(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — More cicadas are emerging by the hour and there’s an app that will help you identify where.
Cicada expert Gene Kritsky began testing his Cicada Safari app back in 2019 with Brood 8 in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
Since then, the professor emeritus of biology at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati says it’s been downloaded over 200,000 times and been used to share more than half a million pictures.
The free app is the latest form of crowdsourcing that he says dates back to the 1840s when a Baltimore doctor began writing letters to newspapers asking their readers to send him sightings.
“By the time he died in 1867 he had documented every brood, not total distribution, but the brood,” Kritsky said.
Kritsky says any cross-breeding in central Illinois during this year’s double emergence is going to be hard to detect because the multiple species within Broods XIII and XIX are so genetically similar.
“That’s the real issue about a potential overlap. You can't tell them apart, you can tell the three species apart, but you can't tell the Brood XIX cicada species from the Brood XIII cicada species.”
That means mapping is going to be crucial.
Kritsky, who grew up in Freeport and earned his PHD from the University of Illinois, hopes the public contributes to his research by sending geolocated pictures and videos of cicadas on the app.
He says it’s a vast improvement over earlier means of collecting data — phone answering messages and emails.
Kritsky was headed to Champaign Friday after learning from spotters there some adult male cicadas had begun a ‘light chorusing’ to attract females.
The Cicada Safari app can be downloaded in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
To get answers to the most common questions about the emerging cicadas, visit WBBM’s guide to cicada-geddon.
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