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Scientist pumped for dual emergence of cicada broods
The rare dual emergence event will be seen in much of the eastern half of the United States.
MINNEAPOLIS — Insect enthusiasts are gearing up this year for an event that hasn’t happened in 221 years, the dual emergence of two periodical cicadas.
Billions of singing bugs will appear in parts of the Eastern United States when Brood XIII and Brood XIX both arrive in the same year.
The cicadas in Brood XIX, or Brood 19, emerge from the ground once every 13 years, while those from Brood XIII, or Brood 13, emerge once every 17 years. In some places, both the 13-year cicadas and the 17-year ones will come crawling out of the earth at the same time.
“The last time these two specific broods emerged together was 1803 when Thomas Jefferson was president of the United States,” Gene Kritsky, Professor Emeritus of Biology at Mount Saint Joseph University in Cincinnati, told KARE 11.
“When it happens in your neck of the woods it’s like having a David Attenborough special in your backyard. It’s just an amazing scene from nature!”
Professor Kritsky has been studying and mapping periodical cicadas for decades and has just published a book about the dual emergence event. His wife, Jessee Smith, is a metalsmith and artist who produces insect-themed jewelry, including cicada pieces.
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Minnesota is too far north to get periodical cicadas, but Kritsky says those who travel to southern Wisconsin or the Chicago suburbs should be in for a pretty good bug show this spring. Sangamon County in central Illinois is one of the spots expected to see both the 17-year cicadas and the 13-year variety.
“They start emerging when the ground reaches 64 degrees Fahrenheit. So, it will start in the Southern states, probably the last week of April and then slowly move up north arriving in southern Wisconsin probably the first of June.”
University of Minnesota entomologist Vera Krischik is also excited about the big cicada event and plans to travel to states where it’s happening.
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world. This is fun for us entomologists!” Krischik told KARE 11.
She said researchers will be taking a deep dive into the physiology of the bugs, their diseases, movements and mating songs. But many experts will take joy in just watching regular people react to the swarms.
“Every entomologist has a kid inside and all those kids just want to watch the civilians, the non-entomologists, squeal as these cicadas are all over the place. That’s our fun!” Krischik remarked.
“They can’t hurt you. Even if you pick them up. They have spines on their legs, so you think they’re biting you but they’re not.”
Periodical cicadas have black bodies, red eyes, and wings with orange veins. Minnesota’s annual cicadas, by contrast, are greenish with green veins on their wings. Those are known as Dog Day Cicadas, named for the dog days of summer.
In Minnesota you’re more likely to see the exoskeleton, or the empty shell of a cicada nymph, clinging to the tree after it has molted into the adult stage and opened its wings. You can hear them singing but they tend to blend into the foliage.
“They mate, the female lays eggs on the tips of maples and other deciduous trees on the edge of the forest,” Krischik explained.
“The eggs hatch into little nymphs, the nymphs burrow out of the twigs, they fall to the ground, attach themselves to the roots, and they feed for another year and come out the next year.”
There is no clear explanation as to why some cicadas come every year, while others spend 13 or 17 years in the ground as nymphs waiting to emerge. Avoiding predators is one likely explanation.
“Predators like birds and mammals can’t keep track of 13 years or 17 years and they’re not going to be there waiting to eat them,” she explained. “With an annual cicada, birds or mice or raccoons, they can remember and go back to the same tree the next year at the same time and eat the cicada.”
In Minnesota, the annual cicadas can also fall victim to cicada-killer wasps. They sting the cicadas and lay an egg in them simultaneously, allowing the wasp larvae to feed off a living host.
Kritsky said the periodical cicadas survive in part because so many arrive at the same time.
“They come out in massive numbers to essentially overwhelm their predators, so their predators can eat all the cicadas they want and get sick of eating them, and there’s still millions of them left.”
Mount Saint Joseph created the Cicada Safari smartphone app, a crowd-sourcing tool that allows people to report cicada sightings and post pics tied to their GPS coordinates.
“Each photograph is accepted by our servers and then is looked at by people who are trained to identify periodical cicadas, and if it’s approved it goes onto a map live,” Kritsky explained.
It got its first test run in 2021 when Brood X, a 17-year cicada, emerged.
“In 2021, which was the big event we wanted to get this ready for, we had 200,000 downloads and received half a million photographs!”
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What if something catastrophic happened here on Earth? How would we recreate ecosystems destroyed? Scientists are betting the moon is the answer.
MINNEAPOLIS — Tucked away in a lab on the University of Minnesota campus, there is a microscopic level of work being done to potentially help preserve our whole world. The concept sounds futuristic, but it’s happening right now.
“What we’re working on is both cells, tissues, whole organs, and whole organisms, and how to cryopreserve them and have them available as living biological systems that can be stored, or shipped, or banked for social impact and for the good of all,” said Professor John Bischof.
Professor Bischof’s work in cryobiology is groundbreaking. Combined with several other scientists across the country and the Smithsonian Institute, they plan to use it for something that may seem more like science fiction.
“What would it look like to create a genuinely public cooperative single biorepository that is not vulnerable to ecological, nuclear, other disasters on Earth and could really be a hedge against disaster? Our big insurance policy up on the moon,” said Professor Susan Wolf.
Wolf, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Minnesota, said we already have a patchwork of biorepositories here on Earth, but they are not necessarily coordinated with one another, and rely on extremely low temperatures to keep the samples safe. Take Svalbard seed vault in Norway for example; the Seed Vault provides long-term storage for duplicates of seeds from crops around the world, but in 2016, higher-than-normal temperatures caused flooding in part of the vault.
“It didn’t ruin the collection, but it was a big red flag. A huge wake-up call that we need to think beyond our planet. That’s what made us start to think about the moon,” said Wolf.
The shadowed craters on the moon are cold enough to store biosamples without the need for electricity or human intervention, some -200 degrees Celsius. And that’s where Professor Bischof’s research comes in — it provides the answer to how?
“Essentially when we are cryopreserving anything the enemy is ice. When ice forms, it expands, it forms crystals, and if that happens in a cell, it will rip the cell apart and destroy it,” said Dr. Joe Kanga, a U of M Post-Doctoral Associate.
“To mitigate that, we add these special chemicals called cryoprotectants. They’re like sugars or alcohols or glycols, similar to antifreeze you put in your car, and that makes it harder for ice to form in the system,” he said.
In this lab, they are working with zebrafish. The only fish on the planet to be frozen as an embryo and brought back to life.
“They get pulled out of the liquid nitrogen when they are ready to be rewarmed and they are shot with this laser and that heats them up at millions of degrees per minute so like in a matter of milliseconds it goes from -200 degrees C up to room temperature,” Kanga said.
Every organism behaves differently, but once they perfect the system, they can translate it to other organisms. These zebrafish were grown and bred and spawned normal baby fish.
“That part is good. Especially when you’re thinking in the context of this lunar biorepository. Will they be able to bring back the ecosystem? So, if they can breed normally, then all signs are positive,” said Bischof.
There is plenty to still work out, like how do you get the cells safely to space, without exposure to radiation? Who controls it? What exactly will they store on the moon? Bischof said it’s unlikely that every organism on earth could or would be stored, but they are working on key organisms that can help replace and rebuild whole ecosystems.
The group of scientists, doctors, ethicists and specialists in a variety of disciplines are working right now to answer all of that. They already know what they plan to send up first. A fibroblast, similar to a skin cell, from a Goby Fish. And if you’re thinking we’re still a long way off from this being reality… think again.
“There is an effort underway that’s gaining traction, and we may actually be on a mission to space sometime in the near future,” said Bischof.
What if something catastrophic happened here on Earth? How would we recreate ecosystems destroyed? Scientists are betting the moon is the answer.
MINNEAPOLIS — Tucked away in a lab on the University of Minnesota campus, there is a microscopic level of work being done to potentially help preserve our whole world. The concept sounds futuristic, but it’s happening right now.
“What we’re working on is both cells, tissues, whole organs, and whole organisms, and how to cryopreserve them and have them available as living biological systems that can be stored, or shipped, or banked for social impact and for the good of all,” said Professor John Bischof.
Professor Bischof’s work in cryobiology is groundbreaking. Combined with several other scientists across the country and the Smithsonian Institute, they plan to use it for something that may seem more like science fiction.
“What would it look like to create a genuinely public cooperative single biorepository that is not vulnerable to ecological, nuclear, other disasters on Earth and could really be a hedge against disaster? Our big insurance policy up on the moon,” said Professor Susan Wolf.
Wolf, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Minnesota, said we already have a patchwork of biorepositories here on Earth, but they are not necessarily coordinated with one another, and rely on extremely low temperatures to keep the samples safe. Take Svalbard seed vault in Norway for example; the Seed Vault provides long-term storage for duplicates of seeds from crops around the world, but in 2016, higher-than-normal temperatures caused flooding in part of the vault.
“It didn’t ruin the collection, but it was a big red flag. A huge wake-up call that we need to think beyond our planet. That’s what made us start to think about the moon,” said Wolf.
The shadowed craters on the moon are cold enough to store biosamples without the need for electricity or human intervention, some -200 degrees Celsius. And that’s where Professor Bischof’s research comes in — it provides the answer to how?
“Essentially when we are cryopreserving anything the enemy is ice. When ice forms, it expands, it forms crystals, and if that happens in a cell, it will rip the cell apart and destroy it,” said Dr. Joe Kanga, a U of M Post-Doctoral Associate.
“To mitigate that, we add these special chemicals called cryoprotectants. They’re like sugars or alcohols or glycols, similar to antifreeze you put in your car, and that makes it harder for ice to form in the system,” he said.
In this lab, they are working with zebrafish. The only fish on the planet to be frozen as an embryo and brought back to life.
“They get pulled out of the liquid nitrogen when they are ready to be rewarmed and they are shot with this laser and that heats them up at millions of degrees per minute so like in a matter of milliseconds it goes from -200 degrees C up to room temperature,” Kanga said.
Every organism behaves differently, but once they perfect the system, they can translate it to other organisms. These zebrafish were grown and bred and spawned normal baby fish.
“That part is good. Especially when you’re thinking in the context of this lunar biorepository. Will they be able to bring back the ecosystem? So, if they can breed normally, then all signs are positive,” said Bischof.
There is plenty to still work out, like how do you get the cells safely to space, without exposure to radiation? Who controls it? What exactly will they store on the moon? Bischof said it’s unlikely that every organism on earth could or would be stored, but they are working on key organisms that can help replace and rebuild whole ecosystems.
The group of scientists, doctors, ethicists and specialists in a variety of disciplines are working right now to answer all of that. They already know what they plan to send up first. A fibroblast, similar to a skin cell, from a Goby Fish. And if you’re thinking we’re still a long way off from this being reality… think again.
“There is an effort underway that’s gaining traction, and we may actually be on a mission to space sometime in the near future,” said Bischof.
The school district says 242 jobs will be lost and includes a complete overhaul of the superintendent’s top leadership.
ANOKA, Minn. — The state’s largest school district is moving ahead with severe cuts to try and continue tackling a $26 million shortfall.
The Anoka Hennepin school board already approved $5 million in cuts at the central office, totaling some 40 jobs. At Monday night’s meeting, its members agreed on $9 million more from the same location, which is another 202 jobs.
Longtime employees tell KARE 11 off-camera that these are the deepest cuts they’ve ever seen and includes a complete overhaul of the district’s leadership.
“That’s a significant cut for the biggest school district in the state and the reality is every district is facing pretty challenging budget decisions like this,” said EdAllies Policy Director Matt Shaver. The advocacy group creates state policies to try and help close student achievement gaps.
Shaver said the gaps will only grow as cuts continue, even if they’re made at the administration level.
“We’re in a situation that nobody is excited about and so to do the least harm, on some level, it makes some sense to look at non-student facing roles, but you have to understand the trade-offs down the road are making it more challenging,” said Shaver.
The most noticeable change essentially slashes Superintendent Cory McIntyre’s cabinet in half. Six positions will be cut and the five remaining will include his general counsel, human resources, chief financial officer, chief operations officer and a new deputy supervisor.
The board’s decision may prevent cutting any programs and teachers for the next year, but there’s concern that they’ll have little support left.
“Those are a lot of folks who doing some of the medium and long-term strategic planning and implementation work that is so important,” said Shaver. “You don’t want to put the work of all that on the backs of teachers who are just trying to do their job.”
Other central office cuts include learning specialists and volunteer service coordinators who are part of community education.
The board will then have to negotiate further cuts for the following school year that they hope will be offset by new, potential state funding, but even that isn’t a guarantee.
“Kids deserve more than that; they deserve better than that,” said Shaver.
