ua/arth muse (click through “University of Arkansas Arthropod Museum Notes”).
ActiveStyle, Pages 23 on 05/16/2011