One of Gene Kritsky's favorite moments from the Brood X cicada emergence in 2021 happened at his own home.
On the second story deck at his house in western Cincinnati, the professor, entomologist and cicada expert at Mount St. Joseph University set up cameras and a recording system, eye-level with cicadas.
While he watched, "hoping they'd accept me as one of their own," Kritsky said the cicadas walked to the undersides of leaves as it began to rain.
That made him wonder what the insects do at night. Eventually, he found that a "significant number" were up in the trees on the underside of branches to shield themselves from the morning dew.
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Since the summer, Kritsky has had a lot of time to reflect on how the 17-year-cicada season went as he finishes working on an upcoming paper for the American Journal of Entomology.
"On regard to the emergence itself, it confirmed the patterns we've seen in the past," he said.
The billions of Brood X cicadas emerged around Cincinnati and the eastern U.S. this summer after 17 years of hibernation. Here, they first emerged mid-May and ran the area for at least a month, beginning to decline around mid-June.
The largest emergences in the U.S. were around Greater Cincinnati as well as an "incredible" emergence in the Maryland and Washington, D.C., areas – so thick that President Joe Biden's press plane was grounded June 8 due to cicadas flying into its power unit.
Cincinnati's own Brood X peaked June 4, Kritsky previously told The Enquirer, where some neighborhoods were seeing cicada mating calls register at 90 decibels or higher. For comparison, Yale University says that's just louder than heavy traffic and at a level where sustained exposure may result in hearing loss.
As in previous years, some cicadas emerged off-cycle:
- Some from Brood 14 came up four years early in Ohio and Massachusetts;
- Some came up three years early from Brood 19 in parts of St. Louis, southern Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina;
- And a scattering of Brood five emerged in Ohio.
Brood X previously emerged in Cincinnati in 1978 and 2004.
And when they return in 2038, Kritsky said he'll be 84 years old and hopes to see the cicada nymphs he "planted" in a maple tree in his yard surface.
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The Brood X effect
There's one thing that Kritsky didn't necessarily anticipate this summer, and that was the sheer number of Cicada Safari app downloads.
The app he helped develop with Mount St. Joseph was downloaded more than 197,000 times this year and more than 561,000 photographs of cicadas from around the country were received and approved, Kritsky said. His wife, Jessee Smith, also helped coordinate the use of the iNaturalist project for the app, which added another 9,000 photos to the list.
On May 30, there were around 8,000 people using the Cicada Safari app at the same time, and it saw 37,000 photos uploaded that day alone, he said.
"When we were building the app, I said I'd be happy if we had 50,000 records," he said. "But we were way off."
Now that the emergence was over, Kritsky the next goal is getting photos and metadata from the app stored on a permanent storage system, so it can be accessed in the future.
The first of several papers using the Cicada Safari data has already been published and includes a map of the 2021 cicada emergences.
He credits the COVID-19 pandemic and the colder months keeping people inside adding to the excitement for Brood X. Through "cicada safari-ing," people had an activity to do with their phones while walking and hiking.
On the Cicada Safari app, cicadas were reported in 17 states and Washington, D.C., and hundreds of thousands of photos of the insects were uploaded.
'A teaching moment'
Thanks to his cicada expertise, Kritsky has always been somewhat of a spokesperson for the billions of insects, right as public interest (or nuisance) peaks with their emergence.
When Brood X emerged in 2004, Kritsky remembers having 734 media contacts.
"I'm a college professor and teacher at heart, and this was such a teaching moment," he said.
This year, he was referenced or interviewed in local and national publications, including The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, USA TODAY and Entomology Today, among many others.
"Cincinnati has always been bug happy, and we did not disappoint this year with cicadas," Kritsky said.
Around Cincinnati, he remembers cicada-themed cookies, T-shirts, countless news stories, a cicada parade in Cheviot and even a children's book, "Cicada Symphony," from Lisa Kobman, Mount St. Joseph's director of human resources.
"It's nice to know my colleagues and fellow residents of Greater Cincinnati got into it," he said.
"Maybe not as intensely as I did, but it was still very pleasant."
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