Local professor to submit study on cicadas’ impact on lawn grass

Following a big cicada season in the Miami Valley, a Wright State University professor is getting ready to submit a study about how the dead bugs affect our land.

Billions of them flew around for a few weeks this summer, and now a study is looking at how cicadas affect something everyone has in their yard—grass.

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Along with students, the Wright State University biology professor, Don Cipollini, studied how cicada carcasses can affect lawn grass.

“What we sought out to do was a simple experiment to largely examine and demonstrate what one of the beneficial effects can be,” Cipollini said.

He used soil and grass seed in every pot. Different pots had two, four and six cicadas, while some had none.

A parallel experiment tested the effect of commercial fertilizer at low, medium, and high levels without any cicadas.

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At the end, Cipollini and his team dried the grass from each pot and weighed it.

According to Cipollini, both commercial fertilizer and cicada carcasses help the grass grow more than it would without the additions.

“You can see between pots that had no cicadas and those that had four, it was almost three times the mass in the pots that had the cicada bodies than without,” Cipollini said.

Outside of the study, Cipollini said we will see the effect through real life results.

“This fertilization effect would have started even this summer, throughout the summer, as these cicada carcasses decomposed. But that effect can persist over several growing seasons,” Cipollini said.

Cipollini hopes to submit the results in early 2022.

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