Notes From My Knapsack 6-17-07
Jeff Gill

An Unearthly Sound, Deep From the Soil

One of the pleasures of writing for the Booster is our range of distribution, covering (officially) Licking County, but with readers showing up in my email from Fairfield, Perry, Muskingum, and Franklin Counties.

That means we cover a fair piece of terrain, from plains and former prairie to the Appalachian foothills. Some of this area is farmed extensively, and others covered with houses; the ground may be designated as “glaciated,” but beyond Dawes Arboretum toward Flint Ridge, the geologists see that Ice Age glaciers stopped short of weighing down that corner of Licking County.

There is an insect often, and erroneously, called the 17-year locust. Bug people (aka entomologists) know that this periodically appearing insect is a cicada, and the 17 year type is a magicicada.

Three springs back, our local “brood” erupted from the ground, 2004 marking the return of the hatchlings who burrowed deep below the tree branches where their eggs were laid, back in 1987. That grouping of cicadas is known as Brood X, which is a cool name for a bug with giant red eyes and a strange screaming sound filling the evening air.

X is actually a Roman numeral, with less cinematic names for other broods like V or XVII. We don’t have to listen to the thunderous shriek of our local magicicada brood again until 2021 (and 2038, but you knew that).

I’m reading about the reactions up in my youthful hometown area around Chicago, where Brood XIII (Brood Thirteen sounds like a sci-fi thriller, too) erupting this summer is big, even if not as large and widespread as our Brood X gang. When you have major market TV recording the megadecibel buzzing, you get the media attention bonus.

But for our area, Brood XIV is just across the southern edge of our area, coming out next year. Then there’s the thirteen-year cicadas, Broods XVIII through XXX. Brood XIX is no small herd o’ bugs, with all the volume of their 17 year cousins, and they’re perking along, one to eight feet underground, to pop up in 2011.

The various broods, and their pattern of emergence, has some very interesting relationships with the line of glaciation, showing their ancient status in the land. The first re-settling big ol’ bugs must have come right behind the Big Thaw, and the consistency of the early soil led them to hug the transition zone from glaciated to unglaciated pretty closely, until a few millennia of vegetation loosened enough soil to allow trees, which then allowed for cicadas.

Whether Brood X, Brood V, or Brood IX of the 17-year, or Brood XIX of the 13-year cicadas, to sound off, these bugs need trees and relatively undisturbed soil. How undisturbed? Well, at least no more than nine inches down, and for seventeen or thirteen years.

In new subdivisions, folk noticed that while some of their neighbors complained of the noise keeping them up nights, they weren’t hearing the cicadas at all. No doubt. If all your trees are new, then they couldn’t have been part of the original drama. Then, where the fertilized female lays her eggs in slits she cuts in tender branches of healthy trees, the eggs can hatch and the emerging nymphs drop to the ground. Those nymphs burrow deep, and latch onto the root system, where they feed in symbiosis with the tree itself.

If your neighborhood wasn’t around in 1987, 1998, or 2003, you won’t hear any cicadas seventeen or thirteen years later. Cicadas give us a very specific window into how much we tamper with the ecosystem when we build and landscape.

Good news, though: there are “common” varieties of cicada in our neck of the woods that have a two to five year cycle of egg, nymph, burrow, emergence and molting out of their outer shell. They quickly recolonize our new neighborhoods, and clear the way for their larger and louder cousins. It’s their sound that we hear later in almost every summer.

If you’re traveling around the Midwest in the next few weeks, you may hear cicadas as you head west. To hear them closer to home, you either need to wait for the end of the summer, or just listen while sitting below a grand old tree for the subtle sipping many feet below you.

No, you won’t hear it, but it might be good exercise for your ears to try.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio. Share you bug likes and dislikes at knapsack77@gmail.com.