Map Shows Where Rare Cicada Event Not Seen in Over 200 Years Will Occur This Spring
Aaron Burr was vice president. Abe Lincoln had not yet been born. The Louisiana Purchase was in the process of being finalized.
That was the America the last time two massive broods of cicadas emerged.
It was 1803 when Brood XIX, known as the Great Southern Brood, and Brood XIII, called the Northern Illinois Brood, last appeared together, according to The New York Times. The Illinois cicadas emerge every 17 years; their southern cousins pop up every 13 years.
The result will mean trillions of bugs emerging from the ground once the ground temperature reaches about 64 degrees, according to CBS.
One trillion cicadas would cover 15,782,828 miles if placed end to end, according to Floyd Shockley, an entomologist and collections manager at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Times reported.
“That cicada train would reach to the moon and back 33 times,” Shockley said.
Gene Kritsky, a retired professor of biology at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, said by late April or early May, northern Louisiana, southern Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, northern Georgia, and up into western South Carolina, will begin to see the bugs as they begin their weeks-long lives.
Next it will be the turn of central North Carolina, eastern Tennessee and northern Arkansas, followed by southern Missouri, Southern Illinois and western Kentucky.
The last phase of cicada eruption will take place in central and northern Missouri and Illinois, northwestern Indiana, southern Wisconsin and eastern Iowa.
Cicadas tunnel up from underground, mature, and then begin the noisy process of males doing what males do best — make a racket finding a mate.
Ryan Fowley, a pest removal expert at Excel Pest Services in New Jersey said cicadas are “well-known for producing a chorus of mating calls that can exceed 100 decibels,” according to Fox News
“That’s louder than a tractor or lawnmower, and even comparable to a jet plane during takeoff,” he said.
Shockley said cicadas do not bite and cause minimal damage to plants, but as they die off, they might leave a mess behind, according to the Times.
Here’s what bug map is #cicada double broods pic.twitter.com/nrJpIJumZc
— CLVYSKA44 (@clvyska44) April 9, 2024
“In urban areas, there will be sufficient numbers to necessitate removal of their bodies,” Shockley said. “But rather than throwing in the trash or cleaning up with street sweepers, people should consider them basically free fertilizer for the plants in their gardens and natural areas.”
“There may be a lot of carcasses that build up around our plants and gutters, so you might want to sweep them out periodically and add them to your compost,” Fowley told Fox News.
John Cooley, a biology professor at the University of Connecticut, said homeowners should not wage war on the cicadas, according to the Times.
“The forest is where they live,” he said. “They are a part of the forest. Don’t try to kill them. Don’t try to spray insecticide, all that kind of thing. That’s just going to end badly because there are more than you could possibly kill with insecticide. You’d end up killing everything.”
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