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“Cicada-geddon” insect invasion will be biggest bug emergence in centuries

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Chicago advised to prepare for billions of cicadas this spring


Chicago advised to prepare for billions of cicadas this spring

02:47

Trillions of evolution’s bizarro wonders, red-eyed periodical cicadas that have pumps in their heads and jet-like muscles in their rears, are about to emerge in numbers not seen in decades and possibly centuries.

Crawling out from underground every 13 or 17 years, with a collective song as loud as jet engines, the periodical cicadas are nature’s kings of the calendar.

These black bugs with bulging eyes differ from their greener-tinged cousins that come out annually. They stay buried year after year, until they surface and take over a landscape, covering houses with shed exoskeletons and making the ground crunchy.

This spring, an unusual cicada double dose is about to invade a couple parts of the United States in what University of Connecticut cicada expert John Cooley called “cicada-geddon.” The last time these two broods came out together in 1803 Thomas Jefferson, who wrote about cicadas in his Garden Book but mistakenly called them locusts, was president.

“Periodic cicadas don’t do subtle,” Cooley said.

Cicada
Dog-day cicada (Tibicen canicularis) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on August 21, 2022.

Creative Touch Imaging Ltd./NurPhoto via Getty Images


If you’re fascinated by the upcoming solar eclipse, the cicadas are weirder and bigger, said Georgia Tech biophysicist Saad Bhamla.

“We’ve got trillions of these amazing living organisms come out of the Earth, climb up on trees and it’s just a unique experience, a sight to behold,” Bhamla said. “It’s like an entire alien species living underneath our feet and then some prime number years they come out to say hello.”

At times mistaken for voracious and unrelated locusts, periodical cicadas are more annoying rather than causing biblical economic damage. They can hurt young trees and some fruit crops, but it’s not widespread and can be prevented.

Two broods add up to a “mass invasion”: 1 million per acre 

The largest geographic brood in the nation — called Brood XIX and coming out every 13 years — is about to march through the Southeast, having already created countless boreholes in the red Georgia clay. It’s a sure sign of the coming cicada occupation. They emerge when the ground warms to 64 degrees (17.8 degrees Celsius), which is happening earlier than it used to because of climate change, entomologists said. The bugs are brown at first but darken as they mature.

Soon after the insects appear in large numbers in Georgia and the rest of the Southeast, cicada cousins that come out every 17 years will inundate Illinois. They are Brood XIII.

“You’ve got one very widely distributed brood in Brood XIX, but you have a very dense historically abundant brood in the Midwest, your Brood XIII,” said University of Maryland entomologist Mike Raupp.

“And when you put those two together… you would have more than anywhere else any other time,” University of Maryland entomologist Paula Shrewsbury said.

These hideaway cicadas are found only in the eastern United States and a few tiny other places. There are 15 different broods that come out every few years, on 17- and 13-year cycles. These two broods may actually overlap — but probably not interbreed — in a small area near central Illinois, entomologists said.

Experts told CBS Chicago there will be no avoiding the insects in Illinois when they emerge there, likely in mid-May.

“It’s going to be this mass invasion, but a peaceful one,” said Allen Lawrence, associate curator of entomology at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.

The numbers that will come out this year — averaging around 1 million per acre over hundreds of millions of acres across 16 states — are mind-boggling. Easily hundreds of trillions, maybe quadrillions, Cooley said.

An even bigger adjacent joint emergence will be when the two largest broods, XIX and XIV, come out together in 2076, Cooley said: “That is the cicada-palooza.”

The origin of some of the astronomical cicada numbers can likely be traced to evolution, Cooley and several other entomologists said. Fat, slow and tasty, periodical cicadas make ideal meals for birds, said Raupp, who eats them himself. (His school put out a cicada cookbook called “Cicada-Licious.” ) But there are too many for them to be eaten to extinction, he said.

“Birds everywhere will feast. Their bellies will be full and once again the cicadas will emerge triumphant,” Raupp said.

Pets may also try to make a snack of cicadas. Veterinarians told CBS Chicago it’s generally not a health hazard.

“They are not toxic to pets. They won’t sting or bite your pet,” said Dr. Cynthia Gonzalez of Family Pet Animal Hospital in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. “The only issue that would present for your pet is if they were to ingest a large amount of them, or if they’re a smaller dog if they ate a small piece of the exoskeleton — sometimes that can really irritate their GI tract.”


The cicadas are coming in Chicago — what does that mean for your pets?

02:52

“Sometimes, in rare instances, an animal may have an allergic reaction to some of the components in that exoskeleton if that pet is also allergic to shellfish,” said Dr. Kelly Cairns DVM, MS, DACVIM — a board-certified small animal internal medicine specialist, vice president of medical excellence and education for Thrive Pet Healthcare, and secretary of the board of directors of the Chicago Veterinary Medical Association. 

Prime numbers and an evolutionary trick

The other way cicadas use numbers, or math, is in their cycles. They stay underground either 13 or 17 years, both prime numbers. Those big and odd numbers are likely an evolutionary trick to keep predators from relying on a predictable emergence.

The cicadas can cause problems for young trees and nurseries when their mating and nesting weighs down and breaks branches, Shrewsbury said.

Periodical cicadas look for vegetation surrounding mature trees, where they can mate and lay eggs and then go underground to feast on the roots, said Mount St. Joseph University biologist Gene Kritsky, a cicada expert who wrote a book on this year’s dual emergence. That makes American suburbia “periodical cicada heaven,” he said.

It can be hard on the eardrums when all those cicadas get together in those trees and start chorusing. It’s like a singles bar with the males singing to attract mates, with each species having its own mating call.

“The whole tree is screaming,” said Kritsky, who created a Cicada Safari app to track where the cicadas are.

Cooley takes hearing protection because it can get so intense.

“It’s up in the 110 decibel range,” Cooley said. “It’d be like putting your head next to a jet. It is painful.”

The courtship is something to watch, Kritsky imitated the male singing “ffaairro (his pitch rising), ffaairro.”

“She flicks her wings,” Kritsky narrated in a play-by-play. “He moves closer. He sings. She flicks her wings. When he gets really close, he doesn’t have a gap, he’ll go ffaairro, ffaairro, ffaairro, fffaairo.”

Then the mating is consummated, with the female laying eggs in a groove in a tree branch. The cicada nymph will fall to the ground, then dig underground to get to the roots of a tree.

Cicadas are strange in that they feed on the tree’s xylem, which carry water and some nutrients. The pressure inside the xylem is lower than outside, but a pump in the cicada’s head allows the bug to get fluid that it otherwise wouldn’t be able to get out of the tree, said Carrie Deans, a University of Alabama Huntsville entomologist.

The cicada gets so much fluid that it has a lot of liquid waste to get rid of. It does so thanks to a special muscle that creates a jet of urine that flows faster than in most any other animal, said Georgia Tech’s Bhamla.

In Macon, Georgia, T.J. Rauls was planting roses and holly this week when he came across a cicada while digging. A neighbor had already posted an image of an early-emerging critter.

Rauls named his own bug “Bobby” and said he’s looking forward to more to come.

“I think it will be an exciting thing,” Rauls said. “It will be bewildering with all their noises.”



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Trump ally Nigel Farage heckles his hecklers as his far-right Reform UK Party makes gains in U.K. election

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The Labour Party and its leader, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, undoubtedly won the U.K. general election, but as he set to work building his new cabinet, there was another politician keen to crow about his party’s election windfall, much smaller though it was. Nigel Farage, the leader of the far-right Reform UK party and long one of Britain’s most divisive politicians, was heckled by a series of protesters as he took the stage to deliver a speech in London on Friday.

He smiled through the interruptions, and even heckled his hecklers back, loudly chanting “boring!” as they were removed from the hall.

Reform UK grabbed only four seats in the British Parliament’s 650-seat House of Commons in Thursday’s national election. But that’s four more than it had before.

Labour Party Wins UK Election
Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, reacts at a news conference following the general election, in London, July 5, 2024.

Carlos Jasso/Bloomberg/Getty


Farage argues that the U.K.’s first-past-the-post voting system makes it difficult for smaller parties to match their overall share of the votes with their share of seats won in the Commons, and he vowed on Friday to push for an end to the current system. But the real success for Farage was in the overall vote tally, not the four seats his party won, which included his own first election to the parliament.

To the consternation of the long-ruling Conservative Party, from which it pilfered a huge amount of support, the anti-immigration Reform UK, whose leader and policies had long been relegated to the fringes of British politics, took about 15% of the vote, with just over 4 million ballots in total.

That gave Reform UK the third-highest overall vote count among all the parties that competed for the parliamentary seats, overtaking even the Liberal Democrats, who, despite getting about half a million fewer votes, emerged on Friday with a record 71 seats in the Commons.

Nigel Farage Celebrates Reform UK's Election Success
Leader of the Reform UK, Nigel Farage, speaks to the media during a press conference presenting the party’s program for the upcoming Parliament, July 5, 2024, in London, England.

Dan Kitwood/Getty


Farage, 60, won the seat in his home constituency of Clacton, in southeast England, after seven previous failed attempts. His Reform UK party, founded initially in 2018 as the Brexit Party, advocating for a complete and uncompromising break with the European Union, has always campaigned on cutting immigration to Britain.

The Englishman is often compared to his transatlantic ally former U.S. President Donald Trump, for both his brash political style and his nationalist rhetoric, and he’s appeared at events with the Republican in the U.S. and met with him in Britain, too.

“Congratulations to Nigel Farage on his big WIN of a Parliament Seat Amid Reform UK Election Success. Nigel is a man who truly loves his Country!” Trump wrote on his own social media platform, Truth Social, on Friday. Mr. Trump made no mention of the Labour Party’s landslide election victory, or Starmer becoming the new prime minister.

Donald Trump Campaigns In Arizona Ahead Of Presidential Election
British politician Nigel Farage (R) praises U.S. President Donald Trump during a campaign rally at Phoenix Goodyear Airport, in an Oct. 28, 2020 file photo taken in Goodyear, Arizona.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty


Farage’s campaign was marred by a number of 11th-hour controversies, mostly involving racist or sexist comments attributed to Reform UK candidates, and on election day he vowed to “professionalize” his party.

“Those few bad apples that have crept in will be long gone and we will never have any of their type back in our organization,” Farage told his supporters, along with the British public and his keenly observing political opponents.

Speaking to CBS News’ Emmet Lyons on Friday morning as the election results were finalized, the Labour Party Mayor of London Sadiq Khan acknowledged the rise of “popular nativist, nationalist movements,” and said Starmer would govern “in the national interest, show humility, be magnanimous and be humble over the course of the next three, four, five years.”

“We’ve got to earn the trust of those that voted Labour, but also try and win the confidence of those that didn’t,” he said.

That will undoubtedly be one of the chief missions of both the Labour and Conservative Parties in the years ahead.

They’ll both be eager to craft political strategies ahead of the next national election that can stop voters following the trend to the far-right seen across Europe in recent years – a trend which, despite their minimal presence in Parliament, was also demonstrated by Reform UK’s share of the votes this week.



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What to expect from 30th annual Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans

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What to expect from 30th annual Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans – CBS News


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The 30th annual Essence Festival of Culture is underway in New Orleans. Janet Jackson, Usher and Birdman are among the headliners with Vice President Kamala Harris also set to make an appearance. Hakeem Holmes, vice president of the festival, joined CBS News to preview what’s in store for attendees.

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GOP, Democratic strategists on Biden’s next steps with calls for him to drop out growing

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GOP, Democratic strategists on Biden’s next steps with calls for him to drop out growing – CBS News


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President Biden will try to tamp down concerns about his campaign Friday with a rally in Wisconsin and an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos amid growing calls for him to end his reelection bid. Democratic strategist Joel Payne and Republican strategist Marc Lotter joined CBS News to discuss the president’s ongoing effort to recover from last week’s debate against former President Donald Trump.

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