Ologies with Alie Ward - Cicadology (CICADAS) with Gene Kritsky

Episode Date: March 3, 2021

They are numerous. They are patient. They are COMING for the United States in droves this spring: They are cicadas. *The* Cicada guy Dr. Gene Kritsky joins to chat all about the annual cicadas you may see every summer vs. the periodical ones that cycle through the states in broods of giant numbers. Learn how they survive underground for decades, what they are doing down there, all about their lifecycle, who eats them and why, plus get inspired to take a cicada safari, download Cicada Safari, and appreciate their sexually desperate songs, which can be as loud as an ambulance. By the end, you’ll want to don a bug costume and hitchhike to the Midwest. (Don’t do that.) Dr. Gene Kritsky’s new cicada book: Periodical Cicadas: The Brood X Edition Download the Cicada Safari app at the Apple Store or Google Play Store. Gene’s website: genekritsky.com Also see CicadaMania.com, and follow Instagram.com/CicadaMania A donation was made to Mount Saint Joseph’s cicada research in the School of Behavioral and Natural Sciences Sponsor links: www.alieward.com/ologies-sponsors More links at: alieward.com/ologies/cicadalogy Gene’s wife Jessee J. Smith is a silversmith who makes bug jewelry. Check it out! Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes! Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWardSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's your friend's older sister who taught you to swear in French. Allie Ward, back with an episode I have waited most of my life for, no exaggeration. When I first came up with all of these as a concept, it was partly just to trick an expert into talking to me about cicadas. If this weren't the 13th month of a global pandemic, I would have recorded this in an Ohio backyard instead of over the internet. I would have hitchhiked there in a bug costume, holding a brood tent or bust sign, and I would have meant it.

This is the spring that bug lovers have waited 17 years for. But before we cover ourselves in discarded exoskeletons, let's say some thanks to the backbone of the show. Patrons, thank you so much. You can submit questions to theologist by joining patreon.com slash oligies. It costs as little as 25 cents an episode, folks, $1 a month. My heart is not expensive. You can also support the show just by texting links of episodes to your neighbors or friends

or enemies if you'd like on your podcast app, or you can leave a review if you like. I have read every review ever left, including this one this week by Neutral Viking, who said, I applied to a PhD program because of oligies. They say, I started listening to oligies in 2019 during one of the lowest points of my life. I had never been one for science, but decided to give the podcast a shot after a friend recommended it to me. Maybe it will be a good distraction.

I thought half a dozen episodes later, I realized how much I actually loved science, but never had it presented in a way that I connected with. Because of oligies, I went back to school and one day hoped to study volcanoes on other planets. Neutral Viking, hell yes, Astro Volcanology. That episode is all yours. Okay, so leave one, see if I read it next week. I dare you.

Okay, let's get to cicada oligies. Cicada in Latin means tree cricket, but your Appalachian friends may call them jarflies, I just found out. I have only seen a cicada in the wild maybe three times in my life, and each time I crowded around it and gasped and took pictures like an American at the Eiffel Tower. I have never even seen a periodical cicada, the ones that emerge in the trillions every 13 or 17 years in the U.S., but at their last emergence in 2004, I was so envious. So this year, we're getting ahead of their emergence.

After the forest entomology episode last October, I asked K-Dubbs, the hiking scientist, aka Dr. Kristen Wicker, for a cicada hookup, and she started an email thread full of my secret internet science crushes, including Dan Mosguy, who runs cicadamania.com, what's up, Dan, and this oligist, who is the authority on periodical cicadas. He hails from North Dakota. He got his bachelor's in biology from Indiana University and his master's and PhD in entomology from the University of Illinois. He's now a professor and the Dean of Behavioral and Natural Sciences at Mount St. Joseph University

in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the editor of American Entomologist. He's written multiple bug books and authored scores of papers on insects. He is the cicada guy. So he typically appears in the news, sometimes maybe you've seen him in all khaki field gear and a tan sun hat, and he has a gentle silver beard with kind of a tidy upturned mustache like a friendly smile. And we hopped on a call to record and I just screwed it up so bad, like immediately. I dropped off the connection and I could not log back in and there were all these tech

hiccups. So I texted our wonderful assistant scheduler, Noel Dilworth. I said, hey, I sent him a new link, but he hasn't shown up, but I hope he's not mad. And then I got the reply, I am not distressed. And I had texted him that instead of Noel. So between wanting to do this episode for 17 years and then talking to the world expert in it and texting him about him, my level of body sweat was clinically dangerous. But regardless, we figured it out.

We got on the line to chat about life cycles and ghostly remains, cicada chasing, insect cuisine, the decibel levels of our springtime friends, and what you should do if you see a cicada, the app, cicada safari, their cultural and pop cultural influence, and what they are doing underground for nearly two decades while we miss them with icon, legend, and cicadologist, Dr. Jean Kritski, who may or may not already be mad at me. Oh my God. Are you mad at me? Why would I be mad?

I felt so mad. I was like, oh no, maybe he just left forever. I was mortified when I realized I went to you, but secrets out, I'm a human being. That's all right. So am I. All right. Down to business. I'm Jean Kritski, and I use he, him.

And now you are, from what I can understand, a cicadologist. Do you ever call yourself that? I consider myself an entomologist. Although I work with cicadas, I also do a lot of work with honeybees. Okay. For more on his bee work, you can start with The Tears of Ray, beekeeping in ancient Egypt. And while you're buying his book, he has a new book. It came out this week.

It's called Periodical Cicadas, the brood 10 edition. And it's 13 bucks for the paperback. The link is in the show notes. Treat yourself. Get it. He literally wrote the book on these gorgeously loud, mysterious creatures. So can you tell me a little bit about what we can expect this year from the cicada population in the United States?

Sure. This year we're going to experience an emergence of brood 10. And when I say brood 10, that's capital B with the Roman numeral for 10, which is an X. Some people that I want to make a little sexier than it really is, brood X, but it's brood 10. And we're already beginning to see signs of it here in the Midwest. People are reporting lots of moles in their yards, bounce from where the moles have been feeding because the cicada nymphs are right now about four to six inches below the surface.

And we'll start seeing our first sign of cicadas in late April after a big, heavy rain. Some of the cicada, especially if the soil is a very heavy clay soil, they'll actually extend their tunnels above ground. They're called chimneys or turrets, very similar to what crayfish will sometimes do. News flashed to me that crowd ads, a.k.a. crayfish, emerge sometimes out of tall, lumpy turrets they build. And also, I googled cicada tunnels. And one image taken under a deck looked like a damn coral reef or like big, tall stacks

of dirty poker chips or like the tallest birthday cake ever, out of which a beautiful ghoul pops up to say, happy 17 years day, surprise. And they'll crawl away to the top of these things. They get as large as 12 inches high. And as the water seeps down through the soil and gets out of the tunnel, they go move back down. But you'll see these little chimneys. That'll be under things like people's decks or under the large overhang of a roof line,

for example, or an outbuilding of some kind. I've even seen them under pallets. People would have a wooden pallet that's not solid wood, but gets nice and super wet and you lift it up and they're filled with these little chimneys underneath. But that's the first sign that we'll see. That'll be usually inside this in late April. We could see, especially in some of the southern states in northern Georgia, for example, we could see a few cicadas emerging around the first of May.

They come out of the soil when the soil temperature reaches 64 degrees Fahrenheit. And then very specific. Very specific. Well, these are cicadas. They got things to do. They're 17 years old and keep track of numbers and what have you. Once you hit that temperature for 64 degrees Fahrenheit, and then you have a really nice soaking rain that just sort of saturates everything.

Then they really pop. I mean, it's just, it's amazing. The highest density I've ever seen was 356 per square yard. And that was over the course of about a two week period they came up with. The first evening they come up by the hundreds and thousands. Some of the things I've noticed, I remember the first time I experienced this one evening, I thought it was, I thought it had to go in because it was starting to rain. And what it was for the cicada, it was falling from the trees above me, landing on the dried

leaves. And it just sounded like a heavy rainstorm. I remember seeing a yard where so many cicadas were crawling up blades of grass. The grass looked like it was in a heavy wind, which is sort of like moving around. It's really quite amazing. And then the weirdest one, you know, I do a lot of work in cemeteries. And so I've been in cemeteries when these things start crawling out of the ground. It's it's almost like a scene from some kind of a B 50s movie, horror movie, if you will. These things are crawling out of the ground.

If there was as much larger, you could probably have a really good sci-fi movie. When they leave those exuvia behind, they look kind of like ghosts that have been frozen to me. It does. It's like it's a it's a hollow shell reminder of what was there was an article. I remember reading from the early 19th century talking about the only the cicadas have left. They call them locusts at the time. The cicadas have left and all we see are their ghostly reminders. That's beautiful. I was going to ask this if it ever kind of gets your goat that they're called locusts

because a locust is a type of like grasshopper morph, right? You know, cicadas are insects that belong to the sorry to get technical. We love it. The insect order hemipter, which are sucking insects like bedbugs and stink bugs and and leaf hoppers and aphids and so on. They belong to the suborder that includes the tree hoppers and leaf hoppers. What have you. They have sucking mouth parts.

In the case of the periodical cicadas, red eyes, orange veined wings, black body as adults, whereas locusts, on the other hand, are essentially a form of grasshopper. It's really interesting. The very first time they were they were seed and, you know, our history of these things goes back to 1634. Dang, that's when William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth, Collie reported them in his history of the colony. And he actually may have gotten the date wrong.

He actually at the top of the page wrote 1633. And then what he wrote, which is kind of neat, he wrote. And in the spring before, especially all the month of May, there was such a great quantity of a great sort of flies like for bigness to wasps or bumblebees, which came out of holes in the ground and replenished all the woods and ate the green things and made such a constant yelling noise as made all the woods ring of them and ready to deaf the hearers.

They have not by the Englishman heard or seen before or since. Now, the reason I say he got the date wrong is it turns out 1633. There is not a brood of cicadas that it would emerge if you go back in time in 1633 today. So you had to kind of backtrack and figure out, OK, minus 17, minus 13. But it turns out there were cicadas that should have emerged the following year in 1634. And it turns out he didn't write that passage in that that same year.

He did it a few years later. So he might have gotten the notes mixed up or what have you. And so I think he probably got the date wrong, but they called them flies until the early 18th century. Well, you know, that was going to be one of my questions because they're in Hemiptera, but are there a lot of Hemiptera bugs that have the kind of robust wings that they do? Oh, well, there are a lot of number, a lot of cicadas do it.

And then they're the lantern flies. They have large wings as well. So there are some. I was trying so hard to impress him by knowing what a Hemiptera is. It means half wing. And I did not realize cicadas were among them. OK. And there are some some strong flyers, not as strong as dragon flies, per se, but the some of the regivians

have our strong flyers as well. Some of us are bumbling along. But piratical cicadas, if you've seen them, they don't look like they're savvy insects. I mean, they're sort of tumbling around. And I've seen them get picked off by birds. You know, they just seem very clumsy at times. Yeah. Well, what's the difference between a

periodical cicada that might come out every 17 years, like Bruten or 13 years and annual cicadas? They they belong to different genera. But if you want to look at if you look at them, you'll find that the annual cicadas sometimes are a summer called dog day cicadas because come up the dog days of summer. They're much larger. Their head is more flat.

Their eyes are are black sometimes green. Many of them are are black with brown markings or black with green markings that look more camouflaged. And as I say, they're they're about a half inch to an inch larger than the periodicals. So the annual ones come out in the heat of summer every year. And although they are more chunk, you won't see their camouflaged bods as readily.

And you will not witness anything near the numbers of the periodical cicadas. The annual ones are just all in all more low key. And behaviorally, they are much more cryptic. They look like little camouflaged insects. And if you sand under a tree, let's say, in late August, you hear this, the annual cicada is singing away. You can stare at them and stare at that tree and you can't see them

because their whole their whole survival strategy is totally different. It's to be cryptic. And when the male starts singing, of course, he then is very vulnerable to a bird if the bird can find it. But he's he's up in the shadows of the tree. A couple of years ago, my wife and I were in Greece and we heard cicadas in the trees. And we must have looked for 25 minutes to find a couple of them.

We were less than three feet away, but it was really hard to pick them out. But on the other hand, the periodical cicada, they're in your face. Yeah, it's not so much that you need to look for them. It's like, where can you look that they're not present to it? They come out in big numbers. Is that part of their evolutionary strategy is just a ton of them at once? How does that work? Well, it's it's works well for them.

It's called predator satiation is what we think is happening. They come out in these large numbers, you know, some of the birds are major predators of them, but their little crops can't hold many more cicadas. And the analogy I like to use is imagine walking outside and all of a sudden you see the whole world is inundated with flying Hershey's kisses. I'm fond of Hershey's kisses.

And you tend to eat and eat and eat and eat and eat these. But eventually you will get tired of them. And in nineteen ninety one and 14 emerge, I was over in a little Maramontan area, a little suburb of Cincinnati. It was really kind of cool to watch. I saw this dog, the first day they come in, snapping out of all over the yard. You know, just going at him five days later, go back to see how the emergence is going on at some of my test sites.

And that dog is just lying on the porch, pause folded and cicadas walking all around. Does not carry over it. I'm over these things. That's why a lot of people like to collect cicadas in cicada years, but not to use this fish bait this year, but to use for next year. And they'll freeze them. And I've seen people collect, you know, ten, five gallon containers of these things and freeze them for the course of a decade.

So periodical cicadas are in the genus Magiskata and they make a splash. They are smaller than the annual cicadas, but they have such style in the form of blood red eyes. And there's billions, maybe trillions of them. In fact, their genus looks like magic cicada, but Magi actually comes from the Latin for many or just a staggering ass load, but not from the word magic. OK, but you will have a magic spring and summer if you live in Delaware, Illinois, Georgia, Indiana, New York, Kentucky, Maryland,

North Carolina, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Michigan, as well as Washington, DC, and you can witness the party. And if you miss it, you're going to have to set your calendars for 2038 to see these hordes of beauties. Now, brood 10 is the largest group of the 17 year cicadas. They emerge this year, but there are over a dozen 17 year broods and a small handful of 13 year broods. And I'm going to link on my website to a US map to see which broods might be in your area.

Now elsewhere in the world, you can always gaze at an annual cicada. If you have them, you can tell you love it, if you can find it. But if you have periodicals in your area, they're hard to miss because they blanket everything. How old were you when you saw your first emergence? I was pretty old. You know, I was born with a cicada year. I'm from North Dakota, so we don't have a periodical cicada there. Oh, you were born in a cicada year, though.

That's auspicious. A brood 10 year. It was 1953. And then in 1970, I was living in Northern Illinois. And of course, they have brood 13 there, not brood 10. So I missed that one. And then finally, in 1987, I was able to witness my first brood 10 emergence. However, I did a lot of field work in 1976 with brood 23, a 13 year cicada that emerged in Eastern Illinois. Had you already been studying them previously or was this kind of like a chance

field work assignment and then you started getting into them? Well, I became an etymologist, in part because of periodical cicadas. My undergraduate professor at Indiana University, Frank Young, wonderful man. He's deceased now. But in that second week of that course, he starts talking about these things. And I thought, whoa, yeah, this is just wild. And he was the cicada specialist for Indiana. And so I knew within two weeks of listening to this man, my life is in bugs.

And so I went to the University of Illinois, where I didn't work on cicadas as my major PhD work, but my advisor was also Illinois cicada specialist, Dr. Louis Stannard, another wonderful guy between Lou and Frank. These guys love life. You know, my dad, he loved life, but he sold insurance. Yeah, but these guys just loved coming to the office every day. And I found that infectious. Jean told me about being in college and taking on a mapping project

and researching old letters from 1863 to track down where in the county the brood may emerge. Back in the 1800s, scientists had to dispatch grad students on horseback. But in the late 1970s, Jean just cracked open a window and let the wind through his hair, following his bliss to mud tunnels and still wet wings. Yeah, did you get into a Chevy Nova and just like ramble around the country looking for different emergencies? You could say that, although it wasn't a Chevy Nova, it was a Chevette.

Close. And can you tell me a little bit about what one of the worlds, if not the world's biggest authorities on periodical cicadas, what is your job like when people ask you, oh, nice to meet you, Jean. What do you do? What are you doing? What actually is cicadas usually won't pay the bills. OK, I'm the dean of behavioral and natural sciences

at Mount St. Joseph University, and I'm the longest serving faculty member there. But I'm an entomologist who works on the I'm a frustrated historian. And so while I was in Illinois, I was able to use the fantastic library resources at Illinois, one of its, I think it's now the largest state university library in the US, and I was able to find mimeographed, stapled papers that had all the USDA records on them. And to me, when every time there's an emergency, you make observations, you come up with hypotheses.

But with cicadas, it's not like looking and checking every year. You've got 17 years between these emergencies. So I decided to start looking through newspapers, any kind of publication I could find for old historic records of cicadas. And I'd gathered about seven to eight thousand by the time I was I was done. And then I found this is getting back down to the 80s. I found a computer program for the Macintosh at the time that was primarily used for demographic marketing of where to put golf courses.

But it had a great mapping program. And so I I literally took all eight thousand of these things and put into the Fipsi code, which is a coding based on the alphabetical order of the state and the alphabetical order of the county in that state. And then from there, I could map out these cicada brews 17 years apart and see how the patterns changed and how we our knowledge built up. And then in other areas where we had emergency records come back to the beginning and so on.

Do golf courses, by the way, side note, do golf courses see a lot of emergence as well? Some do, yes. Yeah, I've been I've been in several golf at several golf courses where there's a decent cicada emergence, especially the ones where they that are near other areas where cicadas are heavy. They've just planted some new trees and the ends of the fairways along the rough. And, you know, this is one thing I think that still mystifies us.

But can you describe a little bit of the life cycle? What are they doing that whole time? Let's start when the adults emerge from the ground. OK, and that's going to happen here in Cincinnati, somewhere in early May. I have a formula that I developed a few years ago, which will allow you to predict when in May they should come out within a 48 hour plus or minus 48 hour period. But we need to have all the April temperatures to do that. So around the 25th of April, I take the long range forecast

and I calculate when the cicada should come out. So that'll be here in around the 12th to the 15th of May. You might see him a week earlier in Georgia because of being further south. But what will happen, as I mentioned, the soil will be 64 degrees Fahrenheit, nice soaking rain, and that causes the nymphalence cicadas to come out of the ground. They start wandering on trying to find a vertical surface to crawl up because they get their whole purpose now is to shed their nymphal skin and transform to the adult.

I've seen them crawl up trees, brick walls, fence walls, tombstones, blades of grass, whatever. They climb up that surface and they lock their little legs into the tree trunk. Let's say it's a tree with their tarsal claws, getting nice, solid purchase. And then all of a sudden the back of the thorax splits open like somebody wearing a black coat under the white shirt underneath it. And it's just too small and they split the seam. You see this thing open up and then it goes up and cracks the head capsule

and then slowly the adult cicada wriggles its way out and pulls itself out to the point where it's hanging upside down, being held in place just by the little tension of the old nymphal skin holding on to the abdomen. And you see these white string like things coming out. Those are the the breathing tubes. I looked up a time lapse of this. And yes, those tracheal tubes are like little white threads,

kind of like the final rip cord that detaches from its old self. And also as I watched the wings inflate on this one video, I 100 percent started to cry at how beautiful and emerging cicada is. Crying. So pretty. The trachea that the cicada breathes by. And those are mostly are made of chitin as well. So when it transforms, it's literally pulling its tracheal tubes inside. You know, the the old ones are being pulled out

because it's made new ones on the inside. Oh, wow. If you thought puberty was rough. Yeah, seriously. Just think what this is like. So it's hanging there for a few minutes and then eventually it'll start doing what I like to call a cicada sit up. It starts trying to sit forward, but just can't make it.

And then it finally can grab ahold of the old nymphal skin and it wriggles his little abdomen free. And by this time it's out, it's clear. It's white in color. It's got red eyes, two black patches behind the head. But the wings are all shriveled. And the next thing it has to do is expand its wings. So it starts pumping fluid through the wings.

They slowly expand to where they look like a typical cicada with the wings held tent like over the abdomen. But they're still creamy white because the their exoskeleton hasn't hardened yet. Now, this has taken about 90 minutes, depending on air temperature. Now they have to start hardening the exoskeleton and they'll slowly start turning dark over the next 90 minutes again. And then they'll eventually look like the typical adult cicada with the red eyes and the black body and the memberless wings

with the orange color on the major wing veins at the base. And then the thing it wants to do now is basically climb to the tops of the trees. It's even though it's dark, it's not completely hard. It's going to take a couple more days, two to three, four, five days somewhere before they complete this process of hardening. But they want to get farther up. So they're hidden as some from some of the major predators. And they start flying.

And that's when you'll see the birds really attuned to them. I've seen this many times, a cicada flying from one tree to another and a blue jay grabs it right out of the air. You know, because they're not they're not strong flies, per se. And at this time, more males emerge the first couple of days than females. That vanguard there is going to give its life so other their lives so that others others can live. Then eventually, the numbers start to equal out and the females,

then more females come out and greater numbers towards the end. But that emerges process is going to take about two weeks. They don't, they all don't come out in one night. It's like, it's not like this massive thing this is about a two week rolling period. And if you have some cool days in there where it might slow down, it could be a little longer. But on the average, it's about two weeks. So the early male gets the axe just first on the scene,

horned up, looking for ladies. They are delicious. They're like the first French fry you eat out of the drive through, just the least likely to survive. And males and females will sprout out over the next couple of weeks, all looking for springtime, summer loving. And after about five days or so after they've emerged, the males can start singing. Yes, I have so many questions about this.

When you say singing, what would you say that it sounds like? It's beautiful. Yeah, remember, these things got me tenure. I love it. I think it sounds kind of otherworldly to me, just this really kind of high pitched buzzing. Yeah, it's very much so. There are three species that are calls are different for the three species.

The large one, septum desum has a sort of like. Oh, and it sounds like when you hear a whole chorus of these things, it sounds like some 1950 science fiction movie. And that's the sound of the flying saucers flying in. Yeah. And then the smaller species, Casini, which is very common in some of the areas that have been turned into suburbs here and since they is more of a constant.

The sound and it doesn't all stay constant and sound and levels. It'll get louder and then drop off, louder drop off. The highest I've measured is 96 decibels. Oh, my gosh, that's about as loud as like a rock band playing, right? As a rock band, I've never been more like your old uncle. But yes, different calls, like the ones on the wonderful, incredible website, Cicada Mania, run by Dan Mosgai hit different decibel levels. And some are said to approach 120 decibels, which I looked it up.

And that is a volume of an ambulance siren. So man bugs, screaming for love. Mount St. Joe is on the flight path. This is a international airport. And Cicadas will drown out the jets. Wow. And if you get the chance to go into a major Cicada area, when you're done after about a half hour of collecting and recording

and taking measurements, whatever you get in the car and the windows are up, you feel like you've been to a concert. Damn you, you're a cruel mistress. It just keeps you. You just it just keeps keeps ringing. How are they making that loud of a sound? The sound is made by a timble. And there are two timbles on the first abdominal segment of the male.

And then the male's abdomen is is mostly hollow. And so that acts almost like a resonator to get a little louder. Think of the belly of a stringed instrument. So there is a reason a violin or acoustic guitar is hollow. It's probably also horny. And you put 10, 20,000 of these in one tree. Mm hmm. It's going to add up.

And the sound, if you've ever taken the bendy straw, you know, the one that has. Yeah. And you can you pull it out, you hear that little snapping sound. Do that about one hundred and fifty two hundred times in a second. And that's your that's your call for that male amplified with the abdomen being hollow and then multiply that by 20,000. And you might have a good example of a chorus. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Oh, I know that there is an aside here about hollow males being the loudest, but I'm just going to let you write that one in your head.

I prefer to think of cicadas as just cruning for love, a symphony of sexual desperation, giving us outdoor ambiance as the weather and maybe our love lives heat up, but also maybe not. So, yeah, it's a chorus, just a huge chorus. And it's a we actually refer to chorusing centers. Males will gather large numbers of males gather in a tree. The ecological term is often not uses a leck, L-E-K. And that's where large aggregations of males occur and then the females fly in.

And there are three types of calls that the large species of desimates. The first one is that that there's a gap. And just as he gets to the, oh, the downs, the downturn, the female will flick her wings. She does not have timbles, so she cannot make a call like the male does. So she'll flick her wings at that moment. And if the male sees that or hears that and notices it, he'll turn and walk towards her to sing again.

Should she flicks her wings? He'll walk closer. Then he'll go into a second call that doesn't have that space, that quiet phase, but just keeps going, oh, that type of thing. Then he'll actually start tapping her with his foreleg. And, well, they, they do the nasty. Now, if you're a male nearby and you hear this female that flicks her wings at the right time, you could steal her by capturing her attention.

So when the first male gets to the lower feral and gets that old portion, another male might start singing before he gets there. So she doesn't hear the end of the call to flick her wings. What a dick. And also, apparently, if you are hosting a boy's cicada on your hand and you want to prompt it to perform, try snapping your fingers at it. It will mistake the sound for a lady and then try to impress you by screaming. And so it's really, it's like a gigantic cicada singles bar

with a lot of competition. So they might, someone might literally swoop in and steal your girl. Yep. When the sound gets loud and then drops off in intensity, that's because if a male has been unsuccessful, he will probably fly to another branch or even another tree. Maybe the luck is better over there. So that's why you can, you can hear this, this is very loud up to 96 decimals. Then it drops down to like 75, 80, depending on the numbers of cicadas that are there.

And if you watch the trees, you'll see this flight going from branch to branch between trees where that happens. Oh, that's so, that's got to be so great. Just to pull up a lawn chair and like crack a beer and just watch them jumping around. Oh, it is. Last year in brew nine emerged my wife, Jesse and I, we went out to check on the cicadas and we didn't realize that we were there just as tropical storm Bertha was coming in. So we had a good cicada experience, but we didn't have that magical experience

where you're in it, where you just, your ears are ringing of them. And so we had back and forth another two days. It was COVID time. So we had arranged to go to hotels that had COVID cleaning regimens. And we took our own food with us and whatever. And we went and we had a great cicada fix that you need to get. And as we were driving back to Cincinnati, we stopped at a rest stop in West Virginia and made our dinner and they had just started emerging at the rest stop.

It was just so pleasant to be there as the, you know, one, one sign. Our glad he came and just to sort of end that trip. Should I drive to the Midwest? Should I rent a van and just f off and drive to the Midwest and let these things crawl in my face? I want to so bad. And as we started recording this, Jared was like, let's go see them. And I am in the sound booth in the closet and I started to cry. So it might happen.

And now what happens when she is gravid or preggers, she gets not as knocked up as a cicada can get. What happens? Well, then she's got to find a place to lay her eggs. OK, and she will lay her eggs in the new growth of trees. That's the terminal at the ends of the branches of the new leaves are. And she will find a tree. They've there are over 200 species of woody plants that cicadas have been

shown to oviposit or lay their eggs in. Oh, wow. And she has a structure called an ovipositor, which is a structure at the tip of her abdomen, which she pulls out of a slit at the tip of her abdomen. And then literally it's it has a central rod. And on each side are two structures that are serrated and they move opposite each other and literally cut into the wood. And a colleague of mine at Kent State

University Stark campus, Matt Leonard and I and his students examined the chemical composition of cicada ovipositors. And it turns out they are also like we see with the kinoan and wasps that lay their eggs in a bark and so on, also reinforced with metals. And these metals are increased along the side of the serrations. So they're armored cicadas. Oh, wow. Oh, that's amazing. I'm just going to restate that for all of us.

So cicada ladies ovipositors are serrated like knives and reinforced with metal, also like a knife. So imagine your crotch is a knife and you wait 17 years to pierce tree bark with this, a baby shank. She'll lay between 10 to 20 eggs in each little egg nester. It's about a quarter of an inch long. Walk another quarter inch down, puncture the tree twig again, lay more eggs and so on.

And she keeps doing that until she either runs out of a branch that she has to fly to another one and eventually runs out of eggs. I've had a student, Kayla Stallworth, for her research project, decided to help find out exactly how many cicada eggs does a female have. And so we sampled females from four different broods and she counted 16,000 eggs. Oh, wow. So many babies. They averaged 506. Wow. Now, but there was a range.

It could be between four and 600, but there was right around 500 eggs, just a little over 500. Then you start realizing that. Think of all the cicadas you see. How many are reproducing? How many are with the trees laying eggs and then multiply that by 500? Oh, that's so many. But they still have quite a trek to make, right? They do. After she lays her eggs, they die.

And both the male is dead and the female then drops dead. And that's it. And it takes six to eight weeks after the eggs were laid that they all start hatching. And that's usually the end of July 1st of August. Again, talking about sitting in your lawn chair with a beer watching this. If you're at the right time, the right place when the eggs are hatching and the nymphs crawl out of there, the egg nests and the sun is the right angle.

You can actually see these things drop like little little flex to the ground. And that that's when they're extremely vulnerable. Spiders, ants, ground beetles go after these things like crazy. So as soon as they hit the ground, they got to find a crack in the soil. And it's usually a long blade of grass and they get underground immediately as fast as they can. So yes, eggs are laid in slits and tree twigs and then they emerge. And once on the ground, they start looking for 13 or 17 year real estate.

Not all make it, but that's why we're laying 500 eggs. Yeah. And so they feed on grassroots for the first few weeks. And then by New Year's Day, they're 10 to 12 inches below the surface, latched onto a tree root, sucking. And I know it because on New Year's Day, I went out and dug up cicadas. Really? So they've already latched on there. So do they spend those cold winters just sucking up sugars from the tree roots? Well, yes, but they're feeding on the xylem tissue.

And as you remember from biology, xylem is the water conducting tissue that brings water and minerals from the soil up to the leaves. The flume has the sugars coming down. So they they're feeding on this nutrient poor fluid for the next 17 years and not moving probably more than a yard or a meter in any direction during that time. In all my bug lust, I realized I forgot to ask, does this hurt the trees? And most arborists say, not really. So the main peril is in younger trees, whose slim little twigs are the bulk of their branches.

So it's recommended not to plant young trees a couple of years before a cicada brood emerges. So for everyone in brood 10 territory who just spent their quarantine gardening, I'm so sorry. But just think you will have a lot of tiny friends to hang out with for the next 17 years in the backyard. It's thought that the long life cycle might be a response to their evolving and adapting to the ice ages. Really? Yeah. OK, so tell me a little bit about that and about these long life cycles and how they know when to come out.

The life cycle is well, there's two life cycles, 17 years and 13 years. And the idea is that the 13 year cicadas evolved south of the glaciers. And if you look at the 13 year cicada distribution, they're mostly in the southern part of the eastern United States. They don't get into Florida, but they're in Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, what have you. They come up the Mississippi River Valley into Illinois and Missouri. And they get up into South Carolina and parts of North Carolina on the east. But then the 17 year cicadas are generally more north than that. Although they're some of that in eastern Oklahoma that get a little far south.

But in general, it's thought that the ancestor of the periodical cicadas split into two species. So Jean explained that cicadas are creatures of climate, evolving and separating into different species and broods and groups relatively recently in the last ice ages, adapting to ice sheets and going further south and then advancing north again when they receded. And the 13 and 17 year periodical cicadas separated over the last 300,000 years, which, geologically speaking, is pretty recently and then further split into the three 13 year broods and 12 17 year broods. And brood X, or 10, is about to have its moment. How do you handle it when people say brood X?

Do you correct them? Oh, yeah, I have to. I'm a teacher. Okay. I've been a tribute in part to Confucius, but there's a phrase, the first steps towards wisdom is calling things by the correct names. Okay. That makes me feel better.

I called it brood X forever because I thought it was like Generation X. I thought it was even named after Generation X. Well, that's what Generation X would like. Oh, I know. Oh, my gosh. Can I ask you questions from listeners? Certainly. Okay.

They know you're coming on and they're very excited. But before we do a quick note about sponsors of the show, because of them, we can toss a cicada load of money at a worthy cause each week. And this week, Dr. Critsky requested it to go to Mount St. Joseph's University in Cincinnati School of Behavioral and Natural Sciences. And Jean says, you can designate it for cicada research. Our VP will be shocked.

So let's do that. Now, if you feel like tossing a few bucks that way, there's going to be a link in the show notes. And thank you to the following sponsors for allowing this podcast to donate. OK, your questions. If there's anyone on planet Earth that can answer these questions, it's going to be you. Miranda Halsey-Vincent, first time question asker wants to know why are their eyes so big and why are they the best bug ever? Well, the eyes of the whole subgroup

to which the cicadas and their relatives belong to are called the alkanarinka, because the eyes are quite noticeable. The eyes are very noticeable because of the red pigmentation, but they are a visual insect in the sense that they need to see their mate and look where they're going. Also, they'll have a behavior they'll they'll feed on fluids under tree bark. And sometimes they'll spray it at potential predators. I've been under Bradford Pears, for example, and I thought it was raining

because these cicadas were sort of shooting honeydew at me. Oh, my God. And so they need to know what's going on. They can aid these things pretty well. I don't know how accurate they could be, but they were hitting me. But I'm a big target compared to a cicada. P.S. I looked up this sprinkling and there's a page on cicadamania.com that explains reassuringly, you may have been under a cicada filled tree on a sunny day and felt a sprinkler too.

Don't worry, it's just watery tree sap, xylem passed through a cicada, under which Dan has embedded a video of cicadas doing this. And, y'all, it looks like a super-soaker fight in the suburbs in the heat of August. It is just juicy water sports from a bug rump. Pretend it's a blessing, wipe it off, move on, you're going to be fine. Ryan G., Carter Hildebrand, first-time question asker, Ashley Burdette. In Ashley's words, I would love to know what they do underground. Do they hibernate until the next instar?

Or is there just a whole cicada world like society? Megan Dahl, Colton Dewitt, a bunch of people had the same question. Sure. Well, they're not hibernating, they're down there feeding. They're below the frost line. And if anybody's ever gone into a cave, like Mammoth Cave, or once you get in there, it's about 56 degrees Fahrenheit below the frost line, even though it's cold here and it's been cold for the last couple of weeks, you got to get below the frost line.

It's going to be in the 50s if you go down a foot. So it's not going to be that bitter, cold and solid. I was out digging up cicadas back in November when it was on a few cold days. And I was surprised that some of the cicadas that I expected to see, four to six inches below the surface, were already eight to 10 inches down. So they're down there. They're sucking on a tree root. They're making a tunnel.

They're not scooting around very fast. You dig them up. They're ecto therm animals. So they're going to be moving slowly, but they're not hibernating per se. And they grow at different rates. One of the differences between the 13 and 70 years cicadas is that the 13 years cicadas molt an extra time within that first five years of life. Oh, OK.

And that triggers, they're coming out four years early. But you can find seven years into the life cycle I've dug these up. I have found third, fourth and fifth star cicadas at seven years underground. And by the time they reach for 17 years, kids, by the time they reach 13 years old, they're almost almost all of them are in the last instar. And then by usually by the 14th year, they are, but then they don't grow. They don't go anywhere. They're just hanging around down there feeding and getting ready for the magical 17.

It's bananas that when you see periodical cicadas, at least in pretend that they are old enough to drive a car, technically. That is true. I've never thought of it quite that way. But yes, many patrons, such as Katie Timothy, Luke, Earl of Gremelkin, Alora Smith, Angelica Scarduzio, as well as Juniper Brooke, Nikki DeMarco, Barty Goodwin. And first time question askers, Molly Cousins and Alex Bowman wanted to know,

how are they better at time management than people, essentially? How do they know when to come out? Is there a stage manager underground? What's happening? Do you have any idea? Do do scientists know if there's something chemical that triggers that emergence? How do they sense it? That's one of the things that there's some experimental work going on now

that I'm involved with by colleagues that we're trying to determine. What's the trigger that we know that they can determine year passages by the changes in fluid flow in this island. You know, when the tree goes dormant, there seems to be some that they can detect that leaf sets and flower sets can trigger that because you'll see more fluid flow. But what we don't know is how do they remember what year it is? We did have an event happen here in Cincinnati in 2006.

We had a December that reached 70 degrees and it continued into January. And the maple tree in my backyard leafed out. I thought it was just to me. This is January. And then we had a hard freeze in February. All the leaves fell off. Come the late March, early April, the trees started leafing out again. And in parts of Cincinnati, where Brood 14 was expected to come out

the following year, they came out. So for those cicadas, they thought they thought 17 years had passed, even though they had two leaf sets that occurred in one year. For more on how leaves come and go, by the way, check out the phenology episode. Also, heads up to Hannah Neust. I'm about to pronounce your name wrong, and I am sorry. And so this dovetails into a question from several listeners. First time question asker, David Ordonoff, first timer, Hunter Elliott,

Hannah Nuest and Earl of Graymulcan all wanted to know in well in Earl's words, not to be depressing, but to be depressing. How is climate change affecting cicadas and Hunter wanted to know could their hibernation cycles be altered because of it? That's one of these that we're looking into and it seems possible. As I mentioned, they are climate insects, if you will. They emerge when the soil temperature reaches 64 degrees Fahrenheit. And prior to 1950, the average for Cincinnati was May 28th, 29th.

Since 1950 and in the last few years, they're now coming around between the 13th and the 16th of May. So spring is now two weeks warmer than we were back in the first half of the 20th century. And that's not surprising. Anybody that goes to a garden store sees these growing season charts and they'll notice that the planting zones are moving northward from that. What that could do, for example, if you had continuous, like what happened

in 2006 and 2007, if you had a year event happen where there was like trees that seemed to the cicada of a two year things had passed, they might molt in that first five years, which would trigger a four year early acceleration of the emerging off cycle. And that's actually happened in 1991. My students in my ecology and evolution classes, which was an alternating course that I taught at the time, know that we would go out to the orchard at the university and we'd dig up cicadas to sort of drive home the scientific method.

I gave this wonderful paper written by Monty Lloyd and Joanne White. It talked about the difference between 13 year cicadas and 17 year cicadas. And it said what stage of growth they should be at each year. And I said, OK, these cicadas laid their eggs. They hatched in 1987. This is 1991. What stage should they be at if they're brewed 10 cicadas? And to drive the point home, I had to write it on a card. They put the card in an envelope.

They sealed the envelope. They signed the seal. And then we got and then we got shovels and went out and dug up cicadas. And the cicadas were bigger than they should have been. So what that meant to me was. They're going to come out four years early. So in 1999, the year before they were supposed to emerge early, Dr. Kresge presents a paper like the nostradamus of cicada wizards. So much is on the line.

He's making a huge prediction. Y2K rolls around, cicadas should pop out early, according to his forecast. Were they right? Did they come out? And they came out. Oh, and massive numbers. It was mind boggling. At that time, we didn't have an app to use to help us map these things. We didn't have the the Wi-Fi's to help.

I used the answering machine and the one woman called. This is why are all the cicadas in my front yard? And so my students and I went out to look for them. And sure enough, her yard was packed with these things. But what was exciting was they were singing. Usually when cicadas emerge off cycle like that, they all get eaten by predators because they don't come out in large numbers. They were singing. They were mating. They were laying eggs.

What's going to happen to that one? Is it going to get off cycle now? Or is it going to step in line with the rest? Well, that's what we wanted to know. So, of course, working with cicadas, that's the problem. This is to the year 2000. So I went back in 2013. My wife and I went to the study site and by the way,

this is one of five places since day where that happened into the year 2000. And they started coming out. They were coming out. We found shells all over the place. We went out there and the hundreds of them came out. But go back the next day, we couldn't find a single adult cicada. Those cicadas did not survive predation to reproduce in 2013. Wow. Wait four more years. Now, you remember, this is now 17 years later.

If I worked on fruit flies, I'd have this done in two months. But no. So this last early emergence happened in 2017. And adult cicadas who were just little baby eggs in that early 2000 emergence made it all around Cincinnati. And their babies were on time 17 years later and not in one backyard, but at 33 different locations recorded. So what happens to all these early bird cicadas?

Things are out of sync. What we've seen now is the origin of a new population of brood six. Oh, wow. And we thought that would be what would be happening because if you look at certain places here in Cincinnati, we have brood 14 adjacent to brood 10 four years apart. Now six is there in the eastern states. We've got brood nine adjacent to brood five adjacent to brood one.

And so this some kind of a genetic switch that triggers in a four year cycle may be coming to play. We see these patterns that corresponded. So I feel like the cicadas reveal one of their secrets that you can kind of start to tease out the mechanisms of that like chronobiology. Yeah, and get a sense of what's really happening. And it's just so cool. It's neat to have people realize that evolution is happening in your very backyard.

Would you say that you're a patient person overall? Do you think that's what enables you to deal with these long stretches? Well, yeah, I am patient. I also have other things I like to talk about work on. So OK, you're a multitasker. So, yes, Gene has many professional obligations and publishing deadlines and pet projects. Oh, speaking of pets, listeners, Red Toke, first time question asker, Miranda Halsey Vincent, who is very excited about this episode,

Rachel Kasha, first timer, Gracie Vandiver, Victoria Boatwright. A lot of them wanted to know about cicadas as pets. Miranda asked, can you keep them as pets or do they make good pets or not at all? Well, if you don't mind a pet that you don't have to play with, because it's underground, you can't dig them up and play with and put them back. That's not going to work. So, yes, I have a lot of cicada pets in the woods behind my house here. But it's not that they're not like a dog.

It'll be that, you know, it's like, it's like, what's the difference between dogs and cats? You know, for example, dogs need a lot of attention. They demand a lot. Some cats do as well. But cats are like having an older uncle or aunt hanging around. That's nice. It's mellow. But cicadas and as you can, you can certainly use them as get out of his pets when they come out as adults.

But you've got to be prepared for early disappointment because they will die in about a month. And maybe if they're boys, they might be just singing their heads off. Yep. OK. On the topic of heads, let's talk about mouth holes and yours and putting cicadas into them. So many listeners on Patreon, including Lauren Doverglass, Rachel Kasha, Mitch Hughes, Crystal Jess Swan, Monica Rasmussen, Val Lucas, Megan McLean, Heather Densmore, Kathleen Sacks, Daniel Sultana, Zoe Jane, Emily Z, Holly Hollis, Aaron McGlesick, Katie Timothy, Meredith Lloyds,

Cicada Loving Partner, Devin Robinson, Samantha Mitz, Alison Ewald, Sheila Luteweiler, first time question askers, Gigi, who once accidentally ate one while playing volleyball, Gavin, Eve Ross, Paul Smith, Tim Dodge, Shelfish, allergic Kevin Beamer, and Leah Darple, who wrote in, Are they safe to eat? I asked because I once watched a friend's dad smear a live one with peanut butter and pop it in his mouth. Well, some people want to know why their dogs like to eat them. And others were curious if you have ever eaten cicadas. Well, I think dogs like to eat a lot of things.

They're generally, they're generally, I actually, by cat, Boudinot was probably maybe the only cat in history to have fresh, live, periodical cicadas for five consecutive years. Jesse and I would drive around to all the broods coming out of that cycle. When you get to brood one, there's cicada brood almost every year for the next 10 years. And so I made it a point to bring him home some cicadas to play with and eat. Now, answer the yes, I have eaten cicadas. I don't make a habit of it because one of the things I'm really actively concerned about this year is

our cicada is under threat. But with getting out to the culinary experience, I've had them deep fat fried. I've had them sauteed. I've had them in salads and stir fries. If you feel like you need to eat cicadas, you want to collect them, right as they're emerging from their shells because they're nice and white and soft. If you should eat them when they're all dark, it's like eating the tail end of the shrimp, the part that you hold to dip the shrimp into the cocktail sauce.

You can't eat that sort of papery, parchment-y like stuff. It's just too solid. That's what it's like eating an adult cicada that's mature. You should want to eat also females because they're filled with eggs, whereas the male is mostly hollow. So you get more nutrition from the female. Oh, yeah. Eve Ross, a first-time question asker, says that they know some entomologists

who shake the trees and have cicada eating contests. Have you witnessed this ever? No. OK. I was like, that's got to be, you've got to really just gorge yourself on that. Every year that periodical cicada brutes emerge, there are people eating them. So make no mistake, there's even a cookbook called Cicada-licious. And some folks say they taste like lobster popcorn or shrimp or are nutty and buttery.

And for more on eating insects, check out the episode we did, Entomophagy Anthropology in January 2019, and I'll link it on my website. But different indigenous groups have varying relationships to the cicada in diet. It can represent eternal life or even hardship as the Anandaga nation located in what's now upstate New York relied on them for sustenance after their people were attacked and crops were torched by colonists. So the bugs can be symbolic now of resilience and sacrifices made by their ancestors. But patron David Ordonoff asks, are we looking at dwindling populations?

I experienced the last brute 10 emergence in Baltimore where I grew up and it was a wild experience. And Hunter Elliott says, I need there to be as many cicadas as possible in my life. They are the beautiful bug-eyed, screaming monsters that sparked my interest in insects as a child. So what kind of head count are we talking? It's sort of interesting. In the 1890s, entomologists at the USDA were getting kind of worried with all the deforestation for agriculture, thinking that would have an impact on cicadas.

And that's mentioned in the USDA works by Marlott in the 1890s. In 1919, headlines and newspapers around the country talked about brute 10s emerging. It's probably on its way out. There's concern about it's going extinct. As crazy as that sounds, it's happened. Brute 11, which emerged in massive numbers in 1699, just outside of Boston. Went extinct in 1954. Wow.

Brute 7, which occurs in upstate New York, is just only found in two counties. That's going to probably be next for its unprotected lands. So maybe that'll that'll that'll help it. But one of the things that my undergraduate advisor, Frank, was really concerned about and talked about this in the 1950s. And then he and I worked on it in 1987 was, are we seeing signs of purotical cicada and a brute 10 decline? And we are brute 10 was known to occur in every county of the state of Indiana.

And now it is in the upper third of the state. It's highly fragmented. You have to sometimes drive miles between emergent zones. There are parts of the southern part of the states have massive numbers are still there. But that's been going on here in Ohio, in Northwest Ohio, several counties that reported cicadas in the late 19th century, early 20th century, no longer have cicadas. So one of the things I'm hoping that we do with people helping us with the cicada safari app is to really give us a good picture.

What's the status of brute 10? But before everyone had cameras and omniscience and global connectivity in their pockets, folk sent out letters. So in 1902, scientists sent out 15,000 letters to schools and postmasters and railroad conductors asking, Hey, if you see or hear this beautiful shrieking bug, just give us a heads up. But these days, with the cicada safari app that they made, Jean's team was able to capture nearly 8000 recorded sightings of an early emergence of brood nine, something

they could have never done with grad students on horseback or dusty letters handed out across the nation. So if you are underwhelmed with dating app options, just go on an insect safari in a local park and upload some horny bugs, maybe wear an ology shirt and you'll find your soulmate also looking for horny bugs. And I will officiate your wedding, maybe just saying. And so now people can download a cicada safari and they what they take a picture and let you know where they took it, like geotagged it.

Yeah, we want to do two things. We want to help people have more enjoyment with the cicadas. So after you've downloaded the app and it's free, there's no money costs, no money. We don't collect the data to sell to people. None of that. The Center for IT Engagement develops apps to engage a user to provide the research data I need so that I can map out cicadas. And so we encourage people to go on their own cicada safari.

And if they see one, they take a photograph and submit it. I've got a group of colleagues who are volunteering and working to help us identify and examine every photograph. And we are expecting 50,000 photographs. That's great. And so we're hoping for that. If we can get, you know, I've been told to expect maybe 65,000. So we're not sure how this is, how this is going to, what it's going to go into.

But we're looking forward to be overwhelmed. Great. US oligites do your thing, cicada safari app. So each photo is a voucher specimen that what they're looking at is a real periodical cicada. That's important. We want to verify that the observations are accurate. If they are, they're put on our live map.

And so users of the app can follow the emergence when it starts in Northern Georgia and slowly see it move north as spring moves northward in April and May and June. We've also, with the new version that we put out last year, can also receive 11 second videos. And from the videos, we can hear the calls. When you hear the calls, you get to identify the species. So everyone in the US where there are cicadas, like get your cameras, get your phones ready.

The cicadas are unique to the Eastern United States. They don't occur any further west than Eastern Kansas and Nebraska. Our friends in Philadelphia, our friends in Washington, Baltimore, Indian apolis, Louisville, Nashville, those metropolitan areas, that's important. Get cicada safari and help us, help us find out what's really going on with this massive brood. Oh, that's great. A few more questions from listeners.

Zoe wanted to know how do people's feelings and associations about cicadas vary in different cultures and places? And also a lot of listeners are, I personally, if I see one, I want to hug it, I get so excited, but some listeners are scared of them. So how do feelings differ and what's the best way to embrace cicadas in your heart? Well, the culture first, cicadas are amazing animals, as we've been talking about, but there's some really interesting culture differences. In China, during the Han Dynasty, you'd find cicada emulets, pieces of jade

carved in the shape of an adult cicada placed on the tongue of the deceased as a means of, of ensuring a resurrection or birth. When I visited the jade Buddha temple in Shanghai, when I was lecturing in China in 1986, they had a little store right next door to the temple that sold religious artifacts or what have you. And it's much like we see here in Suzhou around some of the Catholic churches have little shops to sell, crushes and emulets and what have you. And they had these large wooden carved cicadas.

And it turns out when a cicada nymph crawls out of the ground, up the tree, this dark out of the dirt and everything else and sheds its skin. That's symbolic of the Buddha reaching the next level of understanding. Oh, wow, that's beautiful. Who doesn't love a makeover, especially spiritually? So these ghostly shells that they leave behind are called exuviai. And truth be told, I almost named my company exuviai because I love them so much. So it's just such a cool reminder that you can chill and get ready

and then, boom, blast down and be like, fabulous. And then hopefully no one puts peanut butter on you and eats you and talks about it for 17 years. We have found now just sketches by Van Gogh of cicadas. We've got a couple of Da Vinci cicadas. They're not very big. They're on rebuses. And in Japan, there's wonderful examples of cicadas in those scrolled paintings

and watercolors, just gorgeous. Here in the United States, Copa Pele, for example, is thought by many to be a cicada. Oh, if you know, the flute player. So if that flutes the proboscis of the the insect, it's got a big hump on the behind the eyes. So it's got things like it's bent over and it sings. I'm trying to think of other of other cool examples. In 1970, Bob Dylan got an honorary degree from Princeton University.

And while he's there receiving his degree, the cicadas are screaming in the distance. And what does he do? He goes home and writes a song. The locus sank for me. Oh, beautiful. That's a beautiful thing. Did any get stuck in his hair? No, allegedly, the story goes that he went there with David Crosby, who sat

on the front row with the dignitaries, and he made small talk with Coretta Scott King, who also received an honorary doctorate that year. He got his cap and gown. He didn't address the group. He just got his honorary doctorate, walked off stage, took off his cap and gown, gave it to somebody and drove away. So you wonder then how closely you need to listen, because he's actually really is tuning in on the cicadas.

This is how the locus sank, and they were singing for me. So to patron Amir Kaku, who asked, is there any music that was inspired by cicadas singing in the summer? There's at least one. And cicada mania also has a whole page devoted to cicada theme songs. And again, there are indigenous nations who are said to have paid homage to them and their drum rhythms. And so when you hear them, just think of them serenading you, because they're

so happy to see you after all this time. And unless you're a tree, they do not want to bite you. So all the patrons, such as Rainbow Warrior, Emma Parks, Amy Miller, first time question askers, Taylor Noelle and Sterling Mackie and Katie Rampey, who would like to be assured that they are not a baby, would like to know how not be I scared. What's a way to maybe get over your fear of them? They don't bite us, do they?

No, some people, if you grab them and if you're afraid of them, you're not going to be grabbing them per se, but they're lovely little animals. You should always face your fear. So go out there and really get yourself involved with the cicadas. Watch this slow motion dance they do as they shed their skin and turn into adults. Listen to the coercing. When Gideon Smith, this individual from the 1840s, wrote in 1851, he was talking about Brute 10 and he said, I'm paraphrasing here.

You know, while some people find this a sad son, I enjoy hearing it, but I was melancholy as I heard it because I wondered if I'd lived to hear it again. Hmm. Oh, he died one year before Brute 10 emerged the next time in 1860. He died in 1860, 70 year before. Wow. I could have sworn that Earl of Grammlekin wasn't the only one who asked this, but a few people wanted to know if Mothman exists.

Is there a cicada man somewhere? Uh, not officially, although I, this sounds self-serving. There was a headline in 1987 that referred to be a cicada man since then. Oh, that's amazing. I've been called a lot of things in my life, but that was, that was a first. And what about, last two questions I always ask, worst thing about cicadas, don't worry, I'll ask the best, but the thing about your job that is the most annoying or difficult or irksome, anything really sticking your car?

Well, irksome is a good way. It's not that it's, it angers me by any means, but I do, uh, don't like it when people just step on it willy nilly. Oh my God, it looks like a huge M&M. Anyone see the 1986 Corey Hame vehicle, Lucas? Jean didn't, but if you did, you might remember a young Winona writer and a Charlie Sheen and a subplot of emerging locusts, which for some reason they did not call cicadas.

But either way, my sisters and I can quote entire scenes of that movie. A lot of great bug shots, just got to say, but what else irks Jean? And I do get a lot of questions about eating them. Okay. And that's, that's understandable because the whole reason they're called, they were called locusts in part was related to people looking at these insects and trying to interpret their, what these things were using the King James version of the Bible.

And, uh, John the Baptist ate locusts. We knew the native, the indigenous people of New England ate locusts. When they came out in 1715, uh, the report from, uh, uh, Reverend in Philadelphia said the English split them open, eat them because they said they're the locusts that eaten by John the Baptist. And so I, I can't eat it right now. If indeed the cicadas are in decline, uh, then I really don't like killing them per se because I want them to be around for, uh, many centuries.

That makes tons of sense. Every, you know, 13, 17 years, hopefully someone will write in a journal about their experience, you know? Oh yeah. I could be surprised the number of letters I get, uh, I'm informed about, or I'll do, uh, find a hero of somebody that's got a letter archive. I'll give them dates and what to look for and see if there's any mention of cicadas or locusts, depending on the time period.

Oh, that's great that you can say like, look in spring-ish in this year. And one thing people can do if they want to have the fund themselves. The library of Congress has a wonderful website called Chronicling America. And they've been digitizing newspapers from the late 1700s to 1963. And if you're in a cicada area and you, you can, you can find the thought of my book, periodical cicadas, the Bruton edition, you can, uh, uh, look up what year, if you got cicadas in your area, based on the distribution maps, you can look at what you, what brood they are, look at what year they came

out and then go back into the Chronicling America for May through June and look for stories on locusts, if it's early or cicadas do both because a lot of times they were talking about, even in the 1760s, they were talking about these things aren't locusts, they're cicadas. But, you know. Oh, that's so cool. There's going to be so many people going through back in time into history. And, and they should talk to their grandparents if they're lucky to have

their grandparents around or some of the older, if they got grandparents, did they were around cicadas? What do they remember them? And they may remember what their grandparents told them about the cicadas. So it's a, it's a multi-generational insect, that's for sure. I know that there's so much that you love about them, but is there something that is your favorite thing about cicadas? Oh, wow.

I know. It's, it's there is something about when they first start coming out, I will go out with my tripod, my iPhone flashlight, and I'll set this thing up and I'll sit there for hours, photographing a cicada as it goes. So I've done, I've got probably 20,000 pictures of this now, but it never gets old, it never gets old. And that, that's almost like a zen moment when you can do it, when that happens. And then to the opposite extreme, but still is, but still fun is when the numbers

are really big and they're screaming and it is just, it is just fun. It is just great. So ask world-renowned experts basic questions, even if you have to wait 17 years to do so, and you screw it up for the first couple of minutes at the link in the show notes, you will find Jean's fresh, newly emerged, soft and squishy book, periodical cicadas, the brood 10 edition. It's 13 bucks in paperback and it's available on eReader too, and it'll make your whole year.

And you can get the app cicada safari and you can help Jean's lab track these suckers. Also, Jean's wife, Jesse is a silversmith and a fellow bug nerd and sells her gorgeous entomological creations via the Silver Spot Studio. And I will link them in the show notes as well. Cool stuff. You can learn more about cicadas from Dan Moskai's website, cicada mania, which is wonderful.

And he has an Instagram, instagram.com slash cicada mania, highly recommend following them. And I am Ali Ward on Twitter and Instagram with just one L. And the show is at oligies on Twitter, Instagram. Thank you to Aaron Talbert, who admins the incredible oligies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to cicada obsessed Shannon and Bonnie of the podcast. You are that who manage oligies merch at oligiesmerch.com. Thank you to all the patrons at patreon.com slash oligies.

Hello oligies subredditors. Also, thank you to Noel Dilworth for scheduling this, including when I got locked out and you had to send a new link. And thank you to Emily White and all the transcribers for making transcripts available and free. Those are on my website. They're linked in the show notes. Thank you to Kayla Patton for bleeping them.

Bleeped versions, Safe for Kids are also on my website and links in the show notes. And thank you to assistant editor, but show producer, Jarrett Sleeper, who took the first crack at this week's edit for me because I have had a banana's few weeks with innovation nation shoots. Jarrett, you're the wind beneath my wrinkly and soggy cicada wings. And of course, to editor and magic cicada, Stephen Ray Morris, who hosts the Percast, C Jurassic Wright and everything but the movie A Star Wars Book Club podcast, Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music.

And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this week's secret is that I've recorded a secret like 15 times when I keep losing my train of thought or I changed a secret. One of the secrets I recorded for this was like, you know, it's really good instead of iced coffee. It's just putting hot espresso over ice because it is not too watery. And I was like, that's not a good secret. And then I recorded a secret about how this is coming out later on a Tuesday

because Graham spent Sunday projectile vomiting on clean bedding. And it turned out we had to take her to the emergency bed and she got x-rays and she had just eaten some rocks because she's like rocks. She's going to be fine. Also, I have to be downtown on a shoot camera ready in 29 minutes. And I am in my pajamas. My pajamas are pulled up well past my navel. And this morning the garage door fell off its hinges.

There was an owl hooting a garbage truck. Anyway, I'm having a real Monday over Tuesday. But we're here and I want to see cicadas this year. OK, bye bye.