17-year cicada brood's chorus might be quieter on Long Island this year

This spring, as the soil warms, a cohort of cicada nymphs that has been living amid tree roots for 17 years is due to begin tunneling toward the surface. In decades past the emergence of a cicada brood would have been a dramatic event, with millions arriving from the underworld over just a few days, their loud buzzing sounds filling the air.

The last few broods, as they are known, were sparse on Long Island, experts said. This year, Brood XIV will be debuting in northern Georgia, then in Kentucky and southern Ohio, in central Pennsylvania and sometime next month on Long Island and Cape Cod, Massachusetts. But local entomologists are worried the numbers emerging on Long Island will again be disappointing.

When she was growing up in the 1960s and '70s in Uniondale and Hempstead, Lisa Filippi recalls seeing hundreds of cicadas clinging to tree trunks, singing their persistent buzzing, whirring mating songs. "I haven’t seen that since I was a kid," she said. There have been fewer and fewer in recent years, both annual and periodic ones. A map of cicada sightings during Brood XIV's last appearance, in 2008, shows just scattered observations, along with a good number of points indicating no cicadas at that spot. 

Zoom in to see Long Island observations

In the map below, cicada symbols are "verified presence records" and red symbols are "verified absence records" as of March 2025. Click on points for details.

Source: https://cicadas.uconn.edu/

Filippi, now a professor of biology at Hofstra University, says she’ll be surprised if many Long Islanders see cicadas from Brood XIV this summer. Their disappearance is part of a worldwide decline in many insect populations caused by climate change, pesticides and development.

On Long Island, large parts of the deciduous forests that cicadas depend on for food have been cleared, and large expanses of soil where they spend their infancy through teen years have been paved over, entombing the nymphs below.

"The more we develop, the less we’re going to have," Filippi said.

Male buzzes and chirps, female flicks of the wing

A cicada emergence is one of the stranger phenomena of the animal world: "A wonder of nature," said Dino Martins, an entomologist at Stony Brook University. Hundreds may crawl out from a square meter of the forest floor. The immature insects attach themselves to tree trunks, climb out of their papery exoskeletons, pause a few days as they wait for their wings to unfurl and dry, and then begin pairing up.

Male cicadas attract females with sounds produced by a specialized organ in the abdomen called a tymbal, like a tiny vibrating drum. Every species of cicada has a slightly different song, according to the authors of a 2022 paper in the Annual Review of Entomology. Some are a persistent buzz, some more like a chirp. They are surprisingly loud.

Rival males will try to "jam the signals" with their own competing sounds. Females, who do not sing, show their interest with "sharp wing flicks timed to cues in the male song," the authors wrote.

Periodical cicadas are rare: of roughly 3,000 species worldwide, only seven emerge on predictable but prolonged schedules. Those seven, all belonging to the species Magicicada, exist only in the United States, east of the Great Plains. Some emerge every 13 years and others every 17 years.

Scientists aren’t clear on how the insects know when to come out; some occasionally get their timing mixed up and emerge early or late. The United States also has more than 100 species of annual cicadas, which is why in the heart of cicada country — the Midwest — there’s not often a summer without cicadas buzzing in the trees.

'Foolhardy' meals stuff predators

Though periodical cicadas in particular are a bit alarming looking, especially in great numbers — with their red eyes, black bodies and red-orange wing veins — they are harmless. They don’t bite or sting; they don’t damage crops or garden plants.

On the contrary, they are beneficial to the ecosystem, providing food for birds, reptiles, amphibians and small mammals. Burrowing nymphs help aerate the soil and when they die after their short four-to six-week adult lives, their bodies help fertilize it. Egg-laying can damage the branches of saplings, but gardeners can wrap the young branches in cheesecloth to keep the insects away. (Experts advise against plastic mesh, which can snare birds’ delicate feet.)

Cicadas aren’t strong flyers and sometimes make no effort to escape from animals looking for a meal. (The scientific name for their lack of a flight response is "predator foolhardy behavior.") Their survival as a species therefore depends on their emergence in numbers so great that predators can’t possibly eat enough to make a meaningful dent in their numbers.

But human activities pose another threat against which the cicadas have no evolutionary defense. According to a 2019 study published in the journal Biological Conservation, 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction, mainly from habitat loss, pesticide use and climate change.

Insects "have been around for hundreds of millions of years," Martins said. "They're incredibly robust, but they are also incredibly fragile... [and] easily disturbed by the changes that are happening in the environment." Drought and disease have killed and weakened the deciduous trees that cicadas feed on; nymphs may not survive the erratic freezing and thawing of the soil that is occurring more often now, and may be drowned when the soil becomes heavily saturated in increasingly intense rainstorms.

Martins said other broods have gone extinct, and it’s entirely possible periodical cicadas on Long Island could also disappear.

Cicadas still emerge in great numbers where there is intact forest in less developed parts of the country. Filippi said it’s unlikely that cicadas will go extinct entirely.

For those who have the chance to witness a mass emergence, Martins said, "it’s absolutely magical."