They’re certainly not everywhere, even in their historical range. Just because something is incredibly common doesn’t mean it isn’t vulnerable, as the examples of the now-extinct Rocky Mountain locust and passenger pigeon should serve to remind us.

CGP – Glad you found my cicada blogging to be of interest. I was worrying it might seem a tad excessive!

Glad you got over your aversion to them!

Larry – Glad you liked the post. Yeah, I guess you must be close to some 13-year broods in Hannibal. We don’t have any here. But in the warmer areas where shorter-cycle Magicicadas are found, the trees grow more quickly, so again, as you say, damage is minimized over time.

arby – Great stories about the chainsaws and the mating! I sure wish you had a blog. Your comment about fruit trees on an earlier post was one of the things that sparked this post.

Lee’s River – Yes, except that they don’t actually stridulate, as Gina’s video demonstrates. The Wikipedia article, though lacking in other respects, is good on this:

Male cicadas have loud noisemakers called “timbals” on the sides of the abdominal base. Their “singing” is not the stridulation (where two structures are rubbed against one another) of many other familiar sound-producing insects like crickets: the timbals are regions of the exoskeleton that are modified to form a complex membrane with thin, membranous portions and thickened “ribs”. Contracting the internal timbal muscles produces a clicking sound as the timbals buckle inwards. As these muscles relax, the timbals return to their original position producing another click. The interior of the male abdomen is substantially hollow to amplify the resonance of the sound. A cicada rapidly vibrates these membranes, and enlarged chambers derived from the tracheae make its body serve as a resonance chamber, greatly amplifying the sound. They modulate their noise by wiggling their abdomens toward and away from the tree that they are on. Additionally, each species has its own distinctive song.