After 17 years in hiding, millions of cicadas will soon emerge -- covering the ground with their crunchy shells and filling the air with a very loud buzz. WNYC and Radiolab have been inviting people to track the cicadas' emergence, and this week we received the first cicada sighting from our area.
At Cora Hartshorn Arboretum in Short Hills, N.J. small holes are sprinkled along the pathways as if someone has poked their index finger into the soil. The 16-acre woods are covered with them, and cicadas have already started to come out of the holes.
"You actually see their butt first, they’re actually climbing out backwards out of the hole," said Judy Trigg, executive director of the arboretum. They've been watching the holes open up for the past three weeks, and now the first cicadas have arrived.
They spend 17-years underground, growing from larva to bug. Once they emerge, the cicadas shed their exterior shell, fly up into the trees, and begin their loud mating buzz.
Chris Simon, a professor in evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut, has been researching different cicada broods her entire career. When she started out, she tracked them without the help of the internet, smart phones or even a laptop.
"I was typing letters to county agents on typewriters with carbon paper, I was searching for payphones out in the middle of nowhere, and I was studying protein variation rather than sequencing genomes," Simon said.
Now she has backyard scientists -- and WNYC listeners -- sending data to her website.
If you see cicadas, let us know! We're collecting reports of sightings and sharing them with Chris Simon and other cicada researchers at the University of Connecticut. To file your report, head to our cicada-spotting form.