Today's demon: cicadas

Just kidding. Brood XIX won't be demonic. They'll only sound that way.

Thinking about cicadas today, I stumbled upon the Cicada Song recorded at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival of 2014. The song, performed by human voice boxes, eerily mimics the cicada, a species that also has something like a “voice box.” While the recording is now 10 years old, know that a decade is nothing to a cicada. Old man time is faced with calm and acceptance by cicada broods, which mostly adhere to a biological timetable of either 13 or 17 years of underground quiet, plus a few months of above-ground cacophony. The cacophony is, in fact, one of the single insect sounds that is most conspicuous to humans.

Get ready, everybody, they are coming. Check your local news to get an idea of when and where.

Get ready for the ear-splitting squawks of the male cicada's love songs.

Don’t miss this one-minute video. You’ll better understand similarities between human and cicada sound-making.

Some parts of the U.S. will get the once-in-a-lifetime experience of two broods emerging at the same time: Brood XIX and Brood XII. This co-emergence only happens every 212 years, so—-special. Georgians are only expecting Brood XIX, but lucky for me I’ll be in Tennessee for Mother’s Day, and the Volunteer State is expected to be co-emergence central.

No matter where they are, these non-dangerous native species are expected to use their vocals well to prominently “enter the conversation.”

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Remember the Loud Family? SNL?

Here in Atlanta, I'm trying to get my bike training back on track this week after too many winter layoff days due to Covid and the cold. Lately, I’ve successfully gotten in a month’s worth of 80-mile weeks by splitting them into four 20-mile outings. Biking is one of my loves.

This week while riding, I started thinking about cicadas. We cyclists are a vocal species too, and sometimes all that self-powered movement we are doing just lifts our spirits and makes us feel like big kids. Kids who are loud. My bike group is always whoop-de-do—-i-n-g on the downhills. We do it to let off steam and vocalize how we feel, which is usually quite-well-thank-you when out on a joy ride.

“I was thinking about cicada noise,” I told Fred the other day after one of my 20-milers. “What’ll it sound like with two broods going at it? I read that one brood changes its tune a little, goes even louder, when another brood is out.”

“It may all be amusing at first, but then we’ll be tired of the racket,” he said.

Humans and cicadas make rackets in similar ways, biologically speaking. Humans have a larynx, or voice box, located in the neck, which is involved in voice production. When my biking peeps and I yell on downhills and in tunnels, our sound is produced by air passing through our vocal cords, causing them to vibrate and create sound waves in the pharynx, nose, and mouth. The pitch of the sound is determined by the amount of tension on the vocal folds, aka the vocal cords.

Male cicadas have sound boxes in their abdomens. They make their sound by expanding and contracting a membrane called a tymbal which is a tiny, yet quite stiff, plate located over a resonance chamber.

We humans may use our loud vocals to play around, but for the cicada being a member of the Loud Family is all a matter of life and death. Male cicadas use their noise to attract females for mating, which is a matter of survival of the species, certainly a weighty matter.

Community science for cicadas

I’ll soon help map the distribution of periodical cicada and annual cicada emergences in my areas by participating in two ways. Join me!

• Join the Cicada Safari. When you start the app you will be prompted to enable your phone to record the date and location of where you took your cicada photograph. The photograph is a voucher specimen that confirms you saw a cicada, helps researchers identify its species, and the date and location of you photograph helps us map your observation. Then go on an expedition to find cicadas. When you hear their calls, try to find an adult cicada. Take a sharp close up photograph and submit it for verification and mapping. Enjoy the quest and help monitor cicada diversity.

• Upload images to iNaturalist. I checked the project page at iNat and see there are several cicada-specific groups. I expect more will be created in the coming months. To find a cicada project in the app, look for “projects” at the bottom right of the home screen. My experiences with project pages in iNat have become one of my most educational activities in my quest to become more of a naturalist myself.

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  Upcoming:

• Interview with a young environmentalist in Atlanta who is all about the trees.

• Eastern red cedar trees, high school graduation, and me.

• More one-panel cartoons!