During the summer, Charlottesville was filled with more than just the normal sounds of perpetual construction and late-season Lawn streakers as the Brood II cicadas made a rare appearance along the east coast. The Brood II cicadas that emerged this summer are among 12 different broods of 17-year cicadas, each of which make a six-week appearance before dying an ignoble death.
Every 17 years as the summer nears and the ground warms to 64 degrees Fahrenheit, the cicadas leave the ground to mate and deposit eggs. Once they appear in hordes, their buzzing calls can combine to produce an almost deafening roar.
Although pesky in sheer number and sound, the 17-year cicadas are nevertheless wonders of nature. Virginians from the 1800s to present day have documented a fascination with these noisy creatures.
In her blog post entitled “Observations on the Seventeen-Year Cicada: A Citizen Scientist Reports from 1824,” Special Collections Library Curator Molly Schwartzburg reports one such fascination with the cicadas. A ‘citizen scientist’ writing under the name J.S. determined correctly that the cicadas, which he called locusts, would live underground, often in the roots of trees, and then “[become] busily employed in getting released from a covering they had no use for in their present abode.”
Modern citizen scientists have also been at work studying cicadas this summer. A citizen scientist-driven cicada map sponsored by Radiolab documented the times and locations of the emergence of different groups of Brood II cicadas. The project found a patchy emergence, with cicadas largely populating forested areas and avoiding more developed areas — places where they couldn’t bore holes in cement to emerge from underground.
Following that trend, the cicadas in Charlottesville were suspiciously quiet this summer. Third-year College student Morgan McCoy described the cicadas as being less annoying than she expected and even offered a little citizen scientist observation of her own.
“They weren’t too bad at U.Va. but I know they were worse in the rural outskirts,” McCoy said. “I also saw a cat kill one, and it shrieked while it died.”
Other Virginians found themselves overwhelmed with cicadas and applied a little creativity to the pesky problem, using them as fishing bait or admiring the feeding frenzy that squirrels and other animals enjoyed with each surge.
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