View from the North 40: Animals sing the songs of their people

We all have a voice, and for good, bad or weird animals do too.

NPR’s Madeline Sofia talked March 25 to U.S. Department of Agriculture entomologist Sammy Ramsey about cicadas because the annual cicada hatch is coming up soon, and this should be a big year — a big, noisy year, even for the notoriously noisy insect.

Cicadas, Ramsey said, come in 23 different broods, or types, that hatch every 13 or 17 years, depending on the particular type of cicada.

Brood X, which stands for 10, is the largest brood that is on a 17-year cycle and it’s fixing to hatch across 15 states in late April to early May.

Ramsey called cicadas the laziest of all insects because they emerge from their egg 10 weeks after it’s laid, dig 18 inches into the ground, and just hang out down there eating off the least nutritious part of a tree root for 17 years until then finally grow an exoskeleton and emerge into the world with one thing and one thing only on their mind: Mating.

They are, essentially, stereotypical children in cliched kids movies hanging out, eating all your food and playing video games, until puberty magically hits. Then they become stereotypical teens who vacate their home to go hang out with all their friends, play loud music and show off until they hook up with someone they find attractive.

At this point, it turns into an afterschool special mashed up with Spanish tragedy. They get pregnant, lay eggs, and everybody dies as a moral lesson.

The range for Brood X extends west into Illinois, with scattered numbers from north into Michigan and south to the northern tip of Georgia, but the highest concentration of numbers will be in Washington, D.C., and surrounding states.

And by highest concentration, Ramsey says, he means some regions can get up to 1.5 million of the 2-inch long, fat-bodied insects per acre. Yes, 1.5 million. Cicadas. Per. Acre.

Making a noise that sounds like an oscillating techno-buzzing as if they are trying to tune a radio to reach the mothership and ask to get beamed up. But there’s tens of thousands or maybe millions of them sounding this crazy din, at 80 to 85 decibels per cicada at the same time. You go ahead and do the math on the noise level. I’m an English major, so I can’t count that high.

Meanwhile, in Montana, the first bears are emerging from winter hibernation. Federal officials have reported seeing bear tracks in Yellowstone National Park since the first part of March, with the first sighting of bear reported March 16.

The first bears are generally the males and the females with their cubs in tow will come from about now to well into May, depending on the weather. It’s been decades since I have lived in bear country, but I still like to keep track of when the cubs get to come out of their den and finally start exploring the world.

Adult bears, they roar and grunt and snuffle, and they’ll make this popping noise with their lips when they’re under high-alert, but those cubs, they’re the crazy sounding ones because they sound just like human babies … well, kind of.

Imagine a large man who could’ve sung bass in a barbershop quartet, but he decided to spend all his time and effort smoking and drinking whiskey every evening instead. Now take that guy’s voice and put it in a little bundle of fur, claws and teeth. The surprising moment is when the cub starts bawling full-throttle like a hysterically upset baby but with that deep, raspy man voice.

That’s when you want to hug the little buggers because they sound so human and wretched — but it’s a trap, because it’s like scooping the whirling blades of a paper shredder into your arms. People of a certain age can imagine it’s like hugging the Tasmanian Devil.

The cicadas’ voice is loud, the bears’ both endearing and disastrous, but spiders, well, who knew that spiders speak through a musical instrument.

Reuters reported Tuesday that Markus Buehler, engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a team of researchers are studying spider webs and discovered that webs make noises like eerie music that is inaudible to humans when the spiders move across their web

He also thinks that studying the webs might inspire engineering innovations, which seem pretty logical, but the other thing, the noise thing, the team feels is a form of communication — as if a spider picked up a creepy harp and started strumming an elaborate Morse-type code.

“Spiders,” Buehler said, “utilize vibrations as a way to communicate with the environment, with other spiders.”

He’s hoping that humans can break that code and start communicating with the spiders, kind of like “Charlotte’s Web,” but in the other direction.

We’ll make some 3D model of a silk web and start strumming “Some spider!” “Terrific,” “Radiant,” “Humble,” and “Don’t bite me,” “Stop crawling on my skin,” “Absolutely, do not lay your eggs in my ear,” and “Get outta my house until you start paying rent!”

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Reuters says there’s more than 47,000 species of spiders, and I’m very most-definitely unsure that I want to know what any of them is thinking at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40.com .