ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. – FOX 2 has new video showing a record cicada season is now upon us in St. Louis. We’re seeing thousands now emerging from the ground in places like Ellisville and Ballwin.
We have captured the lift-off and the crawl-out.
An Ellisville resident shared his video of thousands emerging from the ground in his backyard and crawling all over each other on Monday night.
“No way. No way! Ewwww!” Alex Shire of Ballwin said. Shire did her best to actually look at the video of all of those hatching cicadas.
There will be up to 1.5 million of this brood now completing its 13-year life cycle, said Dr. Kasey Fowler-Finn, Ph.D., an associate professor of biology at St. Louis University.
“See, that’s what I am afraid of: they’re going to be dive-bombing,” said Dianne Rodgers, Ballwin resident. “I’ll be gardening, and they’ll be flying in my hair.”
“I think it’s just incredibly magical. I hope people enjoy it more than they’re freaked out by it,” Fowler-Finn said.
We’re witnessing a marvel of nature most of the planet won’t see, she said. We haven’t heard anything like it since 2011, when cicada songs drowned out things like air conditioners and even car traffic.
“It’s hard to be outside when there are cicadas. It’s hard to drive with your windows open because they fly into your car,” Shire said.
“It’s supposed to be horrendous,” Rodgers said.
Perhaps it will seem less so when we realize the cicadas we see now are emerging to mate after living 13 years, feeding on tree roots underground.
“The males make a chorusing song—the ‘reer-err’—that we’re all used to,” Fowler-Finn said. “Then, when they get close to a mate, they switch to a courtship song. They start dueting with the females. The moms are going to lay eggs in the trees. The babies will hatch out of the eggs. It takes about two months. They drop to the ground and they burrow down. They’ve got really strong forelimbs.”
For the first time since 1803, 13-year and 17-year cicadas will hatch in the same year, she said.
Parts of central and eastern Illinois will get both. St. Louis will not.
Fewer than 10 of the 5,000 cicada species worldwide have these extended, synchronous lifecycles.
“Of those 10 or less, seven are in North America,” Fowler-Finn said. “To me, that’s pretty incredible. It means there is some magic set of things that happens to give rise to this. It’s a feat of nature. We don’t know why they do this!”
It will last about five to seven weeks, she said, meaning our interactions with this amazing phenomenon will pretty much be over by July 4 until this circle of life takes another spin in 2037.
