Gonna be a buggy year
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It's an amazing thing to see. We never noticed it when we lived downtown, but here in "Villae in Sylvis" it's quite the event. Sidewalks are literally (and I mean "literally" literally) covered with cicada shells and carcasses. And it's noisy AF.
Male cicadas can reach decibels similar to a lawn mower or passing jet, and their numbers will be large, but their life cycle is short, at just four to six weeks.
It's an amazing thing to see. We never noticed it when we lived downtown, but here in "Villae in Sylvis" it's quite the event.
"When the cicadas start dying and dropping from the trees later in the spring, there are large numbers on the ground, and the odor from their rotting bodies is noticeable," U of I reports. "In 1990, there were reports from people in Chicago having to use snow shovels to clear their sidewalks of the dead cicadas."
One year we hosted a party for the OR staff at our place during the Cicada emergence. One of my surgeon friend scooped about two pints of them into a container, and was frying them up in the kitchen.
No, I didn't partake, but in retrospect, it's amazing that he was predicting the future.
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When we were hit with Brood X a few years ago, I measured it at 93 decibels on several mornings. That’s the same noise level as riding a motorcycle without a helmet.
The Brad
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We had it is 1986 here. They were so thick the corpses piled up six sinches deep along the freeways. I was driving a convertible at the time and that was dicey. You kept your mouth firmly shut. You have to wonder how in the world that creature evolved that way.
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We had it is 1986 here. They were so thick the corpses piled up six sinches deep along the freeways. I was driving a convertible at the time and that was dicey. You kept your mouth firmly shut. You have to wonder how in the world that creature evolved that way.
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When we were hit with Brood X a few years ago, I measured it at 93 decibels on several mornings. That’s the same noise level as riding a motorcycle without a helmet.
@LuFins-Dad said in Gonna be a buggy year:
When we were hit with Brood X a few years ago, I measured it at 93 decibels on several mornings. That’s the same noise level as riding a motorcycle without a helmet.
Summer 2021! Early June I believe... it was in the days before we left for Minnesota.
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Interesting article
When huge broods of cicadas emerge after years underground, they provide an all-you-can-eat buffet for birds. And Brood X—the group that swarmed the Eastern United States in 2021—brought as many as 1.5 million of the protein-rich insects per acre.
These mass cicada emergences have cascading effects on the broader ecosystem, according to a new paper published last week in the journal Science. Researchers found that birds, faced with a sudden abundance of food when Brood X emerged, ate fewer caterpillars. In turn, the insects flourished, munching their way through oak forests.
“Our findings really show how… plants, animals and all sorts of organisms are all deeply connected,” lead author Zoe Getman-Pickering, a former researcher at George Washington University, says in a statement. “When you shift the behavior or the population of one of those organisms, the effects ripple through the ecosystem in surprising ways.”
and
When broods surface, birds have easy access to billions of new, nutritious snacks. It makes sense, then, that they would stuff themselves with cicadas and neglect the caterpillars.
“What would you do if you walked outside, and you found the world swarming with flying Hershey’s Kisses?” says Gene Kritsky, an entomologist at Mount St. Joseph University who was not involved in the study, to Science’s Erik Stokstad.
While birds were busy feasting on cicadas, caterpillar populations boomed, and individual caterpillars grew larger
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Also...
Dogs LOVE to eat cicadas. If your dog has a shellfish allergy (how would you even know that?), it's recommended that you put a muzzle on them to prevent them from eating the bugz.
But if you're adventurous...
Also, despite the concurrance of the 13 and 17 year broods, the areas in which they live are not congruent. So, this year's emergence in any specific location should be pretty average.
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https://wgntv.com/news/chicago-news/chicago-cicadas-infected-std-zombies/
A sexually transmitted disease that is said to turn cicadas into ‘zombies’ and causes their private parts to fall off has been detected in southern parts of Illinois and is expected to reach the Chicago area within weeks.
The infection is a white fungus called Massospora cicadina that takes over the male and causes the gonads to be torn from the body. The chalky spores that are released are spread to other nearby cicadas.
The Massospora cicadina, which targets only the 13- and 17-year periodical cicadas, has already infected cicadas in Champaign and is expected to migrate north to the Chicago area, according to Jim Louderman, a collection’s assistant at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.
The fungus is also the type that has hallucinatory effects on birds that would eat infected cicadas.
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" (coincidentally two prime numbers)."
Hm, I think the mathematically more relevant fact about 13 and 17 is that they are coprime, which means that their product is the smallest common multiple. Which in turn means that it minimizes the chance that their cycles occur in the same year - which seems to make sense evolutionally.
I wonder, though, how the biological counting to 17 works.
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https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2024/08/13/noon-whistle-brewing-cicada-infused-malort
A suburban brewery garnered headlines this year for selling cicada-infused Jeppson’s Malört during the height of the insect’s resurgence.
The liqueur was promoted as a more disgusting version of the already reviled liqueur.
But the drink was also illegal.
and
Illinois’ Liquor Control Act of 1934 has strict rules governing alcoholic infusions.
The law requires that infusions must be mixed and stored on the premises licensed by the state, according to 1818, a Chicago law firm focusing on state regulations. The infusion must be stored in a labeled, sanitary, covered container, and cannot be aged more than 14 days. The infusion must be used or destroyed within 21 days after the aging process.
