17-Year Cicadas A Call For MD Citizen Scientists To Help In Count

MARYLAND — If your fascination with the upcoming emergence of billions of 17-year cicadas in Maryland exceeds your tolerance level for creepy-crawly things, you have an opportunity to become part of what may become an unprecedented citizen-scientist effort.

Researchers say billions of Brood X 17-year cicadas will emerge in May or June in several states, including Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia. But an expert said Maryland will be in the thick of it all. An app will allow you to help count the insects.

In our state, the cicadas are expected to emerge from mid-May to mid-June.

Dr. Michael Raupp, known for his Bug Guy blog and a professor emeritus of entomology at the University of Maryland, said Maryland is at the epicenter of the cicada emergence.

"There will be spectacular numbers of cicadas emerging very heavily, starting perhaps in early May," Raupp told WJLA. "But the big 'cicada-palooza' is going to happen the last two weeks of May and into early June. So in some areas, there will be 1.5 million cicadas per acre emerging from the ground."

Researchers have said that in our state, they'll be in Allegany, Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Carroll, Cecil, Frederick, Garrett, Harford, Howard, Montgomery, Prince George's and Washington counties.

Cities likely to see and hear the invasion of bugs include Annapolis, Baltimore, Bel Air, Bethesda, Bowie, Brooklyn Park, Catonsville, Chevy Chase, College Park, Columbia, Cockeysville, Crofton, Eldersburg, Elkridge, Ellicott City, Fallston, Gaithersburg, Gambrills, Germantown, Glen Burnie, Greenbelt, Hanover, Havre De Grace, Hyattsville, Landover Hills, Laurel, Lutherville, Odenton, Owings Mills, Pikesville, Potomac, Randallstown, Reisterstown, Riverdale, Rockville, Severna Park, Silver Spring, Takoma Park, Timonium, Towson, and Wheaton.

Anyone with a smartphone can download the free Cicada Safari app to help with the data collection on the emergence Brood X — or Great Eastern Brood, as this population also is known.

It’s just a matter of snapping a photo or short video and uploading it. The app automatically captures the time, date and geographical coordinates. Once the images are verified, the information is mapped.

The Cicada Safari app was developed by Gene Kritsky, the dean of Behavioral and Natural Sciences at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati and the author of “Periodical Cicadas: The Brood X Edition.” The app is available for both iOS and Android operating systems.

Kritsky told Entomology Today he hopes to get 50,000 observations from the citizen cicada scientists to help scientists understand more about Brood X, the largest cohort of cicadas that spend 17 years underground before emerging almost simultaneously to molt and mate.

Here are more 17-year periodical cicada stories you might enjoy:

• You Can Eat 17-Year Cicadas As They Emerge In Maryland
• Billions Of 17-Year Cicadas Will Emerge; MD Epicenter In 2021
• Cicadas Swarm And Copperheads: Yes, It's A Thing In Maryland

The app was used last year to document Brood IX of the 17-year cicadas — an effort that was set back by the coronavirus pandemic — and also the emergence of four other off-year broods. Documenting the off-cycle emergences would have been more difficult without the app, according to Kritsky.

Scientists have long relied on local reports from everyday folks to help map periodical cicadas.

As early as the 1840s, when periodical cicadas were more of a mystery than they are today, researcher Gideon B. Smith “wrote newspaper articles asking readers to send him details of where they saw cicadas,” Kritsky told Entomology Today. “By the time of his death in 1867, he had documented all known broods of cicadas.”

And make no mistake: Periodical cicadas remain somewhat of an evolutionary puzzle. They spend more than a decade underground feeding on tree roots before their synchronized emergence as young adults. The males sing, raising quite a ruckus with their mating call. There’s some urgency to it: The males live three, maybe four, weeks after mating.

The females don’t sing but wait quietly to do their job perpetuating the species — to lay as many eggs as possible, up to 600 — before they die. They split the bark on living tree trunks, branches and twigs, burrow in, and lay between 24 and 48 eggs at a time.

According to one theory, cicada life cycles are prime numbers — that is, numbers that can only be divided by 1 or by themselves — as part of an evolutionary strategy that tricks predators.

Kritsky, who developed the cicada app, said this year’s emergence could give him and his colleagues a level of detail that hasn’t been seen before in centuries of research about these insects with long life cycles.

“I have been mining historical emergence records for 45 years, and in the process we have discovered new populations of broods that had been missed for over a century,” Kritsky told Entomology Today. “It’s amazing that an insect that has been studied for so long and by so many still has secrets to reveal.”