Cicadas are so noisy in South Carolina that residents are calling the police | Hacker News Reader

Cicadas are so noisy in South Carolina that residents are calling the police

apnews.com

50 pointsgeox58 comments

This is a double-brood year. But also, one of these broods is infected with the Massospora fungus. It's one of those mind-control parasites that makes the males "hyper-sexual"[1]. The zombie cicadas are driven to mate more aggressively, but their genitals have been replaced with the fungus so all they do is spread spores.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cicadas-zombies-hyper-sexual-se...

So many jokes... must resists.

It's interesting though. The spores can be viable for years and it's thought they are transmitted via the soil. So why doesn't this spread to other years or even the annual broods?

Being any but a handful of species is basically living in an actual horror movie 100% of the time.

Those few, just part-time.

>> But, he said, less than 5% of cicadas are infected with the fungus and researchers have yet to observe any impact on other wildlife.

Even the ordinary annual cicadas in my area are on their own a force to be reckoned with. They don't peak until late summer though. Because of that, and the fact that as a kid it meant going back to school, the sound still makes me sad and melancholy and reflective about whether I achieved what I wanted with my summer time before it's gone.

It's amazing how powerful that sound is.

For a while I've been wanting to write a southern gothic short story about the sound and the sadness and/or insanity that it drives people to.

Do it. A gothic late summer early night pines setting sounds interesting.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higurashi_When_They_Cry

Be advised the quality really drops off after "eye-opening arc", meakashi-hen

> as a kid it meant going back to school, the sound still makes me sad and melancholy and reflective about whether I achieved what I wanted

When I was a kid Star Trek Voyager broadcast on a Sunday night, and it was the last thing on a weekend before bed. So I had exactly the same issue with the end credits music, just more frequent!

Nature can be extremely loud. I’ve been in places where get insects louder than the freight trains going by the other side of a fence.

Some people are really clueless. I had a neighbor who didn't realize dry leaves could burn. It would be funny if they hadn’t made a really good attempt to burn their entire lot to the ground.

I live in a VERY rural part of the US. When I was in college, a friend from NYC came to stay with us for a week in the summer.

He brought a noise machine because he figured it would be too quiet.

He ended up buying ear plugs because the bugs and birds were so loud at night. And he grew to hate whippoorwills.

I enjoyed that quite thoroughly.

I live in a rural area. In summer I typically sleep with the windows open for fresh air at night... then wake up at dawn to close them because the birds are loud as hell.

My parents have a wren that nests outside their bedroom. He has decided that the best way to sing is hanging off the window screen and pointed into the bedroom. It's amazingly loud as the sun comes up.

I feed him because it's also hilarious.

Owls can be surprisingly loud, and annoyingly persistent.

I get barred owls around my place and they give me the creeps. Something in my subconscious knows they would eat me if they could

We have a m-f pair of great horned owls that live in the trees behind the house. Wild how loud they get at night as they’re patrolling the neighborhood together.

Try living in a forest that has howler monkeys. You really can't sleep through it.

> He brought a noise machine

Is that slang for a radio?

No, a white noise generator. May also generate other sounds, e.g. babbling brooks, rain on a roof, or other similar things.

Oh I see. There are thousands of youtube videos for that.

I grew up in the country & enjoy the sounds mostly. Except the time I was camping and there was a whippoorwill nearby; I was just about crazy by the time the sun came up

Watch a video of one on YouTube... wtf... it the platypus of birds! What is up with its mouth?!

Nightjars are terrifying.

> Nature can be extremely loud.

And that's kinda comforting. "Extremely loud" is the exception anyway.

It's when nature falls silent, or people-generated noise drowns out everything else, that's distressing (or depressing).

Reminds me of Angkor Wat in Cambodia when I visited. There was a constant, really load sound like singing bowls everywhere. First I thought it's some Buddhist monks but then I realized it was cicadas. It was really bizarre.

Found a video with the sound. It sounds cleaner live. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muBnqHqOrG0

They are loud but always present in Atlanta. In more rural areas it can be deafening. My kids were asking what the loud noise was at a rest stop last year. They fly all over my backyard and leave their shells as they grow. Their flying alone is pretty loud.

The professor in the video is quite wholesome. Seems to love nature and has a genuinely positive attitude.

And also has me convinced that getting spraying in the face with cicada pee is no big deal.

Apparently cicadas emerge right around when the ground temperature hits 65 degrees. I found this site to keep an eye on it, kinda wondering how close it'll be: https://www.greencastonline.com/tools/soil-temperature

A week ago over here the air temperature spiked to about 80 but apparently the ground temperature only hit 63.

One of my motorcycles is quite loud. (A Ducati Monster 900 with unbaffled Stainture pipes and a chopped airbox.)

There's a stretch of road through a valley in the bush (an Australian term kinda like forest) that I used to ride daily for about 20 years - Wakehurst Parkway between Frenchs Forest and Narrabeen, for anyone familiar with Sydneys Northern Beaches.

In a "good" cicada year, they can be loud enough for a long stretch of that road that they completely overwhelm the engine noise of that bike. Really really loud. Loud enough that I'd often drop two or three gears and pin the throttle wide open just to amaze myself that a bunch of insects were making more noise than my Ducati.

Legend. Tipped my VTR250 around there. :-/

Wow gross

Southern newbies, I guess. I remember my grandmother's magnolia and pecan trees in N TX summer some years, the cicadas were deafening.

Here in an urban-residential boundary area, I have the problem of large crickets getting into my apartment (they're fairly quiet) and downstairs dogs so loud I can hear them barking at all hours day and night through a supposedly solid concrete floor. Of the latter, of course the immature kidult neighbors don't notice and don't care how rude they are having untrained, inappropriate breeds of dogs (plural). They just let their dogs relieve themselves immediately outside the front door of the building.

Sounds like you live in San Marcos, TX. Lots of crickets there and college kids.

Close. ATX near downtown in a slapped-together gentrification high-rise. :D

My mom lives around the corner from there though. I was sad when the geniuses at Earth Burger decided to reimagine themselves as a salad kale? burger? bowl shop. The owner has some absurd grand vision but fails to realize Texas fast food requires a giant sign visible from I-35, consistency, and listening to customers.

Yeah, sharing a building with strangers... never again, as long as I can afford not to. It had its upsides, but wow. The amount of just ever-present noise was such a harm to my psyche, like some kind of slow torture over years. No matter what you do, all windows and doors closed. Just so not for me.

I purposely went from an apartment complex with ~30% Airbnbs, ~40% alcoholic rager kidult residents, and ~10% people who let their dogs relieve themselves in the hallways and in the pool to the end of the hall on the top floor with concrete floors of a new building. Apparently, that was insufficient.

Perhaps leased apartments in the style of invite-only co-op NYC buildings where the security guards actually lift a finger now and then would be an improvement.

At least it won't be my problem anymore in about 2 months because I'm out of this popcorn stand.

There was a really good Radiolab episode about cicadas and their bizarre 17 year cycles. https://radiolab.org/podcast/279210-cicadas-are-coming

We have chorus frogs in a nearby pond. If you walk close to the pond, it is definitely at a solid 90db or more. Sounds amazing. Even weirder, sometimes something happens and they all decide to stop for a while before starting up again together later.

From a place where cicada are common, can confirm they're loud and the noise can easily drown out normal conversations if you're outside.

Also here, I don't think cicadas are "periodical". It's an every year occurrence.

It seems to be different in the US?

There are some annual ones, but they are few in numbers. The periodic ones are on a different level.

Guessing you're either in or close to the tropics then.

Am also in the tropics. For about two weeks in late Jan we have whistling cicadas - both loud and shrill. Regular cicadas no longer bother me, but the whistlers are straight out of a deep circle of hell.

There are multiple species and broods of periodical cicadas - they're literally called that - it's really quite an interesting phenomena, but they have evolved life cycles in that are prime numbered years long, and frequently relatively prime as well. The extended life cycle means that no predator can rely on a single brood, and the relatively prime brood lengths of different groups mean they don't overlap sufficiently frequently for predators to manage by feeding on different broods each year. Then on a year when they do emerge they emerge in colossal numbers, far more than you experience with annual cicadas, and there's also nowhere near enough predation to meaningfully dent their numbers.

This years exciting horror is the result of a bunch of things, summarized from the University of Connecticut [https://cicadas.uconn.edu]:

* For the first time since 2015 a 13-year brood will emerge in the same year as a 17-year brood.

* For the first time since 1998 adjacent 13-and 17-year broods will emerge in the same year.

* For the first time since 1803 Brood XIX and XIII will co-emerge.

This particular event won't be one of the all encompassing horrors though as apparently the range of the overlap is relatively small.

This time of year, every year, the chattiest f*in birds start chatting outside my bedroom window at 4am.

So I’ve just resigned to go to sleep earlier.

Well, look at the time I’m off to bed!

We had this exact problem outside my son's room. Birds would wake him up at 5 am. I put one of those fake plastic owls with a bobble head outside his window. Problem solved.

Yea, you know your Civ addiction is bad when you hear the 4am birds. And good luck getting to sleep through them.

Did anyone live in the Chicago area 17 years ago? I'm wondering how loud the cicadas will be there.

Off-topic: the video stops playing when you scroll away...eg to the bottom of the page. Infuriating behavior, web designers need to stop hijacking.

Yeah, news sites are especially bad for this. The worst are the ones that start playing some other video (with ads) that is pinned to the side of the page as you scroll. Truly sociopathic design IMO.

Have you noticed how they put the close button for those videos on the bottom right instead of the top right, so you get lost for a second or two. I have a low opinion of the engineers who participate in making things worse for everyone.

I'm disappointed that TFA has no recording of the noise!

yeah, we get the occasional cicada down here in Australia.. but that sounds like its a force of nature sort of noise level.

See my other comment here. We 100% get "force of nature loud" cicadas.

In Tennessee, we've had cicadas so loud that dogs and cats were crying in pain.

Force of nature is correct terminology, here.

@ work in the summer months when i go for my daily walk at work - i frequently block my ears from the sound. I live and work in Western Sydney.

The cicada recordings I heard were steady loud buzzing | clicking white noise with an underlying pulse.

I can imagine that getting annoying.

Volume wise, it seems decibels below daily flocks of thousands of Sulpher Crested Cockatoos rap battling flocks of Corellas which we get in this part (any parts) of Australia.

For interest: Individual Australian parrot calls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF8Nr_as0CI

Now, multiply by a thousand and put them in trees outside your house.

1:05 - 1:20 is what they sound like here

https://youtu.be/sh1mfzdWOuo?feature=shared

While a recording will let you hear what they sound like (a loud buzzing) no recording will properly convey the true decibel level of a large brood singing in the trees while you are on the ground below listening. It is something one has to personally experience to properly understand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com