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b'Sign up for our mailing list!\\n\\nIt\'s the 2021 brood of 17-year cicadas! Thanks to Enzo (and several others) who suggested it!\\n\\nFurther listening:\\n\\nVarmints! Podcast - "Cicadas"\\n\\nOur local Brood X cicada (photo by me!):\\n\\n\\n\\nThe holes that cicadas emerged from (photo also by me):\\n\\n\\n\\nDiscarded cicada shells. My work keys and Homestar Runner keychain for scale:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nThis week we\\u2019re going to talk about cicadas, specifically the 17-year cicadas that you may have heard about in the news or in your own back yard, depending on where you live. Thanks to the several people who suggested the topic on Twitter, with special thanks to Enzo who emailed me about it.\\n\\nI actually wasn\\u2019t going to do a cicadas episode because we already talked about cicadas way back in episode 28. We didn\\u2019t go into too much detail in that one, but Varmints! podcast did a great in-depth show about cicadas recently so I\\u2019ve been referring people to them, and check the show notes for a link if you don\\u2019t already listen to Varmints. Besides, I hadn\\u2019t heard any of the cicadas myself so I didn\\u2019t see what the big deal was.\\n\\nThen I returned to work after taking some time off to take care of my cat Poe, who by the way is doing really well now and thanks for all the well wishes! The second I got out of my car, I heard them. The cicadas. Now, we get cicadas every year where I live in East Tennessee, so the sound is familiar to me and I actually like it. I find it soothing and the quintessential sound of summer. But this was something else. At only 8am the trees along the edge of campus were filled with what I can only describe as a high-pitched roar.\\n\\nI went out at lunch and the sound was even louder. I got some audio, so here\\u2019s what a whole bunch of cicadas sound like when they\\u2019re calling at once.\\n\\n[cicada sounds]\\n\\nI also got pictures, which you can see in the show notes.\\n\\nThe cicadas emerging in such numbers this year are 17-year cicadas. They spend almost all of those 17 years as nymphs underground, where they eat sap from the roots of trees and other plants. At the end of the 17 years, when the soil is warm enough, they emerge from the ground and molt into their final form, the full-grown adult cicada!\\n\\nThe adult cicadas have wings but aren\\u2019t very good fliers. I can definitely attest to that because when I was taking pictures of them, I kept having to dodge as cicadas flew from bush to tree and either didn\\u2019t see me standing there or thought I was a weird tree or maybe just couldn\\u2019t maneuver well enough to avoid me. They\\u2019re pretty big insects, up to two inches long, or five cm, with gray or black bodies and orangey-red legs and eyes. The wings have pale orange veins.\\n\\nThe first cicadas to emerge are mostly males, in such numbers that predators get too full to care when the females emerge a few days later. That way more females survive to lay eggs. At first the cicadas that emerge still look like nymphs, but within about an hour they molt their exoskeleton and emerge as full adults with wings. They\\u2019re pale in color until the new exoskeleton hardens and the wings expand to full size, which takes a few days.\\n\\nThis, of course, leaves behind a cicada shell, which is the shed exoskeleton. When I was very small, I was terrified of cicada shells even though they\\u2019re just empty and perfectly harmless. They look scary because of those big pointy legs and big round eyes. You can frequently find cicada shells still stuck to tree bark, and it\\u2019s okay to pick them up and collect them if you like. The cicada doesn\\u2019t need it anymore. You can see the slit along the back of the shell where the cicada climbed out.\\n\\nThe emerged cicadas climb or fly into trees where the males start singing. Males produce their loud songs with a structure called a tymbal organ in their abdomen. The abdomen is mostly hollow, which helps amplify the rapid clicking of a pair of circular membrane...'