Kentucky is known as the country of horses, bourbon and bluegrass – and soon, it will house a lot of cicadas.
Billion winged insects should emerge from the metro from this month during a ritual of coupling, frantic and famous.
This year, cicadas should get out of the ground in nearly a dozen states, but the emergence will mainly be centered in Kentucky and Tennessee. Insects will also appear in Illinois, Indiana, Virginia, Virginia-Western, North Carolina, Georgia and small parts of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York.
Some have nicknamed the cicadas of this season the “brood of Bourbon”, because of their concentration in Kentucky.
“We are in a way the epicenter, so we had the impression that we could make him proud of Kentucky,” said Jonathan Larson, assistant professor of popularization in entomology at the University of Kentucky.
Insects are known as periodic cicadas, as they spend a fixed number of years underground before returning to the surface to search for a companion. Seven broods of periodic scar can be found in North America, and depending on their type, they emerge once every 13 years or once every 17 years.
This year's stakes belong to Brood XIV, who live on a 17 -year cycle.
Larson said that the nickname “Bourbon brood” is appropriate because the periodic nature of insects is a bit like the distillation process of the famous Kentucky whiskey.
“You have to age Bourbon,” said Larson. “We put it in barrels in darkness for a long time, so it's a bit similar.”
The observations of the cicada have already started in certain counties of southern Kentucky, according to Larson, but the real spectacle will begin in the coming weeks when the ground warms up.
“I would expect that in the next two weeks, we will really succeed in trampling,” he said.
When this happens, certain areas will literally be covered with cicadas. But it is not only the large number of them that make periodic emergence of the cicada a distinct experience, it is also the noise of drilling the ear that accompanies it.
Cicadas emit a sharp buzz which can reach up to 100 decibels. The noisy noise is actually their mating song, used to find and attract women. After the insects emerge from the metro, women only have a few weeks to find a companion and lay their eggs before dying.
“The whole thing is wild, beautiful and bizarre and rather wonderful,” said Larson.
Cicadas are harmless for humans, but some people find them a nuisance, especially after the death of insects and a large number of carcasses cover the soil.
“At this early stage, there will be no smells or anything, but later, in about five weeks, because many of them are dead, there can be a kind of rotten smell and decomposed in certain regions, if there are enough piles,” said Larson.
Thousands of species of cicadas can be found in the world, but periodic cicadas are different because they spend the majority of their lives under the ground, where they feed on tree roots and wait 13 years or 17 years before tunneler on the surface.
The first cicadas generally emerge in waves at the start or in mid-May, but most will go to the surface in June when the conditions are warmer. Larson said cicadas are generally waiting for soil temperatures to reach around 64 degrees Fahrenheit before doing their pressure for the surface.
The dependence of insects with regard to environmental clues has raised concerns about how climate change can affect cicadas and their mating ritual.
“If it is warmer earlier in the year, there is the potential that they could start to get closer to the surface before they should do it,” said Larson, and this could prove to be deadly to cicadas, because “we could have a late frost or extreme weather events like floods, which we have seen a lot in Kentucky”.
This is an active research area for scientists, who are particularly interested in studying the long -term impacts of climate change on the cicada broods.
Meanwhile, in the coming weeks, Larson and other bug enthusiasts in several states will have the opportunity to attend a fascinating phenomenon.
“I hope people will go and try to live it,” said Larson. “It only happens in the United States, there are no other places that can experience it, so I encourage people to do cicada tourism if they can.”
Citizen scientists can even help research efforts by taking insect images and recording geographic details on observations on an application called Cigada safari.
