17 YEARS LATER: Billions of cicadas from the Brood X group are ready to emerge from their underground homes for the first time in 17 years. They will be buzzing or singing loudly and mating for the next month or six weeks before they die and their larvae return to the ground to begin the next cycle. Princeton is a prime location for this emergence. (Photo by Mulin Huan)

By Donald Gilpin

Coming soon to Princeton, almost certainly by the end of this month, will be a massive emergence of Brood X cicadas, one of the largest of the 17-year cicada broods — and it’s going to be noisy.

There will be billions of them, about 1.5 million per acre, now ready to appear from out of the ground, climb into the trees, shed their skins, and begin their mating song. After mating and reproducing, the cicadas will live only about six more weeks, and the larvae will return to the earth to carry out the next 17-year cycle.

Princeton High School science teacher Mark Eastburn and his student research team are ready for the emergence. “We’re looking forward to it, but at the same time we want to raise some awareness about it because a lot of people are concerned,” he said in a May 10 Zoom conference, which included four PHS students from his research team. “Someone I was talking to said ‘I hate this. It’s going to be terrible.’ But this is their prom. They’ve been looking forward to this for 17 years. Give them their chance for the next six weeks.”

Pointing out that these insects are harmless, Eastburn said that they provide food for birds and mammals and even humans.

He referred to his group’s opportunities for research and to the role of his student, junior Matthew Livingston, as leader of the PHS Insect-Eating Club. “You know we’ll eat some. We’ll grab some for studies. I have a freezer to fill, and so does Matthew. Beyond that we’re trying to get people to appreciate this spectacle of nature, which won’t be around again for another 17 years. We won’t hear these sounds again for another 17 years.”

Emphasizing the environmental benefits of the cicadas and the potentially destructive effects of pesticides that are currently being marketed to destroy them, Eastburn added, “They’re going to die in six weeks anyway, so we don’t need to rush them to their death. And all of those nutrients will be going back into the soil and then they will be back in 17 years. I’m hoping that people will be able to enjoy it and make the most of it while they are here.”

Anna Schwartz, another 11th-grader on the research team, pointed out that in addition to the two large categories of cicadas — the annual variety and the long-term, 17-year type — there are many different kinds of cicadas in each group. And each group has its own distinct song.

“I want to focus my research on the different songs the cicadas make in order to identify which species is here,” she said. “I might also take my research in the direction of mapping to see what habitats they’re found in, or genetic analysis. But this is definitely going to lead to finding out what types of cicada are present in Princeton and what different songs they make.”

Eastburn mentioned that the cicadas have put Princeton on the entomological map and will be bringing in researchers from Rutgers University and other parts of the state. “Princeton is famous for this emergence,” he said. “The fact that this is a suburban town and not in the middle of the wilderness somewhere makes it very accessible for people.”

The same brood of cicadas, the great-grandparents of this year’s emerging cicadas, Eastburn pointed out, gained their own fame in 1970 when they sang for Bob Dylan in front of Nassau Hall as he received an honorary degree from Princeton University at a commencement ceremony where the cicadas were able to drown out most of the speeches. Later that year Dylan related his experience in his song “Day of the Locusts”: “Yeah, the locusts sang, it gave me a chill / Oh, the locusts sang such a sweet melody / Oh, the locusts sang their high whining trill / Yeah, the locusts sang, and they were singing for me.”

This will be the first 17-year cicada emergence experience for the student research team members, but Eastburn recalls his encounter with the cicadas in 2004. “I grew up in the Philadelphia area and never knew about this until one of my first years teaching in Princeton. All of a sudden they were all over the place. I didn’t believe the stories of how many there would be until I actually saw them. It was incredible, the number of cicadas around.”

Team member Mulin Huan, a PHS junior, added details derived from his cicada research. “For 17 years they stay underground and suck on the juice of tree roots, feeding on that and surviving. Then they come out and reproduce. The noise is a male mating noise. The male makes this noise to attract the female.”

Livingston described the activities of his Insect-Eating Club, which is looking forward to branching out into a new cicada cuisine. “We haven’t been able to hunt or try any yet, but we do have recipes that we’re ready to try out,” he said.

Livingston raises crickets to supply the club’s cricket cookies, cricket brownies, and cricket cake. “I invite the members over, and we try them out,” he said. “We’ve had three tastings so far. At every tasting we try to get people to go from the light stuff like cricket cookies to something more adventurous like a whole roasted cricket. The whole purpose of this is to find what are the most desirable foods for people to eat, so we can introduce them on a larger scale as a stable food source.”

Livingston is optimistic about the prospects for cicadas as a food source. “The cicadas are coming and there will be no need for livestock with all the greenhouse gases they cause, and very little water will be used for production with cicadas. They’re a great food source for the future. With the cicadas coming we’ll be able to bring that food source to the community.”

None of the research team has actually eaten a cicada yet, but Huan noted that his mother had a recipe that she enjoyed when she was a girl living in China. “They would mix corn starch with water so it became really sticky,” he said, “and they put it on a long bamboo stick and used the stick to get the cicadas out of the trees. They took the cicadas and pulled the wings off and put them in a bag. When they got home they took them out and stir fried them in oil, maybe added some salt or other spices and flavors and then they just ate them.”

Schwartz said that her interest in cicadas and her desire to pursue this research project came from her commitment to environmental sustainability. Betaneya Tsegay, a ninth-grader, mentioned that she has liked bugs for a long time. At a biology camp last year, she began to become interested in a variety of different bugs and their possibilities for research. “I don’t find them scary,” she said. “They’re cool.”

Livingston described eating insects when he was a fifth-grader living in Belgium. “They were doing something with bug pasta,” he said. “I thought that was cool. I love food science and cooking, making things taste good.”

Livingston is eager to promote the role of insects in expanding sustainability efforts, and he wants to get his club more involved with the emerging cicadas. “We’re going to go on a hunting trip sometime later this month, with pillow cases to fill with cicadas.”

“We really hope no one in the community will be spraying them with pesticides, “ Eastburn added, “because we want to eat them and we don’t need pesticides.”