US east coast abuzz as ‘Swarmageddon 2013’ approaches

This remarkable event of the natural world has been dubbed Swarmageddon 2013, “Cicada-deggon” and even as a sex symphony owing to the buzzing white noise that billions of these critters make.

Every 17 years along the US east-coast states, cicadas – insects with amber red eyes on either side of their heads and transparent wings – emerge from ground, live for four to six weeks to mate, lay eggs and die.

The mating ritual of billions of flying insects has not been the subject of so much hype among the Washington media since, well, the last hatching of cicadas.

Since 1996 this brood of cicadas has been wriggling in the dirt and sucking liquid from roots waiting for their moment to reproduce and continue one of the great life cycles of American nature.

Friends in Washington DC talk about the last cicada sex fest (when Bill Clinton was president in 1996) and the previous occasion in 1979 when, playing as children, they walked through swarms of the insects, hit them with rackets and swept up large handfuls of the mating bugs and their molted skins.

Mate and perish
The septendecennial event is almost fully upon us in areas stretching from North Carolina to Connecticut this time around as the warm weather this week pushed ground temperatures up to encourage these beady-eyed bugs out of their underground slumber to shed their exoskeletons, sing, mate and perish.

The temperature of the ground must reach 69 degrees Fahrenheit or 20 degrees Celsius before the cicadas emerge.

Choruses of Clinton-vintage cicadas, a species which is estimated to have lived in the ground in the US for four million years, have already been heard outside Washington DC.

These are the Brood II cicadas. There are about 15 broods in the ground in the US. Twelve types, including this year’s batch, have a 17-year cycle, while three have a 13-year cycle. Brood I cicadas emerged from the ground in parts of Virginia, West Virginia and Tennessee last year.

Cicadas are white when they shed their skins and turn darker in colour as their shells harden in the sunlight. Their shrill call comes from the drum-like structures on the abdomen of the males as they call females. Females can flick their wings to answer their calls. It all creates quite a cacophony.

For cicadaphobes who don’t like this invasion of creepy-crawlies, these are six weeks of living indoors.

It’s not funny when these two-inch-long red-eyed insects fly into you and attach themselves to you.

Low in fat and high in protein, according to National Geographic, cicadas bring out a more creative side in others, however.

The University of Maryland has produced a cicada cookbook offering soft-shelled cicadas, cicada pizza and banana cicada bread. Cicada tacos and cicada tempura are also popular. The argument goes, if people eat lobsters and crabs, which are kind of like insects of the sea, why not eat actual insects?

Adventurous cooks are, however, warned not to eat cicadas without first consulting a doctor, while those allergic to shellfish are told not to consume them at all.

The most appetising time to eat the cicadas apparently is shortly after they hatch in the mornings when they are still tenerals and at their most nutritious, brimming with protein-filled eggs.

'Cicada pie'
Eating these insects isn't new. One cicada expert, Gene Kritsky, author of two books on the creatures, traced an article about a cicada recipe, a traditional Baltimore "seasonal cicada pie", in the Cincinnati Enquirer dating back to 1906.

While some make food out of cicadas others make music. Composer, professor and author David Rothenberg, who has played duets with a white-crested laughing thrush and humpback whales on his clarinet, has recorded bug music to the cicadas' "orchestra of sex" – the "phar-oh" sounds made by the male cicadas and the responding "flicks" of the females.

Whirring noise
Carl Anderson, a retired justice department employee, doesn't recall the cicada sounds being as loud in 1996 at his home of 34 years in Lake Ridge, Virginia, about half an hour drive south of Washington.

“It starts around 6.30am and builds up until it sounds like this,” says Anderson, referring to the whirring noise that sounds like a house burglar alarm sounding in the distance.

“If you are out for three or four hours, it gets a little annoying. You get a low-level headache. They fly into you and stick to your back, and you end up bringing them into the house.”

Around Anderson’s back yard are lots of deep holes from where the cicadas have broken free of the ground they buried themselves in. Hundreds of exoskeletons are scattered around the garden, on the shed, fence and surrounding trees.

On undeveloped land beyond Anderson’s garden, cicadas flutter about in the air looking for a branch to land on and a mate to start this 17-year sexual revolution all over again and create the next brood in 2030.