Sometimes you don’t even have to leave home for some adventure! Our home is located right in the middle of the Brood X cicada population apparently and this year we got quite the show! We started seeing cicada shells around May 12th and by early July the only sign that they had been there was the occasional shell and the dying tree branch tips!
I won’t try to replicate a nature documentary here but I thought I’d share some of my more fascinating observations.
First of all, they came out in droves! I could not believe how many apparently had been living in my yard for 17 years. Many would climb to the top of a blade of grass and decide that was a great place to molt. Others put much more effort in and climbed to the top of a tree just a few feet from our property line.
I was especially surprised to see where in the yard they seemed to pop up. Some places were not near trees and so we’d have a nightly line of cicadas walking across the garage door for instance. Many chose to climb our trim around the garage door to molt. They would climb on whatever was there, including each other sometimes, to molt!
Some of the pics in the album show the shear magnitude of what we were dealing with, with literally thousands of cicada shells at the bases of some trees!
I noticed one especially heavily covered tree near our office, and the nearby trees covered in cicadas, and decided to measure the sound level. As you can see in the video I was measuring near 100 dB which is just insane! It really did leave you somewhat deaf for a few minutes after standing near them at that volume.
One other fascinating thing we learned was just how much of the food chain they are while they are present. We basically didn’t see a bird on our bird feeder for over a month. I guess they were gorging themselves on something more tasty. We’d also regularly find signs that something had eaten one and left just the head and wings. Even the ants got in on the action, eating the inside of the cicadas once they were dead, by eating a hole in from their butt. We had tons of empty cicada shells that had clearly been emptied by the ants. The ant population exploded in response and we had a lot more trouble than usual this year trying to keep the ants out of our house once the cicadas were gone.
We also learned about a unique fungus that is sexually transmitted between cicadas. It basically makes the back end of the cicada fall off and leaves a yellow spore covered spongy cap on the bottom of their body. We saw several of them including the one in the picture below. This one was dead but we also found live ones that looked like this. Fascinating!
The cicadas would fly around and land on any tall thing nearby, including people. During the peak of their invasion my wife didn’t like going on walks through our neighborhood because they would land on her constantly and get stuck in her long hair! I didn’t have the hair problem but I will say it is unnerving to have that many flying clumsily at you, straight at your face sometimes!
Once the cicadas had mated the females would cut slits in the branches and lay their eggs in them. This caused the tips of a lot of the branches to brown in the weeks after the cicadas were gone. Some trees clearly were hit hard by the cicadas. Trees in our area, including our backyard, showed these dead tips which fell off a few weeks later.
I made the YouTube video of unedited videos to just capture them as they were. I didn’t put any audio over it because I wanted to document the constant crunching sound that happened every night, and then the inevitable loud calls they were know for. The crunching is something I was not expecting. But when you have thousands of 1-2in long bugs crawling through, under, and over dead leaves and other natural surfaces the combined crunching is surprisingly loud!
I hope we’re around to see them again in 2038!
