What's all the buzz? It's love; Cicadas' mating call screeches through Smokies

By Joel Davis
of The Daily Times Staff

In the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, love is in the air. Too bad it'll make your ears bleed.

Visitors to the park will notice the grating mating calls of periodic cicadas congregating in the trees, looking for love. The critters, in their scores, have burrowed out of ground after 17 years of root-sucking anonymity.

Also known as "locusts," the cicadas are a harmless, if sometimes ear-splitting phenomena of the hardwood forests of the eastern seaboard. The current crop of periodic cicadas has been designated as Brood XIV, said park entomologist Becky Nichols.

Despite the "locust" moniker, the cicadas aren't terribly voracious.

"They are basically harmless," Nichols said. "You might see a little bit of damage from the females ... when they lay their eggs in the outer branches of the trees, they dig a hole in a twig and lay their egg in it."

The cicadas are underground for most of their lifespan.

"They are growing and feeding," she said. "They are the ones that crawl out of the ground at night, then they split open on the back and emerge (as winged adults, leaving husks). If you could just imagine that as a grubby, soft-body larval stage. They will go through five different stages. They have sucking mouth parts. They are basically just inserting their mouth-parts into the roots of trees and sucking plant juices during their entire lives."

The periodic cicadas emerge in May and live through June. "They are usually the only cicada you hear for a while," Nichols said.

Brood XIV is made up of three related species of cicada. Each has a different song.

"There is a fairly large one, about an inch-and-a-half long," Nichols said. "They are black with the red eyes and orange veination on the wings. The largest of the three species has a kind of steady background drone. There are two other species that are a little smaller. They tend to have a raspier call that is more distinct."

Careful listeners will hear several types of cicada calls during the night. "There is just a general chorus call and an alarm call, which is a short kind of staccato raspy call, and there is a mating call, which is up and down and almost sounds like sirens," Nichols said.

There is also a 13-year periodic cicada, the next brood of which will emerge in 2011. "We don't have to wait 17 years to hear them again," Nichols said.

Not that a year is going to go by without some sort of cicada chorus for nightly listening pleasure.

"In the park, we have four other species in addition to the periodic cicadas," she said. "These are annual or biannual. Some of them are on a seven-year development schedule. They don't synchronize, so you end up seeing them every year."

There are 14 identified broods of the 17-year cicadas. Brood X and Brood IV can be found in East Tennessee.

"Brood X emerged in 2004," Nichols said. "I don't remember them being as abundant as this one. "Throughout the brood there are millions probably. We're actually at the southern edge of this particular brood. Cades Cove was full of them -- Maryville, Seymour, Kodak, all heard them. The more north you go, you get into the more dense part of the brood itself."

Brood XIV was expected to appear in at least parts of Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, Indiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. It will return in 2025.