The cicadas are here. Their emergence is the 'biggest insect event on the planet.' - Entrepreneur Generations

                  Emerging from underground, cicadas march toward metamorphosis. (BBC Video)

A familiar song of summer buzzes from trees, echos from backyards and reverberates through forests. It's cicada Brood XIV's emerging and living above-ground tune traveling across sound waves from "northern Georgia up into Indiana and Ohio and eastward through the mid-Atlantic, extending as far north as Long Island, N.Y. and Massachusetts," write Chris Simon and John Cooley for The Conversation.

As evolutionary ecologists, Simon and Cooley study periodical cicadas to "understand questions about the natural history, genetics and geographic distribution of life," they write. While each cicada species has a different "song," all their vibration-lad "singing" is part of the insect's mating ritual.

Female cicadas from Brood XIV "will lay hundreds of eggs inside small tree branches. Then the adult cicadas will die," they explain. "When the eggs hatch six weeks later, new cicada nymphs will fall from the trees and burrow back underground, starting the cycle again."

Each color on this map represents a different periodical cicada brood. Brood XIV is darker green extending from the Midwest to eastern Mass. (University of Connecticut map via Conversation, CC BY-ND)

Cicada brood documentation dates back to entomologists from the mid-1800s. Simon and Cooley have been tracking and "verifying periodical cicada records and updating maps since the late 1980s," they add. "We listen for species-specific songs and then record the cicada species identity on computers, with their GPS locations. Often we’ll stop to examine a patch of forest. If the cicadas are singing, we note whether the chorus is light, moderate, loud or distant."

Simon and Cooley think cicadas have information to share about our changing planet. They write, "Our research suggests that climate warming has resulted in more four-year-early straggling events that are increasingly dense, widespread and likely to leave offspring. . . . Understanding how these four-year shifts are encoded in cicadas’ genes is a mystery that remains to be solved."


from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/n4O2sJA The cicadas are here. Their emergence is the 'biggest insect event on the planet.' - Entrepreneur Generations

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