Cicadas are so noisy in South Carolina that residents are calling the police

https://apnews.com/article/noisy-cicadas-south-carolina-police-39f2bd760a51c8c1d28d88b12473840e

by geox • 2 years ago

50 58 2 years ago

rqtwteye2• 2 years ago

Reminds me of Angkor Wat in Cambodia when I visited. There was a constant, really load sound like singing bowls everywhere. First I thought it's some Buddhist monks but then I realized it was cicadas. It was really bizarre.

rqtwteye2• 2 years ago

Found a video with the sound. It sounds cleaner live. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muBnqHqOrG0

kayodelycaon• 2 years ago

Nature can be extremely loud. I’ve been in places where get insects louder than the freight trains going by the other side of a fence.

Some people are really clueless. I had a neighbor who didn't realize dry leaves could burn. It would be funny if they hadn’t made a really good attempt to burn their entire lot to the ground.

Loughla3• 2 years ago

I live in a VERY rural part of the US. When I was in college, a friend from NYC came to stay with us for a week in the summer.

He brought a noise machine because he figured it would be too quiet.

He ended up buying ear plugs because the bugs and birds were so loud at night. And he grew to hate whippoorwills.

I enjoyed that quite thoroughly.

HeyLaughingBoy• 2 years ago

I live in a rural area. In summer I typically sleep with the windows open for fresh air at night... then wake up at dawn to close them because the birds are loud as hell.

markdown2• 2 years ago

He brought a noise machine

Is that slang for a radio?

jraines• 2 years ago

I grew up in the country & enjoy the sounds mostly. Except the time I was camping and there was a whippoorwill nearby; I was just about crazy by the time the sun came up

RetroTechie• 2 years ago

Nature can be extremely loud.

And that's kinda comforting. "Extremely loud" is the exception anyway.

It's when nature falls silent, or people-generated noise drowns out everything else, that's distressing (or depressing).

fortran77• 2 years ago

I'm disappointed that TFA has no recording of the noise!

senectus1• 2 years ago

yeah, we get the occasional cicada down here in Australia.. but that sounds like its a force of nature sort of noise level.

bigiain2• 2 years ago

See my other comment here. We 100% get "force of nature loud" cicadas.

lightedman• 2 years ago

In Tennessee, we've had cicadas so loud that dogs and cats were crying in pain.

Force of nature is correct terminology, here.

an_aparallel• 2 years ago

@ work in the summer months when i go for my daily walk at work - i frequently block my ears from the sound. I live and work in Western Sydney.

defrost• 2 years ago

The cicada recordings I heard were steady loud buzzing | clicking white noise with an underlying pulse.

I can imagine that getting annoying.

Volume wise, it seems decibels below daily flocks of thousands of Sulpher Crested Cockatoos rap battling flocks of Corellas which we get in this part (any parts) of Australia.

For interest: Individual Australian parrot calls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF8Nr_as0CI

Now, multiply by a thousand and put them in trees outside your house.

batch122• 2 years ago

1:05 - 1:20 is what they sound like here

https://youtu.be/sh1mfzdWOuo?feature=shared

pwg• 2 years ago

While a recording will let you hear what they sound like (a loud buzzing) no recording will properly convey the true decibel level of a large brood singing in the trees while you are on the ground below listening. It is something one has to personally experience to properly understand.

wil421• 2 years ago

They are loud but always present in Atlanta. In more rural areas it can be deafening. My kids were asking what the loud noise was at a rest stop last year. They fly all over my backyard and leave their shells as they grow. Their flying alone is pretty loud.

binarymax• 2 years ago

This time of year, every year, the chattiest f*in birds start chatting outside my bedroom window at 4am.

So I’ve just resigned to go to sleep earlier.

Well, look at the time I’m off to bed!

dgllghr• 2 years ago

We had this exact problem outside my son's room. Birds would wake him up at 5 am. I put one of those fake plastic owls with a bobble head outside his window. Problem solved.

jldugger• 2 years ago

Yea, you know your Civ addiction is bad when you hear the 4am birds. And good luck getting to sleep through them.

hi-v-rocknroll3• 2 years ago

Southern newbies, I guess. I remember my grandmother's magnolia and pecan trees in N TX summer some years, the cicadas were deafening.

Here in an urban-residential boundary area, I have the problem of large crickets getting into my apartment (they're fairly quiet) and downstairs dogs so loud I can hear them barking at all hours day and night through a supposedly solid concrete floor. Of the latter, of course the immature kidult neighbors don't notice and don't care how rude they are having untrained, inappropriate breeds of dogs (plural). They just let their dogs relieve themselves immediately outside the front door of the building.

lukevp• 2 years ago

Sounds like you live in San Marcos, TX. Lots of crickets there and college kids.

hi-v-rocknroll3• 2 years ago

Close. ATX near downtown in a slapped-together gentrification high-rise. :D

My mom lives around the corner from there though. I was sad when the geniuses at Earth Burger decided to reimagine themselves as a salad kale? burger? bowl shop. The owner has some absurd grand vision but fails to realize Texas fast food requires a giant sign visible from I-35, consistency, and listening to customers.

amatecha2• 2 years ago

Yeah, sharing a building with strangers... never again, as long as I can afford not to. It had its upsides, but wow. The amount of just ever-present noise was such a harm to my psyche, like some kind of slow torture over years. No matter what you do, all windows and doors closed. Just so not for me.

hi-v-rocknroll3• 2 years ago

I purposely went from an apartment complex with ~30% Airbnbs, ~40% alcoholic rager kidult residents, and ~10% people who let their dogs relieve themselves in the hallways and in the pool to the end of the hall on the top floor with concrete floors of a new building. Apparently, that was insufficient.

Perhaps leased apartments in the style of invite-only co-op NYC buildings where the security guards actually lift a finger now and then would be an improvement.

At least it won't be my problem anymore in about 2 months because I'm out of this popcorn stand.

bigiain2• 2 years ago

One of my motorcycles is quite loud. (A Ducati Monster 900 with unbaffled Stainture pipes and a chopped airbox.)

There's a stretch of road through a valley in the bush (an Australian term kinda like forest) that I used to ride daily for about 20 years - Wakehurst Parkway between Frenchs Forest and Narrabeen, for anyone familiar with Sydneys Northern Beaches.

In a "good" cicada year, they can be loud enough for a long stretch of that road that they completely overwhelm the engine noise of that bike. Really really loud. Loud enough that I'd often drop two or three gears and pin the throttle wide open just to amaze myself that a bunch of insects were making more noise than my Ducati.

adt• 2 years ago

Legend. Tipped my VTR250 around there. :-/

01HNNWZ0MV43FF3• 2 years ago

Wow gross

jader201• 2 years ago

The professor in the video is quite wholesome. Seems to love nature and has a genuinely positive attitude.

And also has me convinced that getting spraying in the face with cicada pee is no big deal.

whoopdedo• 2 years ago

This is a double-brood year. But also, one of these broods is infected with the Massospora fungus. It's one of those mind-control parasites that makes the males "hyper-sexual"[1]. The zombie cicadas are driven to mate more aggressively, but their genitals have been replaced with the fungus so all they do is spread spores.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cicadas-zombies-hyper-sexual-se...

giantg22• 2 years ago

So many jokes... must resists.

It's interesting though. The spores can be viable for years and it's thought they are transmitted via the soil. So why doesn't this spread to other years or even the annual broods?

vundercind• 2 years ago

Being any but a handful of species is basically living in an actual horror movie 100% of the time.

Those few, just part-time.

ethbr1• 2 years ago

> But, he said, less than 5% of cicadas are infected with the fungus and researchers have yet to observe any impact on other wildlife.

Izkata• 2 years ago

Apparently cicadas emerge right around when the ground temperature hits 65 degrees. I found this site to keep an eye on it, kinda wondering how close it'll be: https://www.greencastonline.com/tools/soil-temperature

A week ago over here the air temperature spiked to about 80 but apparently the ground temperature only hit 63.

thrdbndndn• 2 years ago

From a place where cicada are common, can confirm they're loud and the noise can easily drown out normal conversations if you're outside.

Also here, I don't think cicadas are "periodical". It's an every year occurrence.

It seems to be different in the US?

giantg22• 2 years ago

There are some annual ones, but they are few in numbers. The periodic ones are on a different level.

mlinhares• 2 years ago

Guessing you're either in or close to the tropics then.

smallerfish2• 2 years ago

Am also in the tropics. For about two weeks in late Jan we have whistling cicadas - both loud and shrill. Regular cicadas no longer bother me, but the whistlers are straight out of a deep circle of hell.

olliej• 2 years ago

There are multiple species and broods of periodical cicadas - they're literally called that - it's really quite an interesting phenomena, but they have evolved life cycles in that are prime numbered years long, and frequently relatively prime as well. The extended life cycle means that no predator can rely on a single brood, and the relatively prime brood lengths of different groups mean they don't overlap sufficiently frequently for predators to manage by feeding on different broods each year. Then on a year when they do emerge they emerge in colossal numbers, far more than you experience with annual cicadas, and there's also nowhere near enough predation to meaningfully dent their numbers.

This years exciting horror is the result of a bunch of things, summarized from the University of Connecticut [https://cicadas.uconn.edu]:

* For the first time since 2015 a 13-year brood will emerge in the same year as a 17-year brood.

* For the first time since 1998 adjacent 13-and 17-year broods will emerge in the same year.

* For the first time since 1803 Brood XIX and XIII will co-emerge.

This particular event won't be one of the all encompassing horrors though as apparently the range of the overlap is relatively small.

anigbrowl2• 2 years ago

Off-topic: the video stops playing when you scroll away...eg to the bottom of the page. Infuriating behavior, web designers need to stop hijacking.

amatecha2• 2 years ago

Yeah, news sites are especially bad for this. The worst are the ones that start playing some other video (with ads) that is pinned to the side of the page as you scroll. Truly sociopathic design IMO.

anigbrowl2• 2 years ago

Have you noticed how they put the close button for those videos on the bottom right instead of the top right, so you get lost for a second or two. I have a low opinion of the engineers who participate in making things worse for everyone.

lapcat• 2 years ago

Did anyone live in the Chicago area 17 years ago? I'm wondering how loud the cicadas will be there.

benknight87• 2 years ago

There was a really good Radiolab episode about cicadas and their bizarre 17 year cycles. https://radiolab.org/podcast/279210-cicadas-are-coming

cvoss• 2 years ago

Even the ordinary annual cicadas in my area are on their own a force to be reckoned with. They don't peak until late summer though. Because of that, and the fact that as a kid it meant going back to school, the sound still makes me sad and melancholy and reflective about whether I achieved what I wanted with my summer time before it's gone.

It's amazing how powerful that sound is.

For a while I've been wanting to write a southern gothic short story about the sound and the sadness and/or insanity that it drives people to.

batch122• 2 years ago

Do it. A gothic late summer early night pines setting sounds interesting.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF3• 2 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higurashi_When_They_Cry

Be advised the quality really drops off after "eye-opening arc", meakashi-hen

insomniacity• 2 years ago

as a kid it meant going back to school, the sound still makes me sad and melancholy and reflective about whether I achieved what I wanted

When I was a kid Star Trek Voyager broadcast on a Sunday night, and it was the last thing on a weekend before bed. So I had exactly the same issue with the end credits music, just more frequent!

iainctduncan• 2 years ago

We have chorus frogs in a nearby pond. If you walk close to the pond, it is definitely at a solid 90db or more. Sounds amazing. Even weirder, sometimes something happens and they all decide to stop for a while before starting up again together later.

Cicadas are so noisy in South Carolina that residents are calling the police

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