Billions of bugs: Meet the cicada chasers trailing Brood X – CNET [CNET]

View Article on CNET

For Dan Mozgai, a marketing professional from New Jersey, the perfect vacation involves insects. Lots and lots of insects. 

They can’t be just any random bugs, though. They have to be periodical cicadas. 

The critters spend almost their whole lives underground, living on sap from tree roots. Then, in the spring of their 13th or 17th year, depending on the brood, they tunnel out, synchronously and in huge numbers, for a short adult mating frenzy set to the sonorous sound track of the males’ come-hither calls.

Mozgai knows the periodical cicadas’ siren song well. He’s packed up his car at least 10 times and driven nearly 30,000 miles on America’s roads, from Maryland to Mississippi, Kansas to Kentucky, to follow it. 

Enlarge Image

Count Greg Holmes among them. The 59-year-old photojournalist fondly recalls riding his green bike around Joplin, Missouri, as a kid and spotting annual cicadas molting on tree trunks. On warm nights, he’d hear them buzzing and rattling and see their translucent wings backlit by streetlights. They were part of the suburban landscape, as integral to summer as drinking iced lemonade and dashing through sprinklers. 

Those early Midwest moments helped shape Holmes into an adventuresome, nature-loving spirit who can rattle off cicada species effortlessly: Magicicada septendecim. Magicicada cassini. Neocicada hieroglyphica. 

“If you think bugs are icky, there’s probably not anything anyone can say to change your mind,” Holmes says. “If you’re a citizen scientist, the adult form of a little kid who always had microscopes and telescopes and fossils to look at, cicada research is right up your alley.”  

Holmes — a fan of roadside attractions who writes a lively travel blog under the name Ace Jackalope — drives around the country with a magnetic GPS puck stuck to the roof of his Toyota Avalon and a notebook computer, customized with a little numerical keyboard, adhered to the steering wheel. This year, likely in mid-May, he’ll road-trip from his home in Hutchinson, Kansas, to a cicada hot spot in Maryland. 

“As you’re driving along, when you hear a particular species, there’s a numerical code you punch in,” he explains. “Because the GPS is hooked up to the computer, it makes a record of where exactly that was.” 

With three 17-year species making up Brood X, Holmes will be entering nine codes — one for no activity, one for light activity and one for heavy activity. He’ll get out his camera and ponder how to best capture the little winged creatures. Sometimes he’ll just stop and catch his breath.  

It’s “never-ending amazement,” he says of his cicada adventures. “It doesn’t get old.”

When Brood X last emerged, George W. Bush was president, the final episode of Friends had just aired, and Mark Zuckerberg had launched Thefacebook, Facebook’s precursor, only months before.    

“Those who weren’t alive 17 years ago or who were too young at the time and can’t remember … are in for quite an experience,” says Gene Kritsky, dean of behavioral and natural sciences at Cincinnati’s Mount St. Joseph University and a recognized cicada expert. 

Once the 17-year cicadas crawl out after years underground, they climb up the nearest vertical surface. They shed their exoskeletons and inflate their wings. Then the mating frenzy begins. It’s impossible to miss once the males start emitting their high-pitched mating song via sound-producing structures called tymbals on either side of their abdomen. The noise can surpass 90 decibels, about the same level as a motorcycle 25 feet (about 8 meters) away. 

The insects don’t bite, sting or carry diseases, and while females can damage young trees by laying so many eggs in their branches, the egg-laying also naturally prunes trees, resulting in more flowers and fruit in the years that follow. Periodical cicadas aerate large amounts of soil when they emerge en masse, and when they die, their decaying bodies enrich the ground with nutrients. 

To track cicada distributions over time, researchers need detailed, high-quality data. Holmes, Mozgai and their fellow citizen scientists play a key role in gathering such vital information because periodical cicada populations cover enormous areas of the country and the bugs only appear above ground for limited stretches of time, years apart. 

Enlarge Image