GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — “It's almost biblical,” Grand Valley State University Associate Professor of Biology Michael Henshaw said.
Whether you think it’s biblical or just really loud, the midwest is going to be downright noisy come late spring.
And it’s all thanks to the rare emergence of two periodical cicada broods.
To learn more about what we can expect, I stopped by the biology department at Grand Valley State University, picking the brain of Professor Henshaw.
The cicadas we typically see every year are called annual cicadas. What makes this year special is the co-emergence of two periodical cicadas— broods that only appear every several years.
One of the broods only emerges every 13 years, while the other only emerges every 17 years. But in this special year, both will come up for the world to see —and hear. It will be really, really loud.
“They're incredibly loud, up to 100 decibels, which is equivalent to something like a jet engine, when they come up out of the ground,” Henshaw said. “It can be really intense when they sing during the day.”
Here in Michigan, we will only see brood 13, but they will be emerging in massive numbers in our southernmost counties, most likely in late May or early June hanging around for up to six weeks. The annual cicadas we typically see only show up in the late summer. The emergence of these cicadas will make for a very loud late spring, but other than their noise are relatively harmless.
"They're not really that harmful to plants unless you're planting a very young tree,"Henshaw said. "So if you planted a tree this spring, you might want to try and protect it from them.”
Illinois will be a hot spot to catch the emergence of both broods of cicadas, something we haven’t seen in over 200 years and won’t see for another two centuries.
