17 year cicada's woke up hungry

The 17 year cicada’s are in big numbers this year and they are hungry! Anyone else have trees full of them?

Only a few billion around my house lol.

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I don’t know what kind or kinds we have here because there are some out every year. I’ve been seeing their empty casings hanging from leaves all over for the past couple of weeks.

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Awesome! I grew up in the midwest, farm country. Cicadas were deafening loud sometimes. Two things I miss: Cicadas and thunder / lightening storms.

We called cicadas, “locusts”. As a boy, I collected the brown paper-like shells from tree trunks.

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cicada’s have three extraordinary ‘feats’. They are some of the longest-lived insects, and will outlive most peach trees. Despite their size, they also have the longest ‘gestation’ period—without eating or drinking: 17 years-- and enduring 17 frozen winters!
Last but not least, they are easily the loudest living things in the universe(weight for weight), registering the most decibels relative to size.

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You left out an important feat: they can rip your little fruit tree limbs to shreds. I put in a bunch of trees right before the last 17-year batch hit here (2004?) and I had to prune many of the trees down to stubs to start over for the next year. I’m not looking forward to 2021.

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I’ve done a lot of digging for drainage and plantings in the yard this year and have found a lot of the little buggers in the ground. The one’s I found were pretty big so I’m wondering if we’ll see them this year. I know we have several big broods, but can’t keep track of when we see them.

Scott I know what you mean about ripping up little trees. We had a Japanese maple that was only a few years in the ground when they came out last time and it took several years for that poor little thing to recover.

Seeing so many in the ground in my yard made me wonder what damage they’re doing to all the trees if they are just sitting down in the ground and sucking on the roots?

I used to get my fleshlight out and looking for just merged cicada , it was a fun activity for kids

Same here but even less of a presence. I found just two cases last week but no noise and I just don’t have much leaf damage at all (which I think is in large part thanks to the birds I feed. They wipe out all the leaf eaters and skeeters, mercilessly). I looked up the brood emergences and it looks like LI is Brood X, same as Scott. Though the map also shows we may have Brood XIV too…in which case maybe THAT (in 2025) will be the next big emergence here. I looked at the timing again…I was on nights in 2008 and I think that is when I (vaguely, as every thing is when I work nights) was annoyed as hell to listen to the noise all day when trying to sleep.

Here is the brood mapping:

http://insects.about.com/od/truebugs/tp/cicadabroodmaps.htm

But so far here its been pretty minimal to a no-show for my neighborhood.

Being geeky, I found this article about the correlation between cicada emergence and bird populations intriguing: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2013/06/18/the-cicada-paradox/

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uh-oh, i guess the ones you have are also quite destructive. The type we have in the mojave(apache) is rather harmless, aside from having a ‘shorter’ lifespan of 13 years.
btw, cicadas, especially the females, are very nutritious, if that’s a possible mode of limiting their numbers.

I keep hearing people talk around my town that we will be seeing them this year. However, the maps posted by Brethil suggests I will get hit in WV in 2016. How accurate are these maps?

I think all of those maps indicate the main groups emerging, but there are other groups with slighty “off” cycles and smaller broods that are more localized that they don’t specifically name and are usually smaller populations. As I understand it though, these main broods are the ones that come out so thick that our sidewalks get crunchy. You can see from these listings some of the stragglers connected to the major broods.

I remember a vet friend talking about all the dogs that came in during the last big emergence in his area because they got sick from eating all those crunchy, hard to digest bugs.

I think exactly as Zendog said there will be smaller ‘broods’ as the populations change with each emergence, plus smaller offshoots that may not make the map.

Great site you found there, Zendog.

And since the mapping is based on the last emergence, I guess they will always be one step behind the next burst of activity and range changes.

Poor doggies. What a bellyache. I know my dog would eat them til he burst given the chance.

dogs aren’t the only ones finding them delicious. Here’s a video of a 13 yr old vegas cicada falling victim to a ~5-month old mantis.

http://forum.vpaaz.org/video/vintage-meal

Lots of the fruit trees damaged by cicada last year have been points of infection for a host of diseases, branch breakage etc. They do a great deal of damage to fruit trees. This is a picture of the culprit I took last year

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Clark, what damage do they do and how can I prevent it? They will be out in full force in a few weeks and I want to protect my trees.

Speedster,
In the picture you will noticed I thinned my fruit cluster to a pear or two per branch. They make slits in your trees where they lay their eggs. The larvae and eggs are not harmful but the slits are murder on trees. Branches break the following year when covered in fruit, during storms etc, it also leaves slits all over your trees for disease to enter like Fireblight. The branches are left brittle from the slits they make and as the fruit grows the branches snap off. You can spray for them but the numbers were huge here and nothing I did stopped them. If you don’t have tons of trees you could net them. Small fruit trees they cut to pieces and cost you a year or two of growth. Here are a couple of pictures of the slits they make. This first picture is a small wild callery top I grafted over and you can see the marks on the under side on this dead branch I cut off better because there are no leaves

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Damn that sucks. Looks like I’m going to be buying some netting. My trees are all small.

A good three-word summary. Its not a bad idea to look when the swarms are coming and avoid adding trees in the year or so before. I didn’t realize how bad they would be and planted many young trees which got decimated.

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