The cicadas are coming. Billions and billions of them. Bulging red-eyed monsters with wispy orange, veined wings and black bodies. If you weren’t around for the last cicada plague in 1987, be forewarned.
“They’ll be here on or around May 21, and you’ll find them all the way up to Dayton,” promises Dr. Gene Kritsky, a biology professor at Mount St. Joe.
The cicadas return every 17 years, but don’t call them grasshoppers or locusts — they’re more closely related to aphids. They fly and land everywhere (just ask anybody who lived here in 1987 for their horror stories), and the piercing noise the creatures emit can be overwhelming. It’s the noisy males who do all the buzzing; the insects gather in trees and form a chorus during mating calls, shrieking to the females, reminding each other that in a few months their short lives are over.
The plague is so awful that the Cincinnati Park Board is currently requiring brides to sign a “cicada release form” before they’ll rent out facilities for May and June weddings. Outdoor functions of all sorts will certainly be trashed by the loathsome creatures — dive bombing the potato salad, strafing the salami sandwiches and generally inducing nausea to the faint of stomach.
The cicadas emerge from the ground to grow to the size of a human thumb. How does the pest’s internal time clock operate on such an efficient 17-year cycle? Experts suggest the insects actually keep a mental record of the changes in seasons, from winter to summer each year.
Good news is they’re harmless if annoying. They don’t sting or bite. Bad news is they’re Grotesque with a capital G.
A plague of locust-like creatures trying to ruin our spring and summer. That’s soooo Cincinnati.
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This article appears in Jan 7-13, 2004.
