This spring, there will be more cicadas than usual. That’s because, in our area, Brood XIX or 13-year cicadas, are emerging from the ground along with the annual insects.
You will notice the difference — not just in the number of insects, but in how they look. Annual or dog-day cicadas have brown, green or olive-patterned bodies. Brood XIX has black bodies with orange markings and red eyes.
Dr. Chris Barnhart, an entomologist with Missouri State University, said cicadas are related to tree hoppers and aphids.
“They’re sapsuckers, you know, they've got a beak, a piercing mouth part, and they use it to tap into the plant sap," he said. "And that's what they feed on, strictly liquids.”
He said females cut slits in small twigs of trees and lay their eggs there. The tiny cicada offspring return to the safety of underground burrows, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation, where they feed on roots until they mature and stage the next emergence.
Barnhart said the mass cicada emergence has a significant impact on the soil.
“They bring all this protein up out of the ground, you know, and then they die, and their bodies decay," he said, "so there's this huge pulse of nutrients that go into the soil, and the trees are fertilized for the next year or two or three and probably set more acorns and fruits and so on than they would have otherwise.”
And the cicadas that emerge provide lots of food for cicada predators like birds. In fact, there are more than they can consume, which ensures plenty of surviving insects to produce another generation that will emerge in another 13 years.
Some people are planning to eat them, and Barnhart said he never has, but he might this year.
"If you can collect them before they tan, they harden up — when they're still white and soft — I can imagine they'd be pretty palatable," he said.
If you want to try to find the 13-year cicadas, Barnhart said, drive around with your windows down and listen for their chorus because they are loud. You can find sightings on the website, iNaturalist.
