La Vida Cicada

Last summer, in Albany, N.Y., Russ Miller discovered an unusual use for his tennis racket.

The golf course superintendent from Cape Cod went to visit a friend and avid landscaper. As he approached his friend’s front yard, he was shocked to discover that the entire front walkway had caved in. The cause wasn’t an earthquake, but a veritable army of 1.5-inch insects.

Periodical cicadas emerge from the ground every 17 years. They live underground, sucking moisture and sugars from tree roots about a foot into the soil profile. Their greatest threat to the turf world, as Miller viewed firsthand, comes when they emerge from lifelong hibernation to mate. Apart from this inconvenience to the world of landscaping, some say they’re an annoyance – their 24-hour mating chirp has been known to drown out entire musical bands – but most consider periodical cicadas a wondrous part of nature.

Still, when a loud, black bug with a 2-inch wingspan approaches you head-on, your reflexes might get the better of you.

“The best weapon, I learned, is a tennis racket,” Miller says, laughing.

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This May, Miller was edging the beds in his own Centerville, Mass., yard, when he spotted a curious aeration in his topsoil.

“I was working on my beds and I spotted a few holes, so I etched into the soil,” Miller says.

Right at the surface of each opening Miller found a cicada, waiting patiently to live out its destiny.

Cicadas make dime-sized holes near the roots of trees to prepare for emergence, but they don’t leave the ground until the ground temperature warms to about 64 degrees. In the weeks since that spotting in early May, the ground has warmed up, but the superintendent hasn’t seen many cicadas on his golf course. Still, any cicadas the fairway or in the rough at The Golf Club at Southport have been left to go about their business undisturbed. Miller has posted bulletins around the clubhouse for the membership, providing information on the six-legged species and explaining their life cycle.

Once the insects emerge from the ground, they begin the mating process for which they’ve prepared their entire lives. Cicadas perch on the tips of trees, where they mate, lay eggs and then die. The insects cause little harm to trees, though some browning might occur on branch tips where eggs were laid. Young trees should be protected with a mesh cover to protect bending and breaking.

Once hatched, new cicadas return to live below the surface in close proximity to tree roots. Cicadas in northern states are becoming increasingly rarer, and the Cape is as far north as the insects dwell in the Northeast. Their life cycle and migration is something of a mystery to scientists, but no one could be more interested in the life cycle of a cicada than Barnstable County, Mass., entomologist Dave Simser.

“It’s just cool,” Simser says. “It’s a marker in one’s life. You try to remember back to when you last saw them 17 years ago – what were you up to then, what were you doing in life, how you progressed and regressed in that time.”

So what was Simser up to 17 years ago?

“We had a hurricane in Cape Cod called Hurricane Bob,” he recalls.

Simser isn’t the only one who remembers what was happening that year. Local residents as well as scientists have kept meticulous records of periodical cicada sightings and habits. Periodical cicadas were last seen on the Cape May 27, 1991. They’re numbered in broods from 1 to 17, according to their emergence cycle. Cape cicadas are Brood XIV.

“Once they lay their eggs, the party’s over,” Simser says. “It certainly evokes questions. Why bother? Seventeen years sucking on tree roots to live it up for a couple weeks: La vida cidada.”

Additional source: Cape Cod Online, 4/22/08