The Cicadas Are Coming! Meet the Indiana Jones of the Cicada World, Dr. Gene Kritsky

The Cicadas Are Coming!!! It's a once-in-our-lifetime opportunity to observe and take part in citizen science with your class. Not since Thomas Jefferson was President have broods XIX and XIII emerged together! It won't happen again until 2245. And we have you covered with everything you need to share this magic with your students and friends.

Join us as we embark on an enthralling journey through the remarkable world of cicadas with the Indiana Jones of the insect world, Dr. Gene Kritsky. Discover why these creatures captivate our imaginations and create memories that span generations. Dr. Kritsky unveils the mysteries behind the evolution and distribution of periodical cicadas, the entomology of ancient Egypt, and even Darwin's fascination with insects.

Alongside my special co-host Lynn Wareh Coles, we invite you to be part of this incredible conversation, where we share experiences and insights about these magical creatures that emerge in a spectacular display every 13 or 17 years.  Listen in as we uncover the nuances of cicada emergences and the significance of soil temperatures and weather in their life cycles. Whether you're an avid entomologist or simply a nature enthusiast, you'll be captivated by our discussion on the synchronized life patterns of cicadas from around the world and the impacts of unexpected events like the pandemic.

Plus, learn how to plan your very own cicada-watching safari with the help of Cicada Safari, the innovative app that brings citizen scientists together to document these fascinating insects.

The world of cicadas is full of surprises, and in this conversation, Dr. Kritsky reveals some of the most astonishing facts about these insects. From the discovery of cicada diseases that alter their behavior to the remarkable strength of their ovipositors, every revelation is sure to amaze. But the adventure doesn't end there; Cicada Safari offers a treasure trove of activities for everyone to engage with cicadas beyond mere observation. Whether it's through oral histories, origami, or studying cicada burrow structures, there's a way for all of us to connect with and contribute to the understanding of these periodic phenomena. Don't miss out on this opportunity to be part of a global community of cicada enthusiasts and researchers.

Don't miss these links:

Cicada Curriculum:

Cicada Safari: https://cicadasafari.org/

Dr. Gene Kritsky: http://genekritsky.com/


And tune in next week for part two of Cicada Mania!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Okay, so welcome to the Adventures in Learning podcast. I'm your host, Dr Diane, and this week and next I have a special co-host. I have Lynn Warre-Colds back on the show with me and we are going to be talking all things cicada. This week's guest is the Indiana Jones of the insect world, Dr Gene Kritsky, and he's here because Lynn discovered him and wanted us to talk to him. So, Lynn, what are the things that made you want to invite Dr K on to the show?

Speaker 2: 0:43

Well, first of all, I've been obsessed with cicadas since I was a little girl, growing up in Florida and catching them. But his interest, his research interest, is in the evolution and distribution of periodical cicadas, and so those are the ones that come out every 13 years or every 19 years or every seven years. And if that wasn't enough, his expertise in that area. This professor is also interested in entomology of ancient Egypt and has done research in this area and Darwin's Charles Darwin's interest in insects.

Speaker 2: 1:20

So just a real interesting natural history perspective and a volume of information about cicadas.

Speaker 1: 1:28

Well, let's bring him on. I can't wait to learn everything there is to know about cicadas as we get ready for this incredible convergence this year. We have a super special cicada treat for you today. We have to Wonder Curiosity Connection. Where will your adventures take you? I'm Dr Diane, and thank you for joining me on today's episode of Adventures in Learning. We have Dr Gene Kritsky with us and he is the cicada expert. He is an let me see if I've got this right an archaeological entomologist. Did I get that right?

Speaker 3: 2:09

Well, I guess you could say oh, I'm more a pure entomologist, but I've published books on ancient Egypt. In fact, I lived in Egypt for a full year.

Speaker 1: 2:16

Well, when I read that, I got to tell you I was imagining Indiana Jones chasing after cicadas.

Speaker 3: 2:23

In his case I could see, instead of being snakes, it'd be cicadas, exactly.

Speaker 1: 2:28

Well, we are so thrilled that you were able to take some time to talk to us today about cicadas and the convergence, and maybe let's just start with. Why are cicadas special?

Speaker 3: 2:40

Well, we're talking primarily about the periodical cicadas. There are 3,400 species of cicadas in the world, of which there are seven in the eastern US. That are periodical cicadas, and they're called that because every 17 or 13 years they come out in massive numbers, and that's in part to overwhelm their predators, so that predators can eat and eat, and eat, eat some more, get sick of them, and there are still millions left, and that phenomenon was observed by the pilgrims in 1634. And when there was a major study of the taxonomy of cicadas, the researcher decided there's something really magic about these insects, and so their official generic name is Magisicata.

Speaker 1: 3:31

I love that. They really are magical.

Speaker 3: 3:38

They are a once-in-a-generation phenomena for various parts of the eastern US and they make memories for the little kids that 17 years later, which is almost the full generation, I had a woman back in 1987 call me and she told me that she remembered vividly playing with her brother during the 1936 emergence of Brew 10. And a cicada landed on his nose and she knocked it off with a baseball bat.

Speaker 3: 4:04

Oh no, breaking his nose, and she knocked it off with a baseball bat, oh no, breaking his nose. And so 17 years later she has her own daughter and she's taking her daughter out and telling her this story and talking about cicadas. 34 years later she's got a granddaughter taking the granddaughter, sharing the stories of cicadas and I'm sad to say I don't believe she's still with us anymore, but I'll hope the stories still are in the family.

Speaker 1: 4:27

I do too.

Speaker 2: 4:29

Go ahead. One of the many activities on Cicada Safari is oral history and all different ways. One of the things we're trying to do and we want to ask you about is how do we make this real to our students and to children and how can they participate and how can they get involved? And even if they're not going to be where a periodic cicada comes out, they could be in Florida where cicadas come out every year and what are some things that they could do to be involved?

Speaker 3: 4:57

Sure. Well, the first thing for people who don't live in the area maybe your grandparents do it, I don't know but the first thing people can do, even if they don't live in the area maybe your grandparents do it, I don't know but the first thing people can do, even if they don't live in the region of Brood 13 or Brood 19, is to get the free app Cicada Safari, which is an app I helped develop, primarily for crowdsourcing periodical cicadas and, even though they won't have any periodical cicadas to to monitor where they are, they can follow it live, because as soon as somebody sees a periodical cicada, they take their iphone or their droid and they have their location services or gps turned on and take that picture. They hit this little paper airplane icon at the bottom. It sends us to it, sends it to the app and we have right now, real humans looking at these pictures to verify that it's a periodical skate although we are actively trying to find a sponsor for this to apply artificial intelligence to the identification, because in 2021, we received 561,000 plus photographs.

Speaker 1: 6:07

That's a lot of photos we received 561,000 plus photographs.

Speaker 3: 6:10

Wow, that's a lot of photos. That's a lot of photos. We had a team of 22 people looking at photographs and we got them done. We got them done within a. We tried to stay as close as we could on time, but there were days that we would have we'd identify overview over 20,000 photographs in a, only to have 32,000 submitted that day.

Speaker 1: 6:28

That's fascinating.

Speaker 2: 6:30

Wow. So what are some other activities that students could get involved with besides taking?

Speaker 3: 6:37

pictures Also if they're not living in the area. If you go to cicadasafariorg, the website that supports, you can get the instructions on how to fold an origami cicada. That back in 2021, I think about 8,000 to 9,000 kids in Dayton Ohio made origami cicadas. It's large enough to be its own emergence, if you will.

Speaker 2: 6:57

Wow, I love that idea.

Speaker 3: 7:00

For the younger kids we got a periodical cicada they can color. For the younger kids we've got a periodical skater they can color. But if you are a little more computer savvy you can get online to Chronicling America, which is a Library of Congress free site. They've been digitizing newspapers from 1777, all the way to 1963. And they can look up newspaper articles going back in time, pick a year for a particular brood oh, that's cool and see what's there. But they got to remember when they got back to the 19th century and into the 1800s. Don't call them cicadas, call them locusts.

Speaker 2: 7:37

Right.

Speaker 3: 7:38

Because they were incorrectly called locusts. Up to that time, and by the late 1800s, there were a lot of people saying they really are cicadas but they still call them locusts.

Speaker 2: 7:52

Well, one thing I think is fascinating about the science is it's been what 150 years ago when they were observed? But we're just, you know, 150 years later. We're just starting to understand the periodic nature and I mean it's a lot of people, a lot of eyes observing, a lot of thought to that. And I admit to having been reading your book, which I recommend to anyone, diane will put that up in the notes for the podcast. But cicadas, handy reference. Here I learned several things and I I thought I thought I knew a lot um the um with with the earth, with, I mean cicadas, being the idea of cicadas being negative, that they predict war, they predict plague, that they, uh, harm trees, that they harm the environment, um, could you talk a little bit about why that's not the case?

Speaker 3: 8:49

All that started. A lot of that information started from when they first emerged, back in 1634 in Massachusetts with the Pilgrims by 1715, when Brood X emerged in Philadelphia. That's the oldest historic record of Brood X in Philadelphia and that's the oldest historic record of Brood X. Reverend Sandell wrote that these strange insects came out. The Swedes call them grasshopper, but the English call them locusts. That goes back even before that, In 1699, a man by the name of Paul Dudley living in Massachusetts and observing Brood XI.

Speaker 3: 9:27

He didn't know what to make of these things, and so he asked a friend of his, Reverend Weld, who turned to the King James Version of the Bible, to figure out what they were. And of course they knew the indigenous populations in New England were eating cicadas. John the Baptist ate locusts. They came out in big. These insects come out in big numbers as periodical cicadas, and there were plagues of locusts in Exodus, and so they started putting together all these little pieces. So therefore they must be locusts and that's where the name came from.

Speaker 3: 10:02

It was an effort to understand what was going on. That's where the name came from. Uh, as an effort to understand what was going on. Interestingly enough, when paul dudley uh wrote up his findings and uh, in 1699 he experienced an emergence. 1716 he experienced it again. Uh, and then he waited another 17 years to make sure he was right. Make sure, and so he wrote this paper up and sent it to the Royal Society in London. And they got. While his paper was being read, people started objecting, saying he has confused cicadas for locusts. So rather than immediately publishing the paper, they wrote him a letter and he said oh no, I've got this on firm authority. I've seen a transcript of this letter. I've got this on firm authority. I've seen a transcript of this letter. I've got this on firm authority that these are locusts from Reverend Weld. So what the Royal Society did was they arranged for some Egyptian locusts in Cairo to be mailed to Paul Dudley in Massachusetts in 1734.

Speaker 1: 11:06

Wow.

Speaker 3: 11:07

They got there.

Speaker 1: 11:10

That's even more amazing.

Speaker 3: 11:11

That's even more amazing. We're not the same.

Speaker 3: 11:16

He went back and he said you are right, I have fixed up locusts for cicadas. But then said I don't think you'll ever excuse the fact that the common man here in North America is going to continue to call them locusts for cicadas. But then said I don't think you'll ever excuse the fact that the common man here in North America is going to continue to call them locusts. Sure, and they did. They did for another couple hundred years and then finally, I'd say in the 20th century, starting in the middle of the century, especially with the work of the United States Department of Agriculture, we really got the word across that these were not locusts, and I think the last time somebody referred to them as locusts I won't name the university because it's not what I attended, but they referred to cicadas as relatives of crickets.

Speaker 2: 11:57

Oh no, oh no.

Speaker 3: 11:59

They are not. Cicadas are more closely related to aphids than they are to crickets.

Speaker 2: 12:04

Interesting, interesting, interesting. So my understanding growing up was that periodical cicadas were native to North America, but I just read in your book that there are some in other places in the world. Is that a relatively new discovery?

Speaker 3: 12:21

It's been in the last 20, 30 years or so. But even though there are periodical cicadas elsewhere, they're not in the cicada family. They're not even closely related to our cicadas.

Speaker 2: 12:31

Okay.

Speaker 3: 12:32

So the Magis cicada, the periodical cicadas that we have, are endemic or unique to the eastern United States. They're as unique to the eastern US as giraffes are to Africa.

Speaker 3: 12:42

Excellent and the other two cicadas one's in Fiji, it has an eight-year life cycle and the other one is in India, it has a four-year life cycle, and until COVID, that always emerged at the same time as the world cup, the world cup cicada. But they delayed the world cup a year because of the COVID pandemic. So now it's out of sync with, but they don't. They look very different from our cicadas, they're in a totally different genus and and not even closely related at all. Okay, and we still have, we still have.

Speaker 2: 13:16

Yeah, they're in the family cicadity, so they look like a cicada closely related at all, we still have the terrain.

Speaker 3: 13:19

They're in the family Cicadidae, so they look like a cicada, but the coloration is very different, the life cycle is very different, and so on.

Speaker 2: 13:29

So if we wanted to take our own North American safari and go see as close as we could to this double brood emergence, where and when should we travel to go?

Speaker 3: 13:37

Well, where and when it's going to the first, if you want to start with chronologically, they will start emerging, probably the last week of April, in northern Georgia, northern Alabama, northern Mississippi and northern Louisiana. Then, as, and of course the trigger for that is the soil must get to 64 degrees fahrenheit, and just when that hits doesn't mean they're all going to come out that night. Uh, I've I've discovered in my 50 years working on cicadas that they really like a nice rain to sort of soften the world a little bit, and it makes it a lot easier. Uh, that's where you start with the with late, of course. We're having a very warm spring here in the Midwest and we had a warm spring here in 2021.

Speaker 3: 14:27

And the cicadas still came out in mid-May, right outside the window where I'm sitting, in fact. But as the spring progresses and it warms and the summer's approaching, the first week of May, you'll probably see them around southern Tennessee, probably from Nashville over through Chattanooga and what have you? Then, as you go into the second week of May, they'll probably start merging in Kentucky and parts of northern Arkansas and then southern Missouri. Probably by the third week in May, they should be coming out in good numbers in southern Illinois, southern Missouri. In the east side there's a band through the middle of North Carolina and a few pockets of them in Virginia. But now we're approaching the end of May and, uh, you're going to see them coming out northern illinois, the chicago, greater chicago area and then probably shortly thereafter it'll be southern wisconsin, eastern iowa as well all right excellent so that's what, that's when, where yes

Speaker 3: 15:36

the where depends on where you are in the world and if you have cicada safari. If you have a cicada safari, you can watch the map live as people report. But things are are verified, their photos are verified. You'll see these little cicada icons popping up all over the map and you can actually zoom in like right, get right down to the street. That's how we tested cicada saf Safari. We had it ready for Brood 8 and Brood 9.

Speaker 3: 16:00

And so, using Cicada Safari, we drove to Eastern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania and Northern West Virginia and we had streets and we drove right to that street. That was what we did with Brood 8. Brood 9, we went down to North Carolina and we picked out spots like okay, well, let's check here. And they were there. And what was interesting about the year 2020 was that, in addition to brood 9, we had four other broods emerge off cycle and very small numbers. But one of them was in raleigh, durham, which was a four-year early brood 19 cicada and we, uh, had records of where they were and we we got there. We didn't hear anything.

Speaker 3: 16:41

We didn't see any adult cicada, but we found all the skins right because all the adults were eaten by predators right, because there weren't enough and so uh, but that knowledge you could actually fall aware and so, depending on where you are in the world, if you are close to one of these states or or what have you on the outside, you can then monitor when's the best time for me to drive the shortest distance to see these, and you can zero it pretty quickly. That was very different than what we I had to do back in 1976 when I first mapped out brood 23 in illinois. You would drive and not hear. That also here you've heard them, and so you stop, and then you drive some more and you can actually pick them up at 60 miles an hour and know when to stop. But you were just basically driving blind until you heard the calls.

Speaker 2: 17:31

That sounds like such an adventure, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 17:35

So I have a question for you. How did you fall in love with cicadas and other insects? What drew you to that field?

Speaker 3: 17:43

Okay, well, it's a little bit of a roundabout story, but it's something that I think there's a little. I tell my students there's a lesson here for everybody. I started in the University in Bloomington as a bioanthropology major, very interested in human evolution and in my human paleontology course and this is the 1972, so there's not a lot of fossils like we have now. We've got more stuff. So we had this, you know one.

Speaker 3: 18:10

I remember holding these two skulls and saying to Professor Paul Jameson, who is still alive, and I talk with him via email all the time how do you know? These are the know, these aren't just the male and the female of each other as opposed to two different species. And he starts going on about morphometric analysis, doing all these measurements, putting it in a computer, and then he said you might want to take an anthropology class because that's where they're doing that stuff, that's where they're working that out. Didn't think of it. So I went to register for classes and in those days we would go into a big field house and collect computer cards of all the classes, and so the seniors register first, and the freshmen, then the juniors and then the sophomores I was a sophomore and then in the class there was a random cohort of what alphabetical letters go.

Speaker 2: 19:04

And the K's were the last of the last.

Speaker 3: 19:06

And I walked up to the table. I remember saying this is one of those events where you look back on it to change your life. I said I need five hours. Is there anything open? And this, this woman, says to me I'm sorry, All I have is entomology in the lab. And I thought, well, I might as well take it because it may fit my human evolution. It was taught by Frank Young, who was the periodical cicada specialist in Indiana, and the second week of class he starts talking about these periodical cicadas and I changed my major that week.

Speaker 2: 19:41

Wow, love it.

Speaker 3: 19:42

And what I tell my students is don't get upset when you don't get what you thought you wanted to have. It's the serendipity that can lead to your career. And so I just went. Oh, and I ended up being Frank's undergraduate teaching intern. I took entomology, I was a teaching assistant in parasitology. He and I have written a book together. Now, in its third edition, he's passed away, sadly. Many, many years ago we wrote several papers together and it was weird because he was a US Army Medical Reserve. I was a long-haired guy, anti-war, and we hit it off right from the beginning. And when he passed I remember before he retired I remember him calling me and said I need your help. Can you come over and see me? And so I drove to Bloomington from Cincinnati and he said I want to give you my teaching library because I'm going to retire. And I thought okay, that was 62 cartons of books.

Speaker 1: 20:42

Oh my.

Speaker 3: 20:46

So. But what hit me in his class was in talking about these insects I realized that there could be a lot of historical records that might be important. And I'm a frustrated historian. I love human evolution, I love archaeology and antiquity and so on. So I just sort of thought I'll bet there's some data that you can get by looking at historical records. So graduate from Indiana, I go to the University of Illinois where I'm working with the Lou Standard who was the Illinois specialist on periodical cicadas. I didn't do my thesis on periodical cicadas, I did it on a relative, but I did while I was there in his lab, map Out Brew 23. And in my spare time I looked up for historical records and by the time I graduated with my doctorate I had over 7,000 historic records of periodical cicadas.

Speaker 1: 21:36

Wow.

Speaker 3: 21:37

Now what do you do with the stock? And then Steve Jobs comes to the rescue with the Macintosh and somebody I don't know who came out with a computer program that was designed to be a marketing tool about where to put golf courses. And why I was interested in that software was it had a mapping program.

Speaker 3: 21:58

Oh, I see it now, I can put all my records to FIPC codes, which is a way and I could put them in here by year and I could give the program. I could ask the program all right, give me a map of all the records of these years.

Speaker 3: 22:12

I would pick all the collective years for brood one, brood two, brood three and so on, and I was printing out these maps on dot matrix printers brood, three and so on and I was printing out these maps on dot matrix printers very creative and I saw patterns and that's that's why my folk, my research, focuses on on the distribution and the relationship with broods to one another, and there are there's obvious patterns. For example, if you've got a location, like we have here in sinseg, where there's two broods, they're usually adjacent to each other and they're four years apart, and so you could see these patterns and that's that's how I got hooked, that's so cool.

Speaker 3: 22:48

And, uh, you know, it's all you know. I remember. I do remember as a kid, uh, collecting a large stag beetle when I was growing up in Florida. I remember, uh, uh, uh uh, farrell County of bee, a Farrell County of honeybees, had made some honeycomb in a protected area in this tree and I walked home and the comb was all over the ground. Bees were flying all over the place. So I remember yeah, I'm a nerd I took my chemistry set test tubes and I put pupae in these test tubes in an old rack and watched them develop. And then I'm taking some to my biology. I was in biology at my senior high school and I took them in there and Mrs Ferguson, my biology teacher, asked if she could put them in the display windows. The next thing, oh, there's these, my bees are in the window, and it just goes all up there.

Speaker 3: 23:33

But anyway so that's my interest in insects. I always had an interest in insects. But more.

Speaker 1: 23:44

I'd say I was more interested in natural history. I loved insects, I loved fossils, that type of thing. When I love the way you've brought them all together to create just an amazing career, it sounds like you're doing something that's your passion and it comes through so clearly.

Speaker 3: 23:55

Well, I do enjoy it and I have enjoyed it. I just retired, back in June, but I'm still teaching, I'm still writing books. My six-volume series I edited on the cultural history of insects was just published, in January, and that's a series of six volumes, each one divided by time antiquity, middle Ages, renaissance, enlightenment, industrial Revolution and modern. There's eight chapters in each book and the chapter subjects are the same for each book. So if you're interested in insects and art throughout human history, you can read Chapter 8 in all six volumes. If you're interested in how insects influence the world of antiquity, you can read Volume 1.

Speaker 1: 24:33

Wow, Well, I'm a nerd so I know I'm running out to get that. And Lynn don't bother because I'm getting it for your birthday.

Speaker 3: 24:42

Lynn, she must really like you, because the six sets sells for 550 bucks.

Speaker 1: 24:48

You'll be waiting. You'll get one at a time, one at a time. So I'm curious, as you've been doing all of sort of your research and focused on cicadas, what is the single weirdest fact or single weirdest thing you've discovered about the cicada?

Speaker 3: 25:09

Well, I would know. Yeah, there are two things I'll put in there. One because of my. I was in 1999 at the National Entomology Meetings. I predicted that the following year would be a four-year acceleration of brood 10. And no one had ever done that before. And it happened. Massive numbers emerged in Cincinnati and in Washington and other places. They came out, such numbers that they actually survived predation. They sang, they mated, they laid their eggs and the eggs hatched. That was the first time that we've ever seen an off cycle Emergence survive. And that all happened because nine years earlier you got to be patient to study sick age.

Speaker 3: 25:56

I was teaching ecology and I was also department chair. And I'm walking down the hall and realizing I forgot I had a lab today and I've not prepared anything. So what's the first lab in your, in your, in a science course? It's the scientific method. So I pulled out the paper by Monte Lloyd and Joanne White on impairing the growth rates of 17, 13 year cicadas. I had the students read this paper and I told them. I said now, if you were to go to dig up cicadas today, and we were in a brood, 10 to 17-year cicada area four years after the eggs were laid. What stage should they be in? I had them write that prediction on a piece of paper. They put it in an envelope. They sealed the envelope. They signed the seal. We put all of them together in another and tied it all up, went down to the maintenance at the university, got shovels and went over to the orchard to dig up cicadas and they were bigger than they were supposed to be.

Speaker 2: 26:46

Interesting. It's exciting for the students too.

Speaker 3: 26:49

And the yeah. Well, of course. Basically we make a prediction. All their predictions were wrong, but Monty Lloyd and John White said if they should. What they discovered was that in the first five years of life 17-year cicadas only molt once underground, whereas 13-year cicadas molt twice. And they said if a 17-year cicada should molt an extra time in that first five years they'll come up four years early. So we were going to test that. Telling your students in 1991 that nine years they're going to have early acceleration is like telling them don't smoke because you're going to get cancer. So we waited and so I continued digging them up every year to see their growth and I felt confident enough for monitoring that that they would come out four years early. And they did. Then their second question is will they stay 13 years cicadas, or shift back to 17 years?

Speaker 2: 27:49

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 27:49

So what do you think we should do about that? How would you determine that?

Speaker 1: 27:56

would you continue to track and monitor and dig up cicadas as you make your prediction?

Speaker 3: 28:02

You could, but the real prediction is when they come out.

Speaker 1: 28:04

Right.

Speaker 3: 28:05

What you do is you wait 13 years 13 years.

Speaker 1: 28:08

You were very, very patient.

Speaker 3: 28:11

Oh yeah, if I worked on fruit flies I'd have this all solved in a month, but no. So 13 years later, a few hundred came out. I actually watched them come out, but not enough to overwhelm predators they all got. But no. So 13 years later, a few hundred came out. I actually watched them come out, but not enough to overwhelm predators they all got eaten. We never heard a single one at the emergency site, we never. We found isolated wings and skins, but no adults singing or mating. Four years later, massive numbers come out, oh wow. And they're joined by more accelerating cicadas, think from brood 10, and the net result now we've gotten set up. In the year 2000 I had five location where we had matings uh, singing, mating, and they like now at 33 locations. And they not only came out here, they came out in baltimore and washington and indianapolis and Louisville, in addition to Cincinnati. And so clearly what happens is they come out four years early and they shift back to 17.

Speaker 1: 29:07

Interesting, that is interesting.

Speaker 2: 29:13

And so what we've actually now seen since we have two of these, we've actually now seen the origin of a new brood, yeah, There'll be brood, six by designation, coming out in greater cincinnati that was something I didn't know about until I read this book that there could be just as broods could go extinct there can be new broods as well, and right and this and all this I would just describe, except this is the first generation.

Speaker 3: 29:33

Brood 13 came out in chicago in the year 2020, four years early, singing and mating and lagging. So they're on the verge of seeing a possible brood nine coming out in the future.

Speaker 1: 29:46

Wow.

Speaker 3: 29:47

So that was the one thing that I would say was the weirdest. The one that I'm really most proud of is the man that wrote that paper, with his wife Joanne. Uh, monty Lloyd. I was a good friend. Uh passed away and I was asked to give a memorial lecture at the university of Chicago where he taught for years. And while I was there you had an email from somebody in Northern Kentucky saying I've got periodical scabies this year and I thought they're not supposed to be there. So I inquired do they have red eyes? Oh yeah, they do.

Speaker 3: 30:23

So I came back from Chicago and went out and checked and, sure enough, they were periodical cicadas and there was no brood expected in that part of Northern Kentucky and Western Ohio for the year 2001. So then I remembered that in 1988, a year after brood teneon emerged, there were a lot of cicadas that came out around Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. They came out, I thought, after 18 years, because Monty Lloyd, the same individual, had written a paper with John White saying 17-year cicadas emerging after 18 years. This really establishes it. Didn't think anything of it. Now it's 2001 and it happens again and I started thinking wait a second, wait a second.

Speaker 3: 31:07

88, 2001,. That's 13 years, okay, 88, you know it started going back, that's 75. That's the paper that Monty Lloyd talked about coming out for 18 years and is like less than 50 miles away. So then I wanted for me, I want to have four consecutive emergencies to prove that it's a 13-year cicada, right? So I went looking and I found some of the records for the Melba Lock and Dam in 1962. They had to shut down construction for a couple of days. To quote clean the locusts off the rig. 1962, they had to shut down construction for a couple days to quote clean the locusts off the rig.

Speaker 2: 31:43

That's great.

Speaker 3: 31:44

So now we have what? An established 13-year brood of cicadas in southwest Ohio and northern Kentucky, southwest Ohio in particular which meant there are three new species records for the state of Ohio, and very few of my colleagues believe me. So what do you do to prove it? You wait 13 more years and in 2014, they'd come out in massive numbers again, all three species and it's clear that they are 13-year cicadas, because there's one cicada species that has a very unique coloration on the underside of its abdomen Imagine cicada tridescim and they were there and so literally to be able to discover a misidentified brood and what had happened was it came out simultaneously with brood 14 in 1923. It came out 13 years later with brood 10, both of which occur in Southwest Ohio, so they just were reassigned there and then nobody did any follow-up after World War II and so they had just been assumed to be part of Brood X and Brood XIV. And to be able to find that shows there's still a lot of really fundamental stuff you can still find.

Speaker 3: 32:55

That's really neat.

Speaker 2: 32:56

There's a whole way to explore, a whole horizon to explore with this Do you have any more questions, Lynn? No, I'm good.

Speaker 3: 33:08

There is a quiz. There is a quiz coming.

Speaker 2: 33:10

Oh, no, all right.

Speaker 3: 33:12

That's the quiz. Oh, college professor, there's got to be a quiz, there's always got to be a quiz, all right.

Speaker 1: 33:19

Well, college professor, give us your quiz.

Speaker 3: 33:22

No, if you want to, okay, you want a quiz, let's go for it.

Speaker 2: 33:25

Let's go for it.

Speaker 3: 33:28

I could be really, really persnickety and ask detailed questions like where they should be coming out. But let's do something a little more. Can cicadas get sick?

Speaker 1: 33:43

They get diseases. That's a great question, I would imagine the answer is yes, yes, yes and they get a fungus that leaves a white chalk, that's right there, you literally read the book.

Speaker 3: 33:53

That's excellent. Yes, that fungus massospora fungus affects these cicadas. We don't know how they come up with it. They get it the first time. But we do have circumstantial evidence that it's sexually transmitted. But how do the nymphs get infected? First of all, that's what we don't know yet.

Speaker 2: 34:10

Does that only affect periodical cicada?

Speaker 3: 34:13

No, there are similar fungi that affect the annual cicadas as well. Okay, but apparently it can lay dormant in the soil for 17 years, the spores. And so what happens? The infected cicada? Now this doesn't have. They don't come out fully infected. Usually it's late in the emergence cycle, probably the fourth week they've been out. You'll start seeing cicadas with these. Their tips are all sort of white between the segments and then their butt falls off.

Speaker 2: 34:41

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 34:42

And it hyper-sexualizes these. This is where it's become R-rated.

Speaker 2: 34:48

now You'll edit this part out, Diane.

Speaker 3: 34:54

If there's a male cicada in the tree and he starts singing for a mate, an infected male cicada will flick its wings like it's a female.

Speaker 1: 35:02

Oh, wow.

Speaker 3: 35:03

Luring in the amorous male, basically to inoculate.

Speaker 2: 35:08

That's transmitting the fungus.

Speaker 3: 35:09

And transmit the fungus.

Speaker 2: 35:11

Oh, wow, yeah, Cicadas are cool.

Speaker 3: 35:14

They are fun Well.

Speaker 2: 35:15

the most interesting fact that I learned in your book was that the ovipositor the female laying eggs is not only serrated but reinforced with metals.

Speaker 3: 35:25

Yes, that was a project that I did with Matt Leonard at Kent State University's TARC campus. There was a paper published about 20 years ago I believe it was now that had done some molecular analysis, chemical analyses of the ovipositors of wasps, ichneumonid wasps particularly that lay their eggs in trees. I know those and they found that they were impregnated with metals. And so the observation is I'll bet cicadas do that as well. So I tried to get some colleagues at Mount St Joe to help me with that, but we didn't have the technology yet. Tried to get some colleagues at Mount St Joe to help me with that, but we didn't have the technology yet.

Speaker 3: 36:02

But Matt was able to get his hands on an electron microscope that did elemental analysis, and so I went out and collected all three species of periodical cicadas and an annual cicada. We send them up there and they did the chemical analysis and, sure enough, the ovipositive and impregnative metal. What's really interesting is the concentration of the metals are highest at the tip that actually does the sawing into the tree. So for the ovipositor there's a central rod and then there's two serrated blades that slide along the rod, cutting into the tree, and where they're serrated there's more metal than there is at the base.

Speaker 2: 36:39

At the base. Interesting. That's fascinating. It's just fascinating. I'm a nerd too.

Speaker 1: 36:49

There's nothing wrong with being a nerd. Well, dr K, thank you so much for being on the Adventures in Learning podcast. We appreciate your time and we can't wait to send people to check out Cicada Safari.

Speaker 3: 37:03

Great. I welcome their help and thank you for having me on.

Speaker 1: 37:07

Thank you, take care. Wow. Dr K was everything you promised, and more so. What were some of your big takeaways from today?

Speaker 2: 37:18

Well, you've got to be patient if you want to study cicadas, but at the same token, there's a way for everyone to get involved with this, and I highly recommend getting you to cicadasafariorg, which is the website he mentioned and the Cicada Safari app on your phone. It's got a cute little cicada that takes off when you open it.

Speaker 1: 37:39

Oh, I can't wait to go travel. I've already planned in the back of my head where I'm going to go to look for cicadas.

Speaker 2: 37:45

So it's all. There's several things citizen science, things you can do besides documenting the cicadas, but on the website there's an oral history piece with some questions. Do you know someone? Does your grandmother live in Ohio? Do you know someone that might have seen one of these emergencies? They're collecting the oral histories. I think Dr Kritsky mentioned the origami. There's a coloring page. There's also a cool project after the cicadas emerge and I've actually seen this done with abandoned anthills as well where you take plaster of Paris and you pour it right into the holes and you can study the structures. This is his book. You can study the structures of the cicada burrows after they emerge, right.

Speaker 1: 38:29

They have to be long gone, folks, yeah.

Speaker 2: 38:33

There's directions. There's directions about how to do that as well, and some other activities and tons of facts Some of the facts we talked about today, but all kinds of facts about cicadas.

Speaker 1: 38:46

That is so cool and next week we're going to be going even deeper. This week you got to get all the facts about cicadas. Next week we're going to talk to some authors. We're going to learn about eating cicadas. There might be a little art involved, so you're going to want to tune back in If you're not satisfied with all things cicadas. I promise we're not done yet. There's more to come and a lot of really fun stuff. So tune in next week to the Adventures in Learning podcast and we hope you enjoyed today's episode. You've been listening to the Adventures in learning podcast with your host, dr diane. If you like what you're hearing, please subscribe, download and let us know what you think, and please tell a friend. If you want the full show notes and the pictures, please go to dr dianeadventurescom. We look forward to you joining us on our next adventure.