In the spring of 1803, Thomas Jefferson was President of the recently established United States of America. He was pre-occupied with re-inventing the Presidency after the unpopular and, many argued, unconstitutional initiatives of his predecessor, John Adams. Jefferson had his own Constitutional issues to deal with since he had been approached by representatives of France to purchase territories west of the United States that would effectively double the size of the United States. His dilemma was that, as Secretary of State under President George Washington, Jefferson had argued that the President did not have the authority under the Constitution to conduct or finalize any such negotiations. Meanwhile, Vice-President Aaron Burr was still ‘mad as hell’ after being denied the Presidency when Alexander Hamilton used his influence to break the deadlock in Congress that finally decided who would be the President after the election of 1800. Hamilton felt neither Jefferson nor Burr was qualified to be President, but Hamilton threw his support behind Jefferson as the lesser threat to the new democracy. Burr was disposed to kill Hamilton, but as evidence of his self-control, he waited until 1804 before challenging Alexander to a duel and exacting his revenge: one pistol shot to the liver.
While Jefferson worked on the Louisiana Purchase and Burr worked on killing time before killing Hamilton and John Adams watched from his home in Massachusetts as much of his legislation [remember the Alien and Sedition Acts] was nullified, Mother Nature was quietly brewing up a surprise. It started with a muffled humming of wings and quickly built to a deafening screeching as billions upon billions of gossamer-winged insects emerged from the soil. A swarm of cicadas of Biblical proportions exploded without warning and infested vast swaths of the eastern United States. No American living in 1803 had ever seen so massive an invasion of cicadas. There were some annual appearances of cicadas that lasted four to six weeks in the early spring, but the 1803 explosion surpassed by several fold anything previously witnessed.
Over the years since 1803, insect people (aka, entomologists) learned enough about cicadas to understand what produced this once-in-a-lifetime burgeoning of bugs. [Full disclosure: I spent two years studying the hearing in night-flying moths. Yes, America, I was an entomologist, and it was fascinating.] Cicadas spend virtually all of their lives living, eating, and growing in the soil. They constitute some of the creepy, crawly bugs listed as grubs on pesticide containers. They travel and eat amongst the roots of their favorite plants more than 8” inches below the ground surface. Some populations, referred to in the trade as Broods, live and grow underground for 13 years; others mature over the course of 17 years. After 13 or 17 years these Broods exit their undergound habitats, change from larval worms to winged insects and set about looking for mates. This transformation occurs in the spring when the soil above them gets to 64 degrees Fahrenheit.
The male cicadas attract the females by rubbing body parts together to produce a screeching sound. These rendezvous occur over the course of 4 to 6 weeks, after which the females lay their eggs in tree branches, and both the males and the females die. The eggs hatch, release larvae to the ground, and the cycle repeats itself.
The 1803 invasion was caused by overlapping cycles. Both the 13 year and 17 year Broods matured, emerged, and mated in that year. After 221 years, this concurrence of life cycles for different Broods of cicadas is about to happen again. If Mother Nature abides by her centuries-old schedule, we should see another explosion of the cicadas in March or April of this year.
Fortunately, these noisy bugs are not known to carry any diseases affecting people. They are low in fat and high in protein, making them ideal food sources for many insectivores. Some people consider them tasty delicacies, but the demand for insect appetizers is small. If the billions upon billions of cicada corpses are left where they die, they will give off a foul odor but also release a great deal of nitrogen to the ecosystem.
If the 2024 cicada explosion does not occur, we should worry. Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine (routinely mentioned because the birds are more sensitive to poisonous gases than humans are), any disruption of this natural bug cycle will signal a previously unsuspected injury to Mother Nature. She has been exceedingly patient over the past two centuries as we have fouled our nest, but an absence of a cicada explosion in 2024 will be a clear indication that Her patience has expired.
Dr. Lechtenberg is an Easton resident who graduated from Tufts University and Tufts Medical School in Massachusetts and subsequently trained at The Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. He worked as a neurologist at several New York Hospitals, including Kings County and The Long Island College Hospital, while maintaining a private practice, teaching at SUNY Downstate Medical School, and publishing 15 books on a variety of medical topics. He worked in drug development in the U.S., as well as in England, Germany, and France.
