The Ravages and Operations of the Locusts

For the first time in 221 years, the periodical cicada broods XIII and XIX have emerged from the ground simultaneously; brood XIII in the north central Midwest and XIX across the southern U.S., from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean. An estimated one trillion cicadas are making themselves heard across the United States, their buzz crescendoing to about 100 decibels — over the threshold of what is considered harmful to a person’s hearing. These two cicada broods won’t overlap again until 2245. 

Stories about “swarmageddon” frequently mention this spectacle last happened when Thomas Jefferson was president in 1803, which makes one wonder how the insects were received last time they visited en masse. The fascinating thing is that cicadas hardly exist in the written historical record. Entomology was not a well-established field in America during Jefferson’s time, which did not bode well for the study of this infestation. What surviving contemporary works exist rarely, if ever, mention cicadas, or even “locusts,” the term most people of the era used to describe all manner of crop-eating insects. Although the evidence may not be as obvious as we would like, the cicadas’ presence quietly lurks in letters received by the federal government, specifically about the harvests that suffered in the historic swarm’s wake. The lack of awareness shown by the nation’s leaders about a topic outside their interests and comfort zone also highlights how these historical silences came to be. 

Once above the earth’s surface, cicadas latch onto trees and shrubs, feeding on roots and branches, and sucking them dry. In early 1804, the Jefferson administration received multiple letters addressing landowners’ concerns about the insects’ effects on crops. Two missives stand out, one from William C.C. Claiborne and James Wilkinson, administrators of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory, and one from Nathaniel Douglas in March. In both letters, one addressing secretary of state James Madison, and the other addressing Jefferson and criticizing a perceived lack of care for the merchant class, the writers show the broods appearing to have a particular impact on the seafaring aspects of the nation, particularly in regard to the food source supply. The two broods are geographically located along the Upper Mississippi and affected crops on either side of the river. Since much of the Midwest’s grain and corn harvest would normally be ferried down the Mississippi River to the port of New Orleans, the ships in the harbor were not able to fully stock their larders. 

“On being asked specifically whether he [the harbormaster] would supply this vessel’s company with fresh provisions,” Claiborne wrote to Madison, “he declined it on the ground of impracticability, arising as we understood out of the nature of the climate.” In a separate letter, Claiborne writes that under normal circumstances, arrivals to the port of New Orleans would be offered “every Refreshment in our Power, which may be compatible with their Speedy Departure.” Alas, given the previous year’s poor harvest, it can be inferred that limited hospitality was offered to those harboring in port. 

Thomas Jefferson, so obsessed with proving the vigor and might of U.S. wildlife that he shipped a moose carcass to a French natural historian, was not as concerned with the ways and means of the American insect. In 1781, writing in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson says: 

The honey-bee is not a native of our continent … The Indians concur with us in the tradition that it was brought from Europe; but when, and by whom, we know not. The bees have generally extended themselves into the country, a little in advance of the white settlers. The Indians therefore call them the white man's fly … How far northwardly have these insects been found?

This is one of only a few mentions of insects Jefferson ever makes. In contrast, Jefferson provides an extensive four-page list of all birds known to him. Insects did pique his interest at times, particularly when they “threatened destruction” of various crops, but the world’s smallest creatures rarely made it past his own unwritten knowledge.

This lack of consideration for insects is evident in even the era’s most prominent American explorers: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. They took great pains to write about the wildlife they encountered during their mission to reach the West Coast. In Clark’s Field Notes, he describes a badger at length: “This animale burrows in the ground and feeds on Bugs & flesh … his head Mouth &c is like a Dog with its ears cut off, his hair and tale like that of a Ground hog … and it has a white Streake from its nose to its Sholders.” 

One of the company’s lieutenants, John Ordway, also devoted coverage to the badger, delving into its fate as a taxidermied display for Jefferson, likely the first time the Virginian had seen such a creature, or so Paul Russell Cutright, author of Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists, speculated. Given Jefferson’s interest in the natural world and his aforementioned proclivity for boasting about America’s diverse wildlife — if not necessarily the insects who made their home there — it is assumed he enjoyed the specimen. 

Even if they weren’t remarked upon often, cicadas were likely understood to be an inevitable reality of life in North America by 1804, if not at the scale experienced in a dual emergence. As entomologist Gene Kritsky — the source of much of our understanding of cicada history in the United States — points out in his 2024 book, A Tale of Two Broods: The 2024 Emergence of Periodical Cicada Broods XIII and XIX, Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford was the first European settler to make note of periodical cicadas. Bradford, in 1633, describes “such a quantity of a great sort of flies … which came out of holes in the ground … and ate all of the green things, and made such a constant yelling.” Though he incorrectly identified them, his descriptions undoubtedly refer to the long slumbering insects. In the 1730s, there were reports of a “ground bug” which ate and “wasted” the grain harvest of the Mississippi River Valley. As historian Natalia Belting wrote in her 1948 book Kaskaskia Under the French Regime, the 1736 harvest was estimated to be less than a quarter of the usual yearly harvest, laying total ruin to the corn harvest of that year.

Insects are used to being ignored historically, at least by many thinkers who have been vetted by posterity. (One imagines that many bugs proved far too annoying — or deleterious to health and good fortune — to be overlooked by people who didn’t have the means to spend their time theorizing.) While ancient philosophers like Pliny the Elder wrote about insects, the subject of entomology was not well established until the middle of the 1800s, when influencers like Charles Darwin, Jean-Henri Fabre, and Gideon B. Smith began to publish on the topic. This period saw an upswell of research in natural science research. Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, which drastically changed how scientists saw the world. He was intrigued by the harmony sustained between insects and other animals. If “certain insectivorous birds were to decrease in Paraguay,” he wrote in his most influential work, “the parasitic insects would probably increase; and this would lessen the number of the navel-frequenting flies — then cattle and horses would become feral, and this would certainly greatly alter (as indeed I have [observed] in parts of South America) the vegetation: this again would largely affect the insects.” 

It is only in this era that we begin to see periodical cicadas being observed closely in the U.S., perhaps spurred by a particularly destructive siege from 13-year brood XIX that Eastern newspapers covered extensively in 1829. A West Virginian report furnished by an unknown author provided more details of the mayhem left in the cicadas’ wake:

The other day, calling in to see my friend Timothy Adams, he requested me to take a walk in his garden and see the ravages and operations of the locusts, which appear to be destroying everything before them — the apples, pears, cherries, peaches and plumbs [sic], together with currants and other shrubbery are all rendered one scene of withered desolation by this army of Goths and Vandals.

Scientists eventually saw the newspapers as a useful way to collect data on cicadas. Gideon B. Smith, one of the first American entomologists, wrote an 1858 column in the Pointe Coupee Democrat in Louisiana asking readers to confirm his suspicions about periodical cicada emergences. 

As many persons are inquiring of me where the locusts will appear this year please permit me to inform them, through your columns, that they will appear in the State of Mississippi … These locusts belong to the Southern tribe of thirteen years’ Locusts, which I have designated Cicada Tredecim [sic], and their advent is just as regular and precise to the day as is that of their northern [17-year] brethren.

Smith received a great amount of correspondence, illustrating the impact of cicadas on the region. Though these letters are lost, Smith stumbled upon a great discovery in cicada studies: that there were three broods of 13-year cicadas, separate from the 17-year broods already known at the time.  

Though we may not know the full extent of how the rare dual emergence broods XIII and XIX was experienced 221 years ago, we can now experience it ourselves, and perhaps do a better job of jotting down the details than our forebears did. There is much to carefully document, notes P.J. Liesch, director of the Insect Diagnostic Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, especially how warming temperatures might be affecting the intervals between these broods’ sojourns aboveground. “Since emergence is associated with soil reaching a temperature of 64˚F at a depth of 8 inches,” he told me, “changing climate could mean earlier emergences over time.” We don’t know what that could mean for the cicadas, but data collected by citizen scientists will be just as essential for answering these questions as it was for previous generations of experts.

There are numerous ways in which laypeople can contribute to the collective body of knowledge about the dual emergence. One of the most valuable is the Cicada Safari app, created and used by Kritsky in his cicada research. This app allows users to take and upload photographs and other data to a live map of cicada sightings around the nation. In this way, people today can do for Kritsky and others what the people of Louisiana did for Smith nearly 200 years ago — document the sprawl and significance of this once-in-a-lifetime event, all while playing a part in it themselves.