A plague is coming. Another cicada brood is about to make its once-every-17-years appearance this spring across the eastern half of Ohio.

A plague is coming.

Another cicada brood is about to make its once-every-17-years appearance this spring across the eastern half of Ohio.

Not familiar with cicadas? Here�s how it will go down: Millions of Brood V cicadas will pull their greasy bodies out of the ground and, for six weeks, fill the air with a hum louder than an airplane engine.

Franklin County won�t see many cicadas, said Gene Kritsky, chairman of the biology department at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati and a cicada expert. But elsewhere in Ohio, particularly around Nelsonville, Athens and the eastern parts of the state, they will be impossible to ignore.

Your dog probably will eat them. They will be on your car. They will be on your walkway. They might get stuck in your niece�s hair, causing her to freak out. You�ll almost certainly crunch a few as you wander around your neighborhood.

But fear not: Cicadas pose no threat to anything. In fact, for much of nature, they will make things pretty amazing.

The last time this brood emerged, in 1999, the wild turkey population flourished, delighting hunters across the state. And birds rarely seen in Ohio often arrive to feast on the cicada buffet.

�Everyone eats them,� said Jim McCormac, an avian expert with the Ohio Division of Wildlife. � There are birds like the Mississippi kite (a small bird of prey) that is a very rare breeder in Ohio, but they are huge cicada eaters. ... Everything, just basically everything that can grab one, will start eating them.�

These cicadas have lived underground for the past 17 years, and when they climb to the surface, the holes they leave behind will aerate the soil and more quickly funnel rainwater to plant and tree roots, Kritsky said.

Before they die, female cicadas leave their eggs behind on tree branches, which can, depending on the tree, actually be helpful.

�Next year, the (trees�) flower production and the growth will be a little lusher,� Kritsky said. �Apple orchards and cherry trees, for example, and oak will have a greater yield of fruit next year because of this. It�s like a natural pruning.�

Cicadas can damage young trees, but the amount of insecticide you�d need to wipe them out would be harmful to beneficial bugs and soil, said John Cooley, a cicada researcher at the University of Connecticut. �Wrap the trees with netting and exclude them,� he said.

And here�s a dirty secret about cicadas: Once they emerge, they�re only after one thing. �The purpose of all living things is just to reproduce,� Kritsky said.

That hum you hear the cicadas singing? It�s the males trying to attract a mate.

The female reply is a wing flick that sounds a little like a muted finger-snap. Once the male cicada gets the go-ahead, he flits over to the female. Copulation can last from 30 minutes to 50 hours, depending on the weather, Cooley said. The longest recorded cicada mating session lasted three full days.

�Insects are funny animals,� Cooley said. �And when it gets cold or wet or whatever, they just slow down.�

Kritsky likes to think of cicadas as the insects of history. People tell stories about what they were doing the last time a broods emerged.

Central Ohio residents still tell stories about Brood X, which last emerged in 2004, right before the Memorial Tournament. The hum was so loud in Dublin that it drowned out cheers for Tiger Woods and Ernie Els, who won the tournament.

The last time Brood V came out in 1999, there was no Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Ricky Martin had just started crooning �Living La Vida Loca,� and Sept. 11 was still just a day on a calendar.

�They are the bugs of history, in that they�re generational things � they emerge basically once every generation,� Kritsky said. �The year 2033 will be the next emergence, and you may be telling people where you were in 2016.�

larenschield@dispatch.com

@larenschield