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Kids' Cicada Hunt!
Hunting for Periodical Cicadas:
In 2003, Periodical Cicadas Came Four Years Early!
Every summer we find hundreds of annual cicadas in our town.
During late spring of 2003, we found something even more special near our town:
Periodical cicadas,
also known as "seventeen year locusts." Periodical cicadas
are special because
you usually find them
in your town only one year out of 17.
The periodical cicadas we found in 2003 were
extra special because they arrived
four years before they were expected! On this page, we tell the story of our
very
first hunt for periodical
cicadas.
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Periodical
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Cicada Hunt 2003 Photo Story
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| On June 9, 2003,
Ethan, Aaron, and I found the first shed cicada skins of the year at Brookfield Zoo near Chicago. We
found
at least a dozen shed skins. These skins were much smaller than the
ones we
usually find -- and we found them almost a month earlier than we usually find our
annual cicadas.
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We wondered what these small cicadas were. We got our answer
when we visited the Cicada Mania
weblog:
< http://www.dancentury.com/cicada/weblog.html
>
It turned out that small numbers of periodical
cicadas were emerging in many parts of the Chicago area,
even though they weren't
expected here until 2007.
We decided we wanted to learn more, so
on the last day of school we went hunting for periodical cicadas.
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Periodical cicada
skins are on the left in this photo. They are much smaller
than the annual cicada skins we usually find starting in July (shown
on the right). |
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We
found what we were looking for in La Grange, Illinois -- the shed skins
and orange-trimmed wings of periodical cicadas.
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Some
skins were on tree trunks, some were on tree leaves, and some had fallen
to the ground.
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We
collected piles of shed skins and lots of wings (some with legs
attached). The wings may have been all that was left after birds had
eaten adult cicadas.
We heard adult cicadas singing in the
trees, but we never saw them. |
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Overnight, the nymph shed its skin and grew
wings! |
We
found one live cicada nymph crawling in the dirt. We took it home
with us and put it in a terrarium on our front porch.
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next day, we let it go. |
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| About a week
after our cicada hunt, we found two periodical cicada skins near our home
in Oak Park, Illinois. We even heard a
few periodical cicadas singing in trees near our home. We
still have lots of questions about our early arrival of periodical
cicadas. One article we read said it's been happening in our area
since at least the 1960s, but they didn't say why some cicadas started
coming early. But
then, when you think about it, there are lots of mysteries about
periodical cicadas: How do they keep count of the years? Why
do they stay underground for 17 years up north and only 13 years in the
south? Maybe Ethan and Aaron will grow up to become scientists and
answer those questions. |
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