Cicadas

Stroud and other Daily Herald readers shared their memories of the historic and voluminous convergence of the 17-year cicadas (Brood XIII) and 13-year cicadas (Brood XIX).

While nearly as large as the Asian giant hornet, Sphecius speciosus, or the cicada killer, is not in the same insect family as the Asian giant hornet and is specialized to hunt annual cicadas, and to a significantly lesser extent, periodical cicadas.

Back when Oswald was earning an undergraduate degree at the Art Institute of Chicago, they started hallucinating that trees and cicadas were sending them secret messages.

Cicadas do not hibernate but burrow underground and survive off tree root sap.

Cicadas, dragonflies and many other flying insects have similar wing surfaces that are naturally bactericidal, meaning bacteria killing.

Locusts are grasshoppers and cicadas are more closely related to aphids than grasshoppers.

Soon the mosquitoes will die off, the ants will stop crawling out of nowhere, and the cicadas will cease their chattering cacophony.

What about the bacteria that both feeds on and provides food to the cicadas it inhabits, with distinct genes but no possibility of existence distinct from its host?

According to estimates from several who study cicadas, they swarm headed to parts of the U.S. will number in the billions.

Biologist Gene Kritsky estimates as many as five million cicadas crowded into a small patch of Ryerson Conservation Area north of Chicago, where the males are singing for sex.

Cicadas don’t even need a hi-hat with a souped-up tempo to keep perfect time during all those years spent underground.

Cicadas emerge every year in Illinois, but the emergence of two, separate massive broods like parts of Illinois are experiencing this Spring hasn't been seen since Thomas Jefferson was President in 1803!

He would collect their light green shells, and he remembers the way cicadas chirped playfully whenever he tried to catch them.

If you have these two things in your backyard, you're going to be seeing more cicadas than most, and we'll explain why.

In the Southeast and the Mississippi Valley there are three broods of 13-year cicadas.

I recently called our friend Jenny Kelley, who lives on a farm in Due West, for an update on the cicadas.

It's interactive because you can submit when and where you spot cicadas as Cicada-geddon begins any day now.

I’ve been looking forward to this for many years,” said Catherine Dana, an entomologist who specializes in cicadas at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Male cicadas perch on tree branches to sing — well, the sound is rather more like the vibration of a drum.

Now, I can see us from above: a group of girls sitting on a lawn, making a noise as loud as cicadas.