Displaying items by tag: cicadas

A true katydid is shown here. It’s one of the main insects that provides a permanent soundtrack to your summer life in the Knoxville area.  Stephen Lyn Bales/Hellbender Press

What’s that buzz? We thought Brood X was over.

In case you haven’t noticed: It’s hot!

The “dog days of summer,” are so called because the season coincides with the period of time when the brightest star Sirius, aka the Dog Star, rises and sets with the Sun: early July through August into September.

The ancients believed that when Sirius and the Sun were in the sky together, the days were hotter. I think they got it right.

August has never been that thrilling to me, more of a month to endure. The birds have finished raising their families and are going through their late-season molt. Some of the migratory birds have already started to move south. But that doesn’t mean that our backyards are totally silent because late summer is cacophonous with insects.

During the day, the trees are filled with large, green cicadas that generally spend three years underground in their larval stage, but they are not all in sync like Brood X was, so each summer we have plenty that mature to collect en masse in our neighborhoods.

To attract females, the male cicadas do the chainsaw buzzing, but the songs are not made with vocal chords but rather special organs on the sides of their abdomens called “tymbals.” In effect, their sides vibrate loudly.

Locally in the Knoxville region we have five species of these annual cicadas. Early in the morning and into the afternoon, swamp cicadas (Neotibicen tibicen) are calling. They are also known as morning cicadas because they usually crank up by 10 a.m. with a long uninterrupted rattle that builds in intensity.

Eva Millwood holds Brood X cicadas on her property in South Knoxville in this submitted photo.

We will see a groundswell of East Tennessee 17-year cicadas as the heat comes on.

We have been hearing about it for weeks, online and on TV and in print. After 17 years underground, millions of cicadas are going to climb out of their burrows, shed their juvenile skins, unfurl their wings and fly up into the trees for one last grand jester of panache and reproduction and death. You even read about Brood X cicadas in Hellbender Press.

The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency posted a recent Instagram photo of a wild turkey jake with a crop stuffed full of cicadas, and there are reports of cicadas emerging en masse in parts of Tennessee. But your local searching self may ask: Where are they?

Insects are largely ectothermic. That means their body temperature comes from the surrounding air, water or ground temperature. The periodical cicadas need a ground temperature of roughly 68 degrees, eight inches deep to become very active. And we really have not had that for a sustained length of time.

Last week seemed to be destined to be the first big week of the emergence of Brood X. Monday started strong but the weather turned unusually cool for early May with daytime highs in the low 60s. Some of the cicadas started to ease out but it was primarily dozens, not hundreds or thousands, and certainly not 1.5 million per occupied acre. And remember, they are not everywhere.