What's that LOUD buzz?
If you've heard a noise like a power saw coming from treetops lately, you were the wrong audience. The noise is male cicadas calling out to females in a brief courtship time following years of juvenile life underground.
Some cicadas, called periodic cicadas, emerge all together after 13 or 17 years sucking root juices beneath the soil. After emerging, cicadas mate and lay eggs in twigs, which eventually fall to the ground to start the cycle anew. Just why some cicadas are periodic remains a mystery, though one hypothesis is that the burst of many individuals emerging after so long overwhelms predator populations.
Citizen scientists are well positioned to contribute important data on cicadas, just by observing them! Try using the audio recording option with iNaturalist, or zoom in if you find the large insect in your neighbourhood for a great photo. Submit your observations, and read up on neat cicada facts like these:
Cicadas have antimicrobial wings that engineers have tried to recreate:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.5b08309
Certain fungi parasitize cicadas so that the insects act like zombies to spread the fungal spores:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1754504819300352
Researchers can glean info about climate change and environmental toxins from cicada lifecycles, which are so linked to the trees in their forest and urban habitats:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-are-cicadas-180975009/
Comentarios
Make sure to check out the observation of the week about cicadas and an especially fun discovery! :)
https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/39376-a-naturalist-picking-blueberries-makes-first-sighting-of-a-rare-cicada-in-a-century-observation-s-of-the-week-8-12-20
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