Cicadas are the song of the summer, but this year’s large broods may be especially irritating for people on the autism spectrum who have hearing sensitivity.
The fungus takes over cicadas’ lower halves and sex drives, fueling them to keep mating and spreading the disease in the process. That's why some scientists call them “flying salt shakers of death.”
Cicadas play an important role in the ecosystem, transferring the biomass they eat from trees to the rest of the animal kingdom as birds and small mammals feed off of them. It’s not just animals that feast on cicadas. For the particularly adventurous human, eating cicadas is certainly an option as well. Chef Joseph Yoon, who is the founder of Brooklyn Bugs, a group that explores the potential of edible insects to combat food insecurity, first started cooking cicadas in 2021.
For the first time in over 200 years, certain parts of the country are experiencing a rare emergence of two periodical cicadas — those big, droning insects that mostly live underground until they finally, very audibly, do not.
The largest periodical cicada brood in North America will span at least a dozen states in the Southeast. The brief, but spectacular, emergence has entomologists buzzing with excitement.
Billions of cicadas will emerge this spring across eastern and southern states as two broods arrive simultaneously for the first time in more than 200 years.
A once in a lifetime ecological event is happening this spring ... and you likely won't be able to miss it even if you try. Scientists say billions of cicadas will emerge in the U.S. starting in April. It's a rare double brood emergence event that hasn't happened since 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was president.
A plane carrying dozens of journalists abroad to follow President Biden's trip to Europe was delayed several hours due to cicadas that filled the plane's engine.
A cicada flew into a driver's face in Cincinnati Monday evening, causing them to crash and total their car, according to the Cincinnati Police Department.
Maryland intellectual and free Black man Benjamin Banneker's observations about cicadas' 17-year life cycle were among the earliest known to be documented. But that work is rarely credited.
The insects' appearances stretch back 4,000 years, to a time when ancient settlers carved cicadas from jade and put them on tongues of the dead before burial, evoking transcendence and eternal life.
