In D.C. Area, It's the Day Of the Cicada

In the days before they emerge, cicadas dig tunnels to the surface, which may be visible at the bases of trees. They also sometimes build mud structures, about three or four inches high, that look like cylindrical turrets.

An enterprising homeowner will likely be wasting time using a pesticide to kill cicadas when the tunnels or turrets appear. When the emergence occurs, says Mark Schlossberg, the owner of a Baltimore lawn care company, "they're just going to fly in from the neighbors' property."

Should that happen, a Cincinnati dry cleaner named Sam Luning wants you to be ready. He is the inventor of a repackaged badminton racket -- Luning calls them "bad bug" rackets -- that will soon be on sale in Cincinnati area drugstores and perhaps on the Web for $3.99.

Luning says he got the idea after watching his son chase bugs on a camping trip and seeing "the thrill and excitement in his eyes." Swat 20 cicadas and you may call yourself a "hunter," according to the wrapper on Luning's rackets. Take out 70 and consider yourself a "predator"; if you reach 100, wear proudly the title: "CICADANATOR!!!"

'Predatory Satiation'

Some insects are endowed with elaborate defense mechanisms -- such as moths, whose bodies course with toxins -- that ensure they are left pretty well alone. Not periodical cicadas. There are simply too many of them to be wiped out by predators. Their sheer volume is a survival tactic scientists call "predatory satiation."

"Absolutely everything that can stuff them into their mouths will try to feed on cicadas," says John Cooley, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Connecticut who studies periodicals. "Dogs and cats tend to eat more than they should, so they can get horribly constipated," he adds. "The exoskeletons are hard to digest."

As for the cicadas, says Zyla, the amateur naturalist in Ridge, "they're hoping that all of the predators eat enough and get full so at least some of them are going to breed. It works."

The emergence of the cicadas certainly seems designed to overwhelm hungry squirrels, birds and house pets. One evening late this spring and for several days following -- many experts think the trigger is the soil reaching a temperature of 64 degrees -- the vast majority of cicada nymphs will leave their holes and turrets and head for the trees. If a tree is hard to find, another vertical surface might do. Some have settled for the bristles of pigs.

Once they find an appropriate surface, they will anchor themselves and molt, turning from an insect designed primarily for digging and sucking on the roots of plants into a winged creature eager to mate. When they squeeze out of their nymphal skins, they are a glistening creamy color. After a few hours, their bodies darken to blue-black.

Four or five days into adulthood, the males will begin playing their internal kettledrums, called tymbals, which generate sound the way a piece of metal does when it's pushed in and pops back out. The males will cluster into "chorusing centers" in trees, trying to attract the interest of a female. When the mood strikes, a female will flick her wings once or twice, creating a clicking noise. Given the volume of the males, the flicking may be more of a visual cue than an aural one, says David Marshall, another cicada expert and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Connecticut.

Several males may see the response, but what happens next is this: "As far as we can tell," says Marshall, who has spent many days and nights in the woods watching cicadas disport themselves, "the female usually mates with the first one that gets there."

History and the Cicada

Charles Darwin, citing reports of cicada mating habits in southern Brazil, cast the moment of congress in a more romantic light in "The Descent of Man":

"As there is so much rivalry between the males, it is probable that the females not only discover them by the sounds emitted, but that, like female birds, they are excited or allured by the male with the most attractive voice."

Many observers have found something profound to mull over in the life and times of the 17-year cicada. One Web diarist, who happened to be at Princeton at the same time as Bob Dylan and millions of cicadas, sees the seasons of her own life in cicada terms. "Seventeen years is a significant stretch of time," she writes on her site, called Jabberwocky, which does not give her name. "It is almost the measure of a generation. Tab and I could practically mark our lives by visits of the 17-year cicadas: first as children ourselves, then again as lovers, and next as parents."

Charles Marlatt, an entomologist who worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the turn of the 19th century and who devised the Roman numeral system for designating periodical broods, took a longer view. "It is interesting," he wrote, "in thought to trace the history of this species backward, taking, as time measures, its periodic recurrences, until in retrospect it is possible to fancy its shrill notes jarring on the ears of the early colonists."

Indeed, in 1715, a Swedish clergyman named Andreas Sandel wrote of the appearance of Brood X in Philadelphia: "In this month [May] some singular flies came out of the ground; the English call them locusts." From that May to this one, 17 cycles will have passed.

As it was then, so it will be in 2004: The females will begin to deposit their eggs -- each female cicada carries an estimated 400 to 600 -- after scratching incisions into pencil-thin tree branches. (This activity sometimes results in damage to young trees, and gardeners may want to protect trees by wrapping them in fine netting.)

Gene Kritsky, a cicada expert at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, has researched the effects of development and deforestation on the emergence of periodicals. In 1885 and 1902, members of Brood X appeared in every one of Ohio's 99 counties; in 1987, they emerged in 67 counties. Nowadays, however, "they are more densely numbered in urban areas than out in the woods in many cases," he says, in part because nothing is more appealing to a female cicada than a young tree standing by itself on a lawn. "We are providing the ideal cicada habitat."

Once the eggs are laid, the adults begin to die, and they will all be gone by early July. The eggs will mature, and provided they have not been eaten, young cicada nymphs will hatch out of their nests in August. Each one smaller than a grain of rice, they will drop to the ground and work their way into the soil, not to be seen above ground again until 2021.