NOT MUCH BUZZ: Brood X cicada sightings rare in Hancock County

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The emergence of Brood X 17-year periodical cicadas has been a spectacle in many places, but experts have heard no widespread reports of hordes of the insects in Hancock County. (Tribune News Service)

GREENFIELD — Reports of the potential impact of Brood X cicadas promised a plague of biblical proportions, but so far, Hancock County seems to have been passed over.

Brood X — that’s X as in the Roman numeral for 10 — is a type of cicada that emerges to mate and lay its eggs once every 17 years. This year, they’re thick on the ground in 15 states and are so common in some areas that they’ve created interference on National Weather Service radar.

Central Indiana was predicted as a major epicenter of this year’s Brood X outbreak, and some parts of the state have indeed been greeted by their trademark loud buzzing sounds. But in Hancock County, experts report a largely cicada-free season so far.

Lais McCartney, agriculture and natural resources educator with Purdue Extension Hancock County, helped some locals prepare for the potential infestation earlier this year. She advised those who had recently planted young trees to drape them in tulle, a lightweight fabric, in order to keep off the insects. The cicadas burrow into small branches to lay their eggs, leaving holes that larger trees can easily survive but which can be problematic for newly planted saplings.

“They only lay eggs in woody branches,” McCartney said. “They don’t bother anything else.”

While she’s been looking out for cicadas and asking around about sightings of the insects, McCartney hasn’t heard any reports of large-scale infestations in Hancock County.

Other local officials echoed McCartney’s reports about low levels of cicada activity. At the Greenfield Parks Department, assistant director Skye Mackenzie said maintenance reports for city parks haven’t included any mention of cicada-related problems.

Cindy Newkirk, district administrator for the Hancock County Soil and Water Conservation District, said there have been some sightings of cicadas in the western part of the county, but only in densely wooded areas.

Species like Brood X, which are called periodical cicadas, are known for the loud screeching noises males make in order to attract females as well as for their unusual life cycles. After a female cicada lays her eggs in a plant branch, they hatch in about six weeks. The “nymph” cicadas drop to the ground, where they burrow into soil and feed on tree sap.

Only at the end of a 13-year or 17-year cycle, depending on the species, will those nymphs come out of the ground, shed their shells, and emerge as winged cicadas. (The exoskeletons are what you can easily see on the trunks of trees.) The adults live for only about one month, during which they mate and the females can lay up to 600 eggs.

“While some people consider the mass emergence of cicadas one of nature’s many wonders, others find it a nuisance,” a Purdue Extension resource on the phenomenon says. “In urban areas, heavy infestations can make the sidewalks and roads slick with dead insect carcasses. In fruit orchards and nurseries, cicadas can seriously damage young trees.”

McCartney said the reason why Brood X hasn’t popped up in Hancock County, even though they’ve been thick on the ground in some nearby areas, isn’t clear. The insects would only emerge in areas of the county that were wooded 17 years ago, she said, so it might be the case that the amount of space taken up by crop fields in 2004 prevented them from taking root in much of the county.

Other periodical cicadas are expected in parts of Indiana in 2023, 2024 and 2025, but those likely won’t affect Hancock County. We’ll have to wait until 2038, the next scheduled appearance of Brood X, to find out whether this year’s scarcity will mean the county is no longer part of their habitat or whether this is only a temporary reprieve.