By MARSHA MERCER
The sound of Spring 2021 is the cicada chorus.
The critters have been so thick in the Washington area
they have shown up on Doppler weather radar. Even the president had a close
encounter.
Joe Biden brushed a cicada away on June 9 as he was
about to board Air Force One for his first foreign trip.
The separate charter flight with dozens of journalists
covering the presidential trip was delayed seven hours after cicadas swarmed
into a jet engine at Dulles Airport in Virginia. Panic averted: Pizza was
ordered. For the humans.
Billions of Brood X – pronounced Brood 10 -- cicadas that
spent 17 years underground are out in force in the eastern United States, and
they’re doing what comes naturally.
Males woo females with their songs, the louder the
better. They mate, the female lays eggs and, having fulfilled their destiny,
they die. Their offspring burrow underground and sustain themselves for years sipping
sap from roots of trees and grasses.
See you in 2038.
While entomologists revel in the periodical cicada
show, the invasion makes some people anxious. Having critters fly in one’s face
and hair can be a buzz kill and their noise intimidating.
“This mating call and response, which sounds to some
like the whining of electrical wires rising and falling, can reach over 90
A-weighted decibels or `dBA.’ That is as loud as a lawnmower, motorcycle or
tractor!” the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
reports on its Noisy Planet blog.
The Noise Research office of the National Institute
for Occupational Safety and Health tweeted this cautionary note on June 11: “The
loud calls of cicadas are a great reminder that dangerous noise can affect
workers on the job and at home. . . #BroodXtraLoud.”
To measure how loud the cicadas are near you, download the NIOSH Sound Level Meter app from the Apple Store.
We had plenty of notice Brood X cicadas were coming, but
imagine the shock and awe the first English colonists must have felt when hordes
of cicadas suddenly emerged. The colonists lived in a far quieter world than
ours. They had never heard the din of cicadas’ love songs – or lawnmowers,
motorcycles or tractors, for that matter.
William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth colony,
wrote in his history about what entomologists believe was a periodical cicada
appearance in 1633:
“All the month of May, there was such a
quantity of a great sort of flyes like for bigness to wasps or bumblebees,
which came out of holes in the ground . . . and ate green things and made such
a constant yelling noise as made all the woods ring of them, and ready to deaf
the hearers.”
Native Americans believed the insects would bring
disease, and Bradford wrote that, indeed, the colonists were sick during the hot
summer months.
We now know cicadas don’t bite, cause disease or
otherwise harm humans, but they can damage young trees, especially fruit trees.
Michael J. Raupp, professor emeritus of Entomology at the University of
Maryland who is known as The Bug Guy, calls this damage “the dark side of
cicadas.”
Soon after mating, females choose a nice soft
greenwood twig or branch. The ideal branch is about the size of a pencil. The female
makes cuts in the branch and deposits her eggs. These incisions can cause the
branches to flag or droop and die.
But there’s no need to reach for the bug spray.
“Pesticides are generally ineffective in keeping
cicadas away,” the Environmental Protection Agency says on its website.
“Spraying also doesn’t make sense because cicadas are generally harmless.
Applying pesticides to control cicadas may harm other organisms, including
animals that eat cicadas.”
Experts suggest waiting to prune the branches until
after the cicadas leave, which won’t be long. We expect to be free of this
group of cicadas around July 4.
But the cicadas will be back.
Just as we couldn’t have anticipated all that’s
happened since 2004, we can’t imagine how life will change by 2038 and the
cicadas’ next emergence.
So, stay calm, enjoy – or tolerate – the show. The
cicadas will carry on.
©2021 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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