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A botanic garden in Chicago is seeing signs of cicadas preparing to emerge
Updated: 11:50 PM EDT Apr 24, 2024
Patrons at the Chicago Botanic Garden may be there to check out the beauty and wonder of the plant life they can see above the ground. But just below the ground, something else is going on.The folks at the Botanic Garden told WBBM they’re already seeing signs of cicadas preparing to emerge.”I’m actually finding that they’re starting to prepare their emergence holes. We’re finding mud caps and some holes coming to the surface and they’re just really prepping, getting ready to come out,” Tom Tiddens, supervisor of plant healthcare at Chicago Botanic Garden, told WBBM’s Ed Curran. Tiddens explained how and why the mud caps are there.”The mud cap is really when they dig their little hole up upward, they are kind of pushing the soil upward as they emerge. And then if the soil is a little bit wet as they kind of push out, they’ll push the mud around the side and they really don’t want to emerge,” Tiddens said.He said the bugs “leave a little dome on top” of the soil where their hole is located in the ground.When the cicadas emerge depends on the warmth of the dirt underground. Tiddens said they’ll emerge when soil temperatures reach about 64 degrees, 8 inches under the ground.”They will be very synchronized in there right now,” Tiddens said, adding that this week, soil temperatures were in the low 50s. “As soon as we warm up a bit, they’ll be ready to emerge,” Tiddens told WBBM.See more in the video player above.
Patrons at the Chicago Botanic Garden may be there to check out the beauty and wonder of the plant life they can see above the ground. But just below the ground, something else is going on.
The folks at the Botanic Garden told WBBM they’re already seeing signs of cicadas preparing to emerge.
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“I’m actually finding that they’re starting to prepare their emergence holes. We’re finding mud caps and some holes coming to the surface and they’re just really prepping, getting ready to come out,” Tom Tiddens, supervisor of plant healthcare at Chicago Botanic Garden, told WBBM’s Ed Curran.
Tiddens explained how and why the mud caps are there.
“The mud cap is really when they dig their little hole up upward, they are kind of pushing the soil upward as they emerge. And then if the soil is a little bit wet as they kind of push out, they’ll push the mud around the side and they really don’t want to emerge,” Tiddens said.
He said the bugs “leave a little dome on top” of the soil where their hole is located in the ground.
When the cicadas emerge depends on the warmth of the dirt underground. Tiddens said they’ll emerge when soil temperatures reach about 64 degrees, 8 inches under the ground.
“They will be very synchronized in there right now,” Tiddens said, adding that this week, soil temperatures were in the low 50s.
“As soon as we warm up a bit, they’ll be ready to emerge,” Tiddens told WBBM.
See more in the video player above.
