Brood XIX and Brood XIII will both emerge this spring. The last time these bugs showed up at the same time in the United States, Thomas Jefferson was president.

Brood XIX and Brood XIII will both emerge this spring. The last time these bugs showed up at the same time in the United States, Thomas Jefferson was president.

The cicadas are coming — and if you’re in the Midwest or the Southeast, they will be more plentiful than ever. Or at least since the Louisiana Purchase.

This spring, for the first time since 1803, two cicada groups known as Brood XIX, or the Great Southern Brood, and Brood XIII, or the Northern Illinois Brood, are set to appear at the same time, in what is known as a dual emergence.

The last time the Northern Illinois Brood’s 17-year cycle aligned with the Great Southern Brood’s 13-year period, Thomas Jefferson was president. After this spring, it’ll be another 221 years before the broods, which are geographically adjacent, appear together again.

“Nobody alive today will see it happen again,” said Floyd W. Shockley, an entomologist and collections manager at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “That’s really rather humbling.”

Non-paywall link

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    22·
    10 months ago

    I remember a huge cicada emergence when I was a kid in the 1980s. You couldn’t get a car out of the driveway without driving over dozens of them.

  • Creddit@lemmy.world
    201·
    10 months ago

    I wonder if you could capture a high quality, multitrack recording of this emergence event to get a multidimensional audio sample from unique times/geographies where these groups emerge.

    With an audio sample that could only come from this specific event every 200+ years, you could set up a program that survives your own death and triggers only when it happens again.

    I’m not sure what the utility would be, but I’d watch it on Netflix for sure.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      32·
      10 months ago

      No, they’re harmless and they don’t even do much damage to plants because they mostly eat plant fluid in twigs, which trees and bushes usually survive just fine, even with a huge number of cicadas on them.

      They’re just a big mess.

  • poppy@lemm.ee
    9·
    10 months ago

    I genuinely love the cacophony of cicadas and I live in the Midwest so I’m thrilled for this!

    • jwmgregory@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      21·
      10 months ago

      when unique ecological events happen in any other place in the world, the title is often “x thing is seen in the world for the first time in x years” or some shit like that. honestly sometimes in media yeah, there’s an america-centric worldview being pushed; but sometimes you people get so overzealous about this “the USA is the whole world” schtick. this literally isn’t anything like that jeez. there’s cool unique bugs elsewhere in the world. there wouldnt be people fucking crucifying the title in the comments about those articles.

  • numberfour002@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    10 months ago

    For some reason, I was thinking it was a few years more recent than 2011 the last time the Southern Brood emerged in my area. I have a memory of going for a hike in a wooded park, and there were so many of these cicadas that their individual calls just blended together into an almost ethereal low hum. Just didn’t realize it was that long ago.

    Since childhood, I’ve always thought cicadas were really cool critters. Their calls are the quintessential soundtrack of summer days for me.

    I don’t formally track things, but I do pay attention to when I first start noticing cicada calls each year. I had noticed that they have seemed to emerge later and later the past 4 or 5 years. In 2023, the first time I noticed any calls at all was near the end of June. Normally I start hearing them around the last week of May to the first week of June.

    I also did not see as many cicada molts last year as normal, so I was thinking that it was a smaller emergence than typical. I wonder if it’s related to the upcoming 13-year brood getting ready to emerge?

    Final note: I went most of my life without knowing that cicadas can “bite”. I mean, technically they can’t bite because their mouth parts are needle-like, but I found out that they will sometimes jab a human.

    One year I had a Disney princess moment where a cicada landed on my finger while I was outside working in the yard. I just left it to do its thing, because again I think they’re cool and never had issues handling them before. Several minutes went by, and then I felt a poke in the general area of the cicada – and then realized it must have mistaken me for a tree and it was trying to feed. I could see it lifting up a bit and making repeated attempts to stab its mouth into my finger. I guess I was the most poplar Disney princess that cicada had encountered that day. Fortunately it wasn’t painful, but one of the jabs did break the skin and there was a small amount of blood.

    • EmpathicVagrant@lemmy.world
      4·
      10 months ago

      And when the plagues come, the cicadas shall have a taste for human blood. We shall all have numberfour002 to thank for their hunger.

      • numberfour002@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        10 months ago

        I prefer to believe that I’m uniquely nutritious and irresistibly sweet. And I probably acquired some kind of special powers from my cicada bite that enable me to make anything I touch suck.

  • rekabis@lemmy.ca
    2·
    10 months ago

    I wonder if climate change will have dented their number. Large swaths of North America have been hit by unprecedented, multi-year droughts thanks to Climate Change. Trees under severe stress and unable to properly support sapsucking insects over multiple years may have killed off many cicada grubs.