At night, the ground swells and the insects rise. After 17 years underground, the cicada larvae decide to climb higher, so they climb up the trees en masse, molt, and emerge as adults. And then the fun begins.
An adult periodical cicada, fresh from molting, clambers over the shell of another larva at the base of a tree in Charleston, Illinois, Friday, May 17, 2024. Bug tourism in America: Swarms of biblical cicadas bring visitors to a nature lover’s dream in the heartland of America. (AP Photo/Carolyn Custer)
Swarms of cicadas are popping up and flying around, trillions of once-hiding larvae now in the air, in trees, and even on people’s shirts, hats, and faces. They’re red-eyed, noisy, and full of energy.
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“What I saw was biblical,” said biologist Gene Kritsky, who has followed periodical cicadas for 50 years. Still, he was astonished to see 3 to 5 million of them swarming in a small corner of Ryerson Nature Preserve north of Chicago. “Some of the things I saw here I’d never seen before.”
It’s a sight that can only be found in America, and the last of a predicted triple crown of rare natural wonders.
First there was the solar eclipse in April, then unusually frequent southern aurora borealis in May, and now 2024’s two periodic cicada outbreaks have emerged from below to join the sky’s existing show on a scale not seen since 1803. Though it has lasted several weeks longer than the other two fleeting natural eccentricities, in many places the cicada outbreaks are beginning to subside.
The males are chirping to mate, continuing until the female cicada flap her wings and consents. In some places in Illinois, the decibel level reaches 101, louder than a lawnmower, and there are waves of constant buzzing, like aliens descending from a sci-fi movie, punctuated by sudden, low-pitched calls that go “fffaaaro, fffaaaro.”
The cicadas’ chirps are loud in places like Chicago suburb Oak Brook, but already muted in the southern part of the state, including where the two swarms overlap. In an asphalt-paved shopping plaza in DuPage County, the sound of a swarm of cicadas huddled on the branches of a lone tree drowned out the hoses and rolling brushes of a neighboring automatic car wash.
“Anytime I was driving I thought there was something wrong with my car and that noise was caused by bugs,” said David Quinn, who was visiting the Chicago area from Northern Ireland.
Buggy sightseeing
Cicada chasers in 18 Midwestern and Southern states have posted photos of the cicadas to the Cicada Safari app. Most of the photos are concentrated in two regions, each representing a different swarm. The northern Illinois swarm, which emerges every 17 years and is called the XIII swarm, is so dense that in some places like Ryerson, there are 1.5 million cicadas per wooded acre, or nearly 1 billion cicadas per square mile, Kritsky said. The Great Southern swarm, which emerges every 13 years, stretches from Virginia to Missouri and southern Illinois into Georgia.
In central Illinois, especially around Springfield, the two swarms nearly overlap, but it can be hard to tell which swarm a cicada belongs to.
At the Lincoln Memorial in Springfield, executive director Joel Howedel thought it would be a good idea to hang a push-pin map of the United States to keep track of where visitors were coming from. But he wasn’t thinking too big. At the bottom of the map, beneath the scrawled words “Outside the U.S.”, he reads: “Japan, Belgium, Lithuania, Germany, Great Britain, Japan (Kyoto).”
“It’s just unbelievable how many people have come,” Howedel said.
Rebecca Schmidt, a research entomologist with the USDA, says calls about insects are usually about something bad, scary, like murder hornets. That’s not the case with periodical cicadas. “People come to us for good reasons, like, ‘Tell me more about this. We’re really excited about this,'” she says.
“This is a little window into some amazing things that nature does, some of which we can predict pretty accurately,” Schmidt said.
Cindy Harris, a Springfield retiree, walked through Lincoln Gardens pointing at cicadas wearing a T-shirt that read, “I survived the cicada invasion, but all I got was this shirt (and earplugs),” which she won by posing as a cicada on a toy skateboard.
“I don’t know why I’m fascinated by them,” Harris said.
They’re just weird, with powerful jaws and squirting urine, and the occasional zombie germ.
The charm of cicadas
Jennifer Ryzewski, an insect ecologist with the DuPage County Forest Preserve District, wore a 3D-printed hooded cicada costume with bulging red eyes to create educational social media posts and take part in cicada walking tours.
She studied how insects move in order to film them on video.
“You go outside and the sidewalks are covered in bugs, marching around in the night,” she said of the still-wingless caterpillars.
“They’re very hunchbacked and they look like they’re crawling slowly, alien-like, on their little limbs,” Libzewski said, “but they’re really cute,” she added.
Six-year-old Lily Torrey of Springfield is obsessed with cicadas; she even feeds them to her pet lizard, Dart. When one approaches her front door, she rushes over to her doorbell camera to get an up-close look at the creature. She can distinguish the difference between silent females and noisy males, the different parts of a cicada’s body and the “little tingly” sensation it gives when it walks by. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt,” she is quick to add.
But many people are frightened or disgusted by the sight of trillions of flying insects that die soon after mating and fall to the ground in a rather smelly mass.
“Fear of creepy crawlies is probably the most common fear that people have,” says Martin Anthony, chair of psychology at Toronto Metropolitan University and director of the university’s Anxiety Research and Treatment Lab.
He said there is an evolutionary reason for this, as people long ago needed to be on guard against danger.
“Cicadas themselves are not dangerous, but they may share characteristics with other animals that are potentially threatening or carry diseases,” Anthony said.
Beneficial, not harmful
The only danger is to young trees, as females make notches in the branches to lay their eggs, Libzewski said. Many newly planted trees have a protective white netting that contrasts with the black-winged insects that line the mature trees.
Overall, cicadas play an important role in local ecosystems by providing fertilizer, aerating the soil, and providing food for birds and other animals, says Marvin Lo, a tree root biologist at The Morton Arboretum, who collected cicada carcasses from an area and crushed them into a smelly powder in the lab to measure and test later.
The botanical gardens were full of cicadas, cicada watchers, and scientists watching the insects. The insects did not disappoint. They were swarming and bizarre. The Associated Press discovered a cicada with blue eyes, a one in a million find.
Kritsky first spotted blue-eyed cicadas in Ryerson Forest. It’s a numbers game. Even if it’s one in a million, there are so many of them that you’ll get a few in a small patch of land. A biologist who wrote a book about the dual emergence says the cicada invasion is slowing down, but he’s still looking for more.
“Obviously in another two weeks it’ll be over,” Kritsky said. “It’s been really fun.”
