You may have heard that the cicadas are coming this spring. For the first time since 1803, both 13-year (Brood XIX) and 17-year (Brood XIII) cicadas will emerge at the same time. The previous time was only 30 years after the Boston Tea Party, when the young United States was on only its third president – Thomas Jefferson. The bad news (or good, depending on your perspective) is that these cicadas are not emerging here: You’d have to go to North Central Illinois to have a chance to see both. The area of overlap is quite small, however, and since the broods look the same, you would not be able to tell one group from the other.
In Massachusetts, there are nine species of cicadas. Most emerge every year, but not on one-year life cycles. They have two- to five-year life cycles, which means that a cicada species born this year will not emerge for two to five more years. We hear them every year, however, because some cicadas mature and emerge each year while their immature brethren are still underground. In other words, these cicadas are not synchronized – they do not all emerge as adults in the same year.
One species of Massachusetts cicada (Brood XIV) is periodical and emerges every 17 years. This cicada will emerge again in 2025 on the Cape in Barnstable and Plymouth counties. If you want to see it, visit the Cape in late May or early June 2025.
The cicadas we hear every year in late summer are probably dog-day cicadas (Genus Neotibicen). These cicadas are the largest cicadas in North America. They are difficult to see, but one cannot miss hearing them. To attract females, the males vibrate membranes on each side of the abdomen to make constant buzzing or whining sounds. Their buzzing drone can reach 100 decibels – as loud as a hair dryer or a subway train.
A Massachusetts periodical cicada emerges at night and climbs a tree. It sheds its hard outer covering and transforms into a winged adult. It hides out for a few days while the new exoskeleton hardens. The males make that high-pitched buzzing sound to attract females, and a pair mates. The female makes slits in the twigs of trees and lays hundreds of eggs into them.
The male and female die shortly thereafter. After about two months, the eggs hatch, producing nymphs. The nymphs fall to the ground and dig deep into the soil. There they attach to tree roots, suck fluids from the roots and grow slowly through eight stages for 17 years.
A northern dog-day cicada in Groton on Sept. 4, 2022. (Photo: Tom Murray)Just like the folklore surrounding a groundhog and its shadow, there is folklore about dog-day cicadas. It is said that six weeks after cicadas first begin sounding off in late summer, the first frost will arrive. (Please, no.)
The Plimoth colony’s Governor William Bradford penned the first written record of periodical cicadas in North America. Of course, indigenous people had long known about these 17-year cicadas. In fact, the Iroquois dug up the nymphs just before they emerged and cleaned and dried them for a nutritious feast. (Cicada nymphs are said to taste like asparagus.) In 1633, after spending 13 years in Plimoth, Bradford saw for the first time the Massachusetts Brood XIV cicadas:
All the month of May, ther was such a quantitie of a great sorte of flies, like (for bignes) to wasps, or bumble-bees, which came out of holes in the ground, and replenished all the woods … and made such a constante yelling noyes, as made all the woods ring of them, and ready to deafe the hearers. They have not by the English been heard or seen before or since.
Bradford may be forgiven for not realizing that these insects were cicadas. Periodical cicadas occur only in North America – absent from the rest of the world. In addition, there is only one species of cicada in England, and the noise it makes is so high-pitched that humans cannot hear it. For this reason, early colonists frequently called these insects locusts.
Cicadas and locusts are not the same: Cicadas are more closely related to aphids, while locusts are large grasshoppers. Cicadas feed on liquids and cannot chew, so they do not cause much damage. Swarms of locusts, on the other hand, can cause widespread crop damage. They eat everything, stripping vegetation bare and even eating cloth. A sardonic joke of the 1800s was that locusts ate entire farms until nothing was left but the mortgage.
There used to be large swarms of locusts in the Rocky Mountains and Western prairies, but they went suddenly extinct. The last giant swarms of locusts occurred in the 1870s; the insects were completely gone 30 years later. It is not known why – probably because of settlement of Western lands as hordes of grazing cattle and sheep destroyed grasslands and farmers’ plows turned up the soil, killing locust eggs.
Samuel Prescott Hildreth, a physician born in Methuen in 1783, described a cicada emergence in 1812:
From the 24th of May to the 3rd of June, their numbers increased daily, at an astonishing rate … When they first rise from the earth … in the night, they are white and soft. They then attach themselves to some bush, tree, or post and wait until the air has fried the shell with which they are enveloped: the shell then bursts on the back for about one third of its length, and through this opening the cicada creeps, as from a prison.
If you want to see (or more likely hear) a dog-day cicada, you must wait only until they emerge in late summer. It may be enough to convince you to skip seeing the Brood XIV cicadas next year. A city-data forum poster described an experience with the Brood XIV cicadas on the Cape: “In 2008, they weren’t that bad but 1991 UGH. I remember … the sound of them crunching underfoot and … running, head covered, from house to car to avoid getting creepy crunchy critters stuck in my hair.”
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Jeanine Farley is an educational writer who has lived in the Boston area for more than 30 years. She enjoys taking photos of our urban wild things.
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