FOREST PARK, Ill. (AP) — Mayumi Barrack sees a pair of periodical cicadas mating, takes out her phone and says, “Hey guys!” and take their photo.
“I’m not really a bug lover, but as I look at them more and more, I think they’re adorable,” Barrack explained, noting that many other creatures – birds, squirrels, raccoons and others – are just as eager to get closer to insects. insects, if only to transform them into food. “I just want to document their existence.”
And boy has it. Barrack has published more than 4,600 photos of the insects on the Cicada Safari app for cicada lovers. That’s 2,000 more than its closest competitor. She’s the queen of cicada hunters, even though she doesn’t really hunt – most of the photos are from her garden – and she considers herself more of a mother of insects than a queen.
“I take care of them,” Barrack said, standing in his suburban Chicago yard filled with trees and flowers.
Mayumi Barrack photographs periodical cicadas on a fence in her garden, Thursday, June 6, 2024, in Forest Park, Illinois. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Periodical cicadas are strange, with eccentricities which include very strong urine flow and a zombie fungal infection. But their superfans are also unusual, or at least very passionate.
Gene Kritsky, a biology professor at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, has been working for decades on this year’s mass emergence of cicadas. He first heard of cicadas in 1972 and has been studying and hunting them since 1974. He wrote the book about the current emergence, “A Tale of Two Broods.” He also created the cicada tracking app that enthusiasts like Barrack use to post photos and find where the insects are in large numbers.
A periodical cicada nymph clings to the end of a twig Friday, May 17, 2024, in Charleston, Illinois. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
This is the third time Kritsky has mapped the cicada brood XIII. This is quite a feat since they only come out every 17 years.
Often wearing a safari hat that makes him look like the Indiana Jones of cicadas, as he’s been called, Kritsky and his artist wife Jessee Smith made several trips from Ohio to Illinois this spring to delight in insects. Over the course of several long nights in a forest north of Chicago, he saw a considerable number of people, including his first one in a million blue-eyed cicada. He called the May 24 outbreak “incredible,” with thousands coming out that night to his home.
“Periodical cicadas are the gateway to natural history,” Kritsky said.
For New York chef Joseph Yoon, cicadas aren’t just amazing, they’re dinner. His company Brooklyn Bugs is on a mission to spread awareness about the taste and sustainability of edible insects, even though he knows many people are disgusted by the idea.
Yoon spent nine days in Illinois collecting, freezing and then bagging tens of thousands of cicadas. Back home, he served cicada tempura to 400 people at an event at Syracuse University.
Yoon said that collecting and cooking cicadas “is quite painful for me because I love cicadas so much.”
But he added: “At the same time, I can also recognize and appreciate that the life of each of these cicadas represents the potential to transform someone’s perception or opinion about eating insects.” »
Yoon’s friend, Wisconsin artist and professor Jennifer Angus, also sees the beauty in cicadas and other insects — so much so that she incorporates actual insects into her art. Sometimes she would put them in outfits and make them look like dolls.
“I love them because they have great faces and bulging eyes and they are very sturdy,” Angus said. “They resist the wear and tear of my exhibitions.”
“I find their faces full of humor,” Angus said.
Renee Martin is a professor of architecture at the University of Kentucky and is also interested in puppetry. Three years ago, at a puppet festival in Cincinnati — while Brood X was making headlines on the East Coast — someone suggested he create a cicada costume or puppet.
“What would I do?” A cicada striptease? She asked her friends, who said unequivocally yes.
She imagined “something between a puppet and a costume” for this festival, then brought it out for this year’s big event, putting on a show in a Cincinnati alley for friends, neighbors and visiting journalists .
Billions of once-hidden bedbugs are in the air, on trees, and perched on people’s shirts, hats, and even faces. Illinois is at the center of this year’s emergence of double cicadas (AP Video: Melissa Winder)
Martin, wearing fake fishnet stockings and moving comically to stripper music, starts as a pale cardboard nymph, then bursts out as a full-grown red-eyed nymph. The audience added to the effect with noisemakers and shouts of “ooh la la” and “sexy cicada”.
Meanwhile, photos of cicadas are flooding into Kritsky’s app, with nearly 5,000 people posting them. About 150 people posted at least 100 photos of cicadas, but none came close to Barrack – who said he was surprised to be in the lead.
“I have so many photos I haven’t sent yet,” she said.
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Follow Seth Borenstein on @borenbears
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