May 25, 2007

Periodical Cicada Facts

Birds, snakes, spiders, raccoons, chipmunks, skunks, foxes, dogs, cats, moles and squirrels will eat cicadas.

Adult cicadas have 1 1/2 inch long black bodies with red eyes and orange wing veins.

Adult cicadas fly, at the most, a half-mile during their lifetimes.

Most cicadas mate and die within a few hundred feet of where they emerged from the ground.

Cicadas have piercing and sucking mouthparts.

Some years no cicadas emerge in the United States.

Cicadas will emerge when soil temperatures reach 64 F.

Brown one-inch long cicada nymphs will emerge from the soil.

Nymphs will crawl up trees and other vertical structures for their final molt.

Sometimes cicadas emerge a year or two later or earlier than scheduled. This is called "straggling"

Male cicadas sing using structures on their abdomens called tymbals. Females do not have these organs.

Only the male cicadas sing to attract the female cicadas for mating.

Cicadas do not sing at night.

Male cicadas die soon after mating.

In Chicago in 1990, people used shovels to remove dead cicadas from their sidewalks.

Females lay eggs with their ovipositor in branches and twigs 1/4 to 1/2 inches in diameter.

Eggs are white and the size of a grain of rice. Eggs will hatch in six to ten weeks.

Female cicadas can lay as many as 600 eggs.

Cicadas build chimney-like structures from through, which they emerge.

Cicadas are not locusts. Locusts are migratory grasshoppers.

Cicadas are related to leafhoppers.

Cicadas are edible.

Cicadas feed on the sap of tree roots while underground.

Periodical cicadas are only found in North America.

Cicadas will not bite or sting humans.

Cicadas cause minimal damage to trees.

There are 15 broods of cicadas in North America. Broods I though X, XIII, and XIV are 17-year broods and Broods XIX, XXII, and XXIII are 13-year broods. Five broods occur in Illinois.

The five Illinois Broods are the Iowan Brood (Brood III), the Great Southern Brood (Brood XIX), the Great Eastern Brood (Brood X), the Northern IllinoisBrood (Brood XII) and the Lower Mississippi River Valley Brood (XXIII).

The Northern Illinois Brood is emerging in 2007. It last emerged in 1990 and will next emerge in 2024.

Generally the 17-year brood is made up of three Magicicada species-Magicicada septendecim, Magicicada cassini, and Magicicada seplendecula.

Each Magicicada species has its own song.

There are seven species of cicadas. Four species have 13-year life cycles and three have 17-year life cycles.

Most cicadas will be gone by July.

Cicadas are one the world's longest living insects. Termite queens can live 15 to 20 years.

Cicadas molt 5 times underground.

After their final molt, cicadas are white, but darken as their exoskeletons harden.

Comments: rwolford@uiuc.edu

Posted by Ron Wolford at 3:16 AM |