The “Brood X” cicadas have invaded the Miami Valley, with one distinctive sign of their arrival being loud, buzzing sounds almost anywhere you go.
For perspective, WHIO reports that while using a decibel meter application on a phone, the peak of the cicadas’ noise can reach up to 85 decibels.
>> CICADA WATCH 2021: Photos of the insects across Miami Valley
Even with billions of the cicadas emerging out of the ground and into the summer air, there are some spots around the Miami Valley where they haven’t popped up.
News Center 7′s John Bedell spoke to Tom Macy with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Forestry, who explained the science behind these “cicada-free bubbles.”
“The periodical cicadas are pretty closely tied to trees and forested areas. So you know basically for the last 17 years, they’ve been living underground, and they feed on roots of trees underground as nymphs and then of course, they emerged this spring,” Macy said. “Basically, if the forest of the trees were removed from that area or there was any type of soil disturbance, like plowing or digging for construction and stuff like that, it would eliminate the cicadas. They probably wouldn’t survive that.”
While some bubbles seem cicada free, the video above shows what it sounds like outside of the WHIO-TV studio today.
For anyone who doesn’t live in a “cicada-free bubble” and dislikes the noisiness, ODNR says the cicadas will most be gone by July 4.
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