WASHINGTON — That loud buzzing and clicking sound across 15 states and the District of Columbia this spring from the emergence of billions of Brood X cicadas is music to the ears of a Catholic university professor and entomologist.
Gene Kritsky, described as the Indiana Jones of the cicada world, is the dean of behavioral and natural sciences and a biology professor at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati.
As a cicada guru, it would seem he knows all there is to know about these creatures that began tunneling their way out of the ground – on his watch as of May 18 – but he wants to learn more and he wants the public’s help.
He has written a book specifically about Brood X – pronounced “brood 10” because the cicada broods are labeled by Roman numerals – and has written numerous academic articles on cicadas and given more interviews on the 17-year reappearing bugs than he can count.
Kritsky began teaching at Mount St. Joseph in 1983. Although he knows a lot about bugs, and cicadas in particular, he wants to gather all the information he can about the creatures who will be around for only about six weeks.
To do this, he is enlisting the general public’s help in mapping and tracking Brood X with an app he developed with the help of the university’s IT team called cicada safari. As of May 19, more than 136,000 had downloaded the app, and that was just at the edge of the cicadas’ emergence. App users are encouraged to send in photos or videos of cicadas, which will help determine their locations and overall status.
Kritsky collected fossils and insects as a kid. He first started tracking cicadas in 1976 when he was in graduate school – Brood XXIII. When he was a teenager, he met the well-known anthropologist Margaret Mead at a lecture and took to heart the advice she gave him: to write and take pictures for the public.
He has written a lot about cicadas and his other love, bees, and has taken plenty of photographs. Currently, he is a cicada ambassador of sorts for a nation that is not sure what to make of these creatures with the loud male mating songs and the exoskeletons of males and females that crunch underfoot.
Editor’s Note: More information can be found at cicadasafari.org.
Stay Connected With Us