May 19, 2004

Cicadas Respond to Their 17-Year Cue

RINCETON, N.J., May 18 - The cicadas are back. Or, since they've never actually left - just dropped out of sight - they're out again.

In the echoic thrum in the air in the deep woods, in the crunch of their discarded larval husks, in the spastic flight paths of giant insects that only just got their wings, the return of the 17-year cicadas has begun to be heard, and seen, in the New York region.

Greg O'Neil, the Princeton Township arborist, began seeing them on Monday, after the weekend rains softened soil enough to allow the first of uncounted billions of cicadas, wakened from their larval slumber, to claw their way to the surface, climb the nearest tree, pole or pant leg, shed their crusty skins and begin looking for mates.

"We'll start getting calls from homeowners now, wanting to know how to get rid of them," Mr. O'Neil said as he stood next to a large silver maple at the township's new Rosedale Park, the litter of cicadian husks crunching underfoot, and the tree trunk crawling with the tentative first quests for sex by insects that have been waiting 17 years.

"There's really nothing you can do with them but wait for it all to pass," he said.

The insects pose no serious threat to humans or pets. True, people will notice that some tips of tree branches will die off in late summer, after the female cicadas have laid their eggs in narrow slits cut in the bark. A passer-by may experience the harmless mist of cicada urine if there are enough of them in a tree overhead, and while the emergence will be a bonanza for spring birds, dogs and cats have been known to get sick from over-snacking on them.

The emergence of Magicicada septendecim will be the biggest insect eruption most people in the Ohio Valley and the central Atlantic seaboard will see, said Gene Kritsky, professor of biology at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, and the author of several books on cicadas. In the East, the emergence stretches from northern Virginia, across the District of Columbia, Maryland and southwestern Pennsylvania, and up across South and Central Jersey and New York City to the tip of Long Island. It grazes the lower Hudson Valley and southwestern Connecticut.

"If you figure 100 per square yard and look at all the land involved, I have estimated five billion just for southwestern Ohio," Professor Kritsky said. "For everywhere, it would be just enormous. I've heard people talk about hundreds of billions, but that may be low."

So from now through mid- to late June, as the bugs work their way through their 20- to 23-day lives of emergence, mating and death, the so-called Brood X cicadas will be everywhere the ground has lain undisturbed. They will freak out the nervous mothers of brides at outdoor weddings as their guests swat at the pesky party crashers. They will clog swimming pool filters from Westchester to Westport, prompt countless "dare you to eat one" challenges by reality-TV besotted children, and drown out graduation speakers with the wall of sound that is the mating call of the males.

Bob Dylan almost ran for his car instead of picking up an honorary degree at Princeton University during the Brood X emergence of 1970 that the Princeton Alumni Bulletin described as "biblical." Mr. Dylan wrote about the experience in "Day of the Locusts," a track on his "New Morning" album of that year:

"And the locusts sang, yeah, it gave me a chill.

Oh the locusts sang such a sweet melody.

Oh the locusts sang their high whining trill,

Yeah, the locusts sang and they were singing for me."

To be fair, cicadas are not locusts, which are a form of grasshopper, but they are noisy. "Just think of it as a giant love song," said Faith Kuehn, plant industries administrator for the Delaware Department of Agriculture.

While the cicadas have only just begun to reintroduce themselves to the New York metropolitan region, they have been out long enough south of here to render people buggy with excitement.

"Every day there are six articles in The Washington Post about cicadas coming out," said Georgina Javor, the spokesman for the Music Center at Strathmore, a center for the arts in North Bethesda, Md. "All over town there are special cicada drinks and cicada parties and on the radio it's all about who can eat them the fastest."

Strathmore has even commissioned a local composer, David Kane, to write a piece for seven instruments called "Emergence: A Cicada Serenade," to be performed at a free public concert on July 29.

"I just moved here from New York, so I don't really get it," Ms. Javor said. "But we're going with it."

There is no way to know if this cicadamania - and there is a Web site with that address - will grip strollers in Central Park and suburbanites in Rockland or Suffolk Counties as it has others farther south. But the periodic nature of the insects, the way they come at about the span of a person's youth, make them irresistible emotional mnemonics, said Robert J. Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University.

He calls cicadas the ultimate golden oldie, just as the pop songs of our youths were, he said, before they were squished into mush by the Muzak of dentists' waiting rooms.

"Cicadas are the sound of summer, of that year when you were young," said Professor Thompson, happy that he was no longer being asked to fit the end of "Friends" into some cultural gestalt. "They were there when you were young, and then they go away for 17 years, and then they come back, with all those memories. It's the closest thing to a time machine you can get outside of science fiction."

Male cicadas call by scratching their tymbals, the ribbed membrane on their bellies. It is the closest one can get to the sound of a small jet engine revving up without being blown away, said Dan Mozgai, a Web developer who lives in Metuchen, N.J., and who put up cicadamania.com as a bulletin board for cicada enthusiasts.

"I think it is because they're so unusual," he said of the keen interest people have shown in the bugs. "Over the past 20 years there has been a lot of mobility as people move into this region from places that have never seen a cicada. You have people from India and other Asian countries who come here to program computers and suddenly they're confronted with bugs that are bigger than anything they saw back home."

In the woods behind Rosedale Park here in central New Jersey, the cicada's call is still low enough to flood into a listener's consciousness only when there is a break in the traffic on Rosedale Road. Then it seems to wash out of the wood, a hollow, wooden and slightly echoing note that falls around D below middle C on a piano.

"It's kind of a Zen sound, " said Mr. O'Neil, the arborist.

There are other periodic cicadas, including three 13-year broods. But the Brood X cicadas are the most numerous of all, because they have no competition.

"Seventeen is a prime number: therefore it would be next to impossible for another species to evolve a 17-year life cycle to match it," Professor Kritsky said. "So other species have evolved in synchrony with cicadas."