Cicadas, insects that proliferate every few years in invasions, have become so noisy in a South Carolina county that residents have called the sheriff’s office to ask why they are hearing sirens or a loud roar, reports the Associated Press .
The Newberry County Sheriff’s Office posted a message on Facebook on Tuesday, April 23, notifying people that the roar they are hearing is just the “song” of cicadas: the sounds the males make to attract mates, after more than a decade of inactivity.
Some people complained to police about the noise and wanted to know what it was about, said Newberry County Sheriff Lee Foster. Police received phone calls throughout Tuesday from several locations. The noisy cicadas were moving around the county, which has 38,000 residents and is 40 miles northwest of Columbia.
Billions of red-eyed cicadas periodically emerge from underground in the eastern US this month. The chicks that come to the surface have cycles of 13 or 17 years. This year, the United States is facing one of the most massive outbreaks of these insects in recent centuries. Some have called the underground invasion “Cicaghedon”.
After Tuesday, Sheriff Foster understands why.
“Although the noise is annoying to some, it is not a danger to people or pets,” Foster wrote in the message to residents of his county. “Unfortunately, they are the sounds of nature,” he added.
CICADES, SOME STRANGERS OF NATURE. THEY HAVE STRONGER SPEECH THAN HUMANS, AND A VENEREAL DISEASE CAN TURN THEM INTO ZOMBIES
Cicadas are not just insects that overwhelm with their large number and the noise they make. They are truly freaks of nature.
These insects have the strongest urination in the animal kingdom, with flows that put humans and elephants to shame, writes the Associated Press.
They have some kind of pumps in their heads that draw moisture from the roots of trees, allowing them to feed for more than a decade underground. However, they are the saviors of the caterpillars and are ravaged by a sexually transmitted disease that turns them into “zombies”.
Inside trees are sweet, nutrient-rich saps that flow through tissue called phloem. Most insects love sap. But not cycads – they prefer tissue called xylem, which carries mainly water and few nutrients. And it’s not easy to penetrate the xylem, which doesn’t simply leak when an insect touches it because it’s under negative pressure.
But the cicada can get the liquid because its oversized head has a kind of pump, explains entomologist Carrie Deans of the University of Alabama Huntsville. They use this “trunk” – about the width of a hair – like a small straw, like a pump that sucks up the liquid, says Georgia Tech biophysics professor Saad Bhamla. I spend almost my whole life drinking this liquid, year after year. “It’s not an easy way to live,” comments Deans.
All that watery liquid has to come out the other end though. And this is happening.
Bhamla published a study in March on the urine output of animals around the world. The cicadas were clearly the queens, eliminating two to three times more powerfully and faster than elephants and humans. They have a muscle that pushes debris through a small hole, like a jet, Bhamla explains. The researcher said that he found this out when, in the Amazon, he chanced upon a tree that the locals called the “weeping tree” because the liquid flowed down, as if the plant was crying. It was, in fact, what eliminated the cicada.
In the years and in the areas where the cicadas come out, the caterpillars enjoy a respite. Entomologist Dan Gruner of the University of Maryland studied the caterpillars after the cicadas emerged and found that the insects that transform into moths survived the spring in greater numbers because the birds that usually eat them were too busy catching the cicadas. Periodical cicadas are “lazy, fat and slow,” Gruner said. “They are extraordinarily easy to capture for us and their predators,” says the researcher.
However, a sexually transmitted disease, a fungus, gives them trouble, which turns the cicadas into “zombies” and makes them actually lose their sexual parts, explains John Cooley, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut. It’s a real problem that “is even stranger than science fiction,” says Cooley. “It’s a real zombie sexually transmitted disease,” he adds. Cooley saw areas in the Midwest where up to 10% of individuals were infected.
The mushroom is also the type that has hallucinatory effects on the birds that would eat it, Cooley claims. This white fungus takes over the males, their gonads are ripped from their bodies, and the spores are spread around other cicadas nearby, he says. Insects are sterilized, not killed. In this way, the fungus uses cicadas to spread to others. “I am completely at the mercy of the fungus. They are actually walking dead”, concluded the researcher.
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