Brandon Bell
Contributing Writer
It’s spring, and that means seniors will soon walk into the Oak Grove to a crowd of well-wishing advisors, families and friends at Commencement. But a less welcome guest might outnumber them all.
This spring is expected to be the year in which the cicada population in Ohio and West Virginia will skyrocket. A swarm of the insects has spent the last 17 years underground, waiting for the chance to emerge. As temperatures begin to warm, their long-awaited time is nearly here.
The website ‘Cicada Mania’ predicts that this generation of cicadas, already named ‘Brood V,’ will emerge by May, but also warns that they may make an early arrival in late April. Cleveland Metropolitan Parks has already photographed cicada nymphs, just weeks away from adulthood, nearing the surface of the ground just 60 miles away from Wooster.
So, what does this mean for the College, besides a background ambiance for the Commencement festivities?
The 17-year cicadas emerge in order to mate and lay their eggs in trees. With the Wooster campus proudly lined with trees, it’s not unreasonable to assume that cicadas will make them their home and nursery this summer.
Egg-laying does damage to trees and can be particularly harmful to smaller branches, which is the reason that they can be dangerous for young trees and small fruit trees. Cicadas leave grooves in branches that can result in dead limbs and brown patches in otherwise healthy trees.
However, cicadas can be beneficial to trees. During their nymph stage, they can help prevent the soil from becoming too compacted, allowing air to reach the roots of the trees. Cicadas also do not eat away at the leaves of plants like locusts.
The eggs that cicadas lay in trees eventually fall to the ground, where they are buried and spend their time until they hatch.
“More than likely we will not be able to do too much,” said Beau Mastrine, the chief general manager of Campus Grounds. Noting that cicadas hadn’t presented a problem for the College in the past, he nonetheless promised that the noise the cicadas make “will be the most noticeable” part of their presence.
While a different type of cicada can emerge from year to year, 17-year cicadas represent a species with a different life cycle, making what Cleveland Metro Parks describes as a “continuous buzzing sound” rather than the more characteristic “ch-ch-ch” sound made by the annual cicadas. These “periodic” species of cicadas emerge when the soil temperature reaches 64 degrees and may only live for a few weeks to a month above ground versus their 17-year life as immature nymphs below ground.
The last cicada brood to emerge in Ohio came in 2004, even though their largest numbers were found farther west in Michigan and Illinois. The species present in Brood V has not emerged since 1999.