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You may have heard that we are under invasion by red-eyed creatures with skeletal wings. You heard wrong.
We’re safe – for now.
It's a different story for our neighbors in the far reaches of the state and points north. In recent days Magicicada spp — yes, that's its name, and no, that's not a typo — has been sighted everywhere from Helen, up in the mountains, all the way to Connecticut. You would know this visitor by its common name, the periodical cicada.
After 17 years underground, these winged bugs have emerged for a few weeks of making noise and making whoopee before dying. And thus a cycle that started millions of years ago will begin again.
Nancy Hinkle, explain.
“They’ve (periodical cicadas) been sucking sap for 17 years,” said Hinkle, an entomologist with the University of Georgia. “They’re amazing.”
Hinkle is pretty unusual herself. She’s that rare scientist who can talk and not sound like some know-it-all. Ask her about cicadas, and scientific restraint vanishes. She says they’re “cool.”
They are. Consider:
- The bugs are not the same critters as our annual cicadas, which show up every summer. Scientists have bestowed a technical term on the yearly visitors: “dog day” cicadas.
- Periodical cicadas appear in different groups, called broods, and they don’t all emerge at once. The current crop of cicadas is Brood II, which includes pockets of bugs at Unicoi State Park and in the Chattahoochee National Forest. The group that encompasses the rest of Georgia, including the metro area, is Brood XIX — the Great Southern Brood. It appeared in 2011 and is laying low until 2024.
- There are 23 broods, all east of the Rocky Mountains.
- Not every brood stays underground for 17 years. The Great Southern bugs, for example, come out every 13 years. Why? No one knows, and the cicadas ain’t saying.
- Cicadas live on the roots of hardwoods before digging out for a last fling. Like underclassmen at Cancun, they make lots of noise, then seek a mate.
- The females lay eggs under bark on the tips of tree limbs before dying. The limbs, weakened by the eggs, break off and fall to earth. The egg hatchlings, called nymphs, burrow into the dirt for a decade or more of sap-sucking.
“They provide a natural pruning service,” said Hinkle.
They do more than that. Cicadas are a crawling lesson in natural history. Show a child a cicada’s cast skin, the crackly shell a bug exits, and watch that kid’s eyes get wide.
"They're so primordial," Hinkle said.
They also provide an answer to a question that’s vexed us all: What happens when you put one in your mouth?
“When you put one in your mouth,” said Hinkle, “it keeps making noise.”
Do you know this first-hand, Dr. Hinkle? She laughed.
“My dog does,” she said. For the record, that’s Dottie, a Rottweiler mix with a taste for bugs. She conducted her own exhaustive experiments two years ago, chomping on bug after bug when cicadas emerged in her part of Georgia.
Hinkle tracked a bunch of Great Southern cicadas to Lexington, east of Athens. The woods were overrun with them — so many that some folks got scared. They called the sheriff.
“Some callers said there were UFOs in the woods,” said Hinkle. “They (cicadas) made that much noise.”
Tell it to Ellen Graham, the resource manager at Unicoi State Park. On second thought, you’ll probably have to yell it to her.
“Oh, they’re deafening,” said Graham, who late last week pointed an excited cicada searcher from Indiana University toward the park’s green folds where male and female bugs regarded each other with red-eyed lust. “They’re everywhere.”
When she heard the periodical cicadas are in north Georgia, Hinkle nearly whooped with anticipation. “I’m probably going to head up there (to Unicoi),” she said on Friday. “This is a once-in-lifetime — well, four-times-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I’m going to take it.”
Hinkle did not plan to take Dottie, her four-legged cohort who discovered what cicadas do in mouths. That dog’s already done her part for science.
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