FOREST PARK, Ill. (AP) — When Mayumi Barack spotted a pair of mating periodical cicadas together, she pulled out her cellphone, said “Hi, everyone!” and snapped a photo of them.
“I don't really like bugs, but the more I look at them the more cute they seem to be,” Barrack explained, noting that many other creatures, including birds, squirrels and raccoons, will also try to get close to the bugs, if only to feed on them. “I just want to leave a record that they existed.”
And she's done it with flying colors: Barrack has posted more than 4,600 photos of the insects to Cicada Safari, an app for cicada enthusiasts, 2,000 more than her nearest rival. Though she's the queen of cicadas, she doesn't actually chase them; most of the photos are taken in her backyard, and she considers herself more of an insect mother than a queen.
“I take care of them,” Barack said, standing in her suburban Chicago backyard, filled with trees and flowers.
Periodical cicadas have some strange characteristics, like excessive urination and being infected with a zombie bacteria, but their enthusiastic fans are also unusual, or at least very enthusiastic.
Gene Kritsky, a biology professor at Mount Saint Joseph University in Cincinnati, has been working on this year's cicada outbreak for decades. He first learned about them in 1972 and has been studying and following them since 1974. He wrote a book about the current outbreak, “A Tale of Two Broods.” He also developed a cicada-tracking app that cicada enthusiasts like Barrack can use to post photos and find where they're clustered.
This is the third time Kritsky has mapped the 13th generation of cicadas, which is quite an accomplishment since this generation only emerges once every 17 years.
Kritsky is often seen wearing a safari hat that makes him look like the Indiana Jones of the cicada world (as he's been called). Kritsky and his wife, artist Jessie Smith, made multiple trips between Ohio and Illinois this spring to enjoy the insects. Over several nights in the woods north of Chicago, Kritsky saw tons of cicadas, including a one-in-a-million blue-eyed one, the first time he'd ever seen one. The May 24 outbreak was “unbelievable,” he said. That night, Kritsky saw thousands of them appear where he was.
“Periodic cicadas are a gateway into natural history,” Kritsky says.
For New York chef Joseph Yoon, cicadas aren't just awesome: They're dinner. His Brooklyn Bugs company is on a mission to spread the word about the flavor and sustainability of edible insects, but he knows many people are peeved by the idea.
Yoon spent nine days in Illinois collecting, freezing and bagging tens of thousands of cicadas, then served them as tempura to 400 people at an event at Syracuse University when he returned home.
Collecting and cooking cicadas is “quite painful for me because I love cicadas,” Yoon said.
But, he adds, “We also acknowledge and appreciate that each and every one of these cicadas' lives has the potential to change someone's perception or opinion about eating insects.”
Yoon's friend, Jennifer Angus, an artist and professor in Wisconsin, also sees beauty in cicadas and other insects, so much so that she incorporates actual insects into her work, sometimes dressing them up and posing them like dolls.
“I love them because they have amazing faces and bulging eyes and they're so hardy,” Angus says, “and they stand up to the wear and tear that comes with my shows.”
“I think the look on their faces is funny,” Angus said.
Renee Martin is an interior design professor at the University of Kentucky and a puppeteer, and three years ago at a puppet festival in Cincinnati, when “Brood X” was becoming a big thing on the East Coast, someone suggested she come up with a costume or puppet for Cicada.
“What would I do? A cicada striptease?” she asked her friends, who answered with an emphatic yes.
She created “something between a doll and a costume” for the festival and brought it back for this year's big event, performing the show in a Cincinnati alley for friends, neighbors and visiting journalists.
Clad in fake fishnet stockings and moving comically to stripper music, Martin appears first as a pale, cardboard nymph and then as a red-eyed adult nymph, the effect enhanced by the audience's noisemakers and cries of “Ooo-la-la” and “sexy cicada.”
Meanwhile, Kritsky's app has been flooded with cicada photos, with nearly 5,000 people posting them. About 150 people have posted more than 100 cicada photos, but no one has come close to matching Barack's. Barack said he was surprised to be at the top.
“I have a lot of photos I haven't sent yet,” she said.
This article is an adaptation of Renee Martin’s major at the University of Kentucky.
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