All spring long we heard the reports: the cicadas are coming, the cicadas are coming!
Then, it went quiet.
Now with the dog days of summer here, if you go outside in many parts of southern Wisconsin you are likely to hear a high pitch buzzsaw noise during the daylight hours.
You are not hearing things.
“It’s likely you are hearing cicadas during the daytime hours,” said Patrick (PJ) Liesch, the director of the UW-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab, who is often referred to as the “Wisconsin Bug Guy.”
This time of year the hot summer days are referred to as the “dog days of summer” and the cicadas that come along with it are referred to as “dog day cicadas” that come out every year.
“They come out during the warmer days of summer,” Liesch said.
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They are different from the periodical cicadas that everyone was talking about in the spring. Those are the cicadas that emerge approximately every 13 to 17 years, Liesch said. They emerge in the spring as the soil starts to warm up, not the summer.
The periodical cicadas spend most of their life cycle below ground in the soil and then emerge when they become adults, with them latching to vertical surfaces like trees and fences and shedding their outer shell.
After that you often don’t see them. “But you’ll hear them,” Liesch said.
In southeastern Wisconsin, the last group of periodic cicadas emerged in 2007 and the next batch is expected in 2024. However, some periodic cicadas were reported last spring in the Lake Geneva area, Liesch said.