Clearing land for suburban development disrupts cicada cycles:

“They have a tight connection with the tree,” says Dan Babbitt, the manager of the insect zoo at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Cicadas spend their underground years feeding off the roots of trees. Then when they’re ready to come up, they crawl back out along the tree trunk to the branches where they lay their eggs, all in the hopes that the next generation of cicadas will fall back into the soil, burrow down to the roots, and feed there for another 17 years.

This is why leafy residential neighborhoods often have some of the best cicada sightings (and sounds). It’s also why the absolute worst thing we could do to the creatures is clear-cut whole stretches of once-rural land for new development while they’re down there. Get rid of the trees, and you get rid of the cicadas. And re-planting those sad saplings common along many freshly paved roads in the exurbs won’t help…

“When they go out and build these things around Champaign-Urbana, they cut the trees down, they bring in the bulldozers, they pull up the top soil, and they stick the houses down,” Cooley says. “None of the cicadas in the ground there would have survived that. None of anything in the ground would have survived that.”

Some periodical cicadas do well in older, tree-lined suburbs, Cooley says, those places where houses were built slowly over time, “where they didn’t take the big trees.” Across history, it’s hard to tell if the shape and geography of broods has altered significantly around the footprint of expanding cities. Early records on when and where they appeared – and which broods were which – aren’t all that reliable. Some “straggler” cicadas also appear off the cycle of the rest of a brood, further confusing history’s witnesses.

Just another way that suburban development disrupts natural habitats. But, I’m still left with two pressing questions:

1. Would the average suburbanite see this as a problem? For those who live in the areas with more cicadas, are they viewed as a big nuisance even if they are only around every 17 years?

2. There is no indication in this article about how destructive this is. How bad is it if suburban development wipes out cicadas? What are the side effects? This is related to Question 1: perhaps suburbanites would be friendly toward cicadas if they knew they were making their lives and the habitat better.