If you haven’t heard about it yet, you soon will. What are we speaking of? The latest fad, the newest restaurant, the hippest fashion? No…the emergence of the seventeen year cicada. Soon, in an outdoor area near you, you will find these noisy and abundant visitors. The following is a link to a website put together by the University of Illinois Extension Service: http://web.extension.uiuc.edu/cicadas/ This should provide any and all information relating to the arrival of this mass horde beginning in late May of this year.
According to James Shuster, U. of I Horticulture Educator, "Cicadas are sometimes mistakenly called locusts. In actuality, they are not related to locusts. Locusts are grasshoppers. The male cicadas 'sing' during the day to attract females. The northern Illinois brood, which will emerge in late May 2007, has a reputation for the largest emergence of cicadas known anywhere."
Shuster goes on to say "During the 1956 emergence, they counted an average of 311 nymphal emergence holes per square yard of ground in a forested floodplain near Chicago. This translates to 1½ million cicadas per acre. In upland sites, they recorded 27 emergence holes per square yard, translating to about 133,000 per acre. This number is more typical of emergence numbers but is still a tremendous number of insects. By way of comparison,” Schuster added, “a city block contains about 3½ acres”. "When the cicadas start dying and dropping from the trees later in the spring, there are large numbers on the ground, and the odor from their rotting bodies is noticeable. In 1990, there were reports from people in Chicago having to use snow shovels to clear their sidewalks of the dead cicadas."
If you’d like to avoid these incredible natural phenomena, call your travel agent.
2 comments:
This was a very interesting post. I remember 1990 and how my dog would eat these insects right off of the ground. The noise these little creatures make is intense. Nature is wonderful and strange isn't it?
I read in the newspaper yesterday that the Ravinia concert schedule is being rearranged a little bit because of the noise level of the cicadas, moving some concerts into the indoor venue. Personally, I think I'll just avoid Ravinia until after the deluge ends, which is supposedly late July.
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