Many countries have cicadas that create a terrible din day and night. But humans appear to be very tolerant of the noise even though it is loud and frankly unappealing a sound. One might think this is due to being habituated to the sound and it becoming part of the background sound. But even those people who are tourists from areas with no cicadas…for eg British tourists in Turkey…never complain of the sound.
Has any nation tried to eradicate cicadas?
I’d disagree the sound is unappealing, unless you’re within a few metres of a cicada it is just background noise (one I’m quite found of as it reminds me of staying with my grandparents whose gardens were literally infested with cicadas at times) and it is pretty rare for them to get inside a house for the noise to become any kind of nuisance.
For the record I’m from the inland south UK, where even hearing (the much quieter) crickets is rare. I just don’t think the sounds of chirping insects are particularly bothersome to humans.
The only thing bad about the sound is the sheer decibel level that is sometimes achieved.
I saw on a Nova program that the Australian Cicada is a very loud beastie indeed. Louder than a jackhammer, able to drown out the opera singer they had on that program. YMMV. They can cause significant damage to trees when they hatch in large numbers, because they lay their eggs in the narrowest twigs. But I don’t hear about municipal spraying for cicadas eradication. Our trend towards less yard spraying has allowed them to grow in large numbers. And has allowed the rebound of a predator, the cicada wasp. Which is pretty scary looking, but pretty harmless to humans Sphecius speciosus - Wikipedia
Cicadas are harmless. When Brood X, the largest of the US East Coast 17-year broods, hatches out, it is a spectacle and a memorable event. The eggs they lay in tree twigs cause a lot of brown leaves and twigs hanging down…for a little while…and then everything is normal again, no perceptible change from before.
They are part of the natural world. I am pretty sick of people trying to kill everything.
Maybe humans naturally evolved to tolerate or even enjoy the sound – early humans maddened by the sound of cicadas or crickets would never make it to reproduce, because the sound would be a major boner-kill, or it would drive them to jump off a cliff. Or set themselves on fire.
How unromantic, to be offended by a chorus of love songs! Cicadas, in their brief adult lives, eat nothing, find/mate with other cicadas and lay eggs. The only harm they do is to the tips of the outermost branches, where they bite open the bud and lay eggs in it. The twig is not killed, and the tree has hundreds more undamaged twigs.
When the eggs hatch, the little larvae fall to the ground, and the birds eat most of them before they have a chance to burrow into the ground. Over the next 17 years, many of the chubby little grubs will fall prey to burrowing rodents and such.
What sounds like a chorus of thousands is really a much smaller number. If you’ve ever chanced to meet a single cicada in a patio room, you know one cicada makes an astonishing racket.
QFT.
Eradicate cicadas? How about eradicating aedes aegypti or other actual threats to public health? Not harmless insects whose seasonal noises are a part of the cultural soundtrack of some nations.
We do seem to become accustomed to high levels of noise. Visit someone who lives near a busy road and they seem totally deaf to the noise. Even people living under a flight path seem to stop hearing the planes. When we were in Turkey, the cicadas were just background noise.
As a sufferer though, can anyone tell me why I can’t stop hearing the noise tinnitus makes in my right ear?
Cecil on tinnitus.
I lived in South Korea for a while. It is truly astonishing how loud they can be, especially if you are close to a tree when they reach a crescendo. But sleeping indoors, I don’t recall ever being bothered by them.
I don’t know about human tolerance for “real” cicada noise, but I once had a Cicada Keyring from Archie McPhee…and I can tell you human tolerance for that noise was ZERO. 
I looked up how they do it. How they get so loud. Unlike crickets, who are essentially playing fiddle, cicadas are beating on miniature drums. On either side, their chitin thickens around a resonance-producing hollow space, over which the chitin becomes very thin to form the drumhead. Also, they articulate hard projections of chitin to beat on them like drumsticks. Cicadas are literally whaling on bongo drums they carry around with them.
Says the person who never had a single cricket hiding in the bedroom, chirping at intervals when you’re trying to sleep. :smack:
When I lived in a rural area, I was astounded by how loud frogs are in the spring. You think the countryside would be quiet and peaceful at night, but its not, there’s a constant shrill noise of love-sick frogs. Now that I live in the city, I miss the sound of frogs.
As a consolation, we have cicadas in the city. It does amaze me how one not very big bug can produce so much sound. I’ve always thought of them as heat bugs - I only hear them during the hottest summer days, and to me it is just part of the sound of summer.
Caught the cat chasing a cricket the size of a Buick across the living room last night. Was pretty happy to relocate him to the back garden before he found somewhere to hide out and start chirping.
Cicadas are pretty common in the Southern US in the summer and quite loud, and while you sometimes notice the noise, it’s generally SO omnipresent that it just blends into the background, much like road noise does if you’re living near a busy road, or the way that the surf does if you live on the coast.
When I first move to Fl I thought I thought the buzzing sound was the electric lines :smack: I used to feel fairly stupid about that but I have since met other people who thought the same thing. The sound isn’t unpleasant to me but I do try not to think of the trees all around me full of the ugly ass creatures. The first time I saw one - it was clinging to my fence for some reason- I had no idea what it was but it was absolutely revolting.
When Buddy Holly was just getting started in his garage studio, there was a cricket the band could never track down. The band’s first recordings had the cricket’s sound in the background. That’s why Holly’s band was called The Crickets.
Again—miniature bongo drums.
Millions cicadas! Millions of drums! Millions cicadas drumming on drums!
Ch’rrchchch’rrchchch’rrch’rrch’rr!
ETA With apologies to Al Perkins for the parody.