This morning I walked out my front door with my oldest son to head down to the bus stop.  Something seemed odd.  The sidewalk was not just dirty with bits of leaves and sticks, it was crunchy.  It looks like the cicadas are coming up from the ground and moulting now.

I've lived in Asheville now for about 4 years, and every year since we arrived, we've heard, "this is the year all of the locusts come out!  Once every 17 years!".  It becomes a meme in the late spring every year. 

It's never really happened before now.  Sure, we'd see a few, but not the great plague that was always expected to descend upon us.  I guess they were just off by a few years.

Since they gave me such an interesting morning, I thought I'd see what I could find out about them.  Will they hurt my plants?  Will they bite or sting the kids?  Here's what I learned.

It turns out that they aren't really locusts.  Locusts are a kind of grasshopper.  Cicadas, however, are more like spittle bugs and leafhoppers.

Cicadas don't bite or sting or have any poison that you need to worry about.  They are pretty benign as bugs go.  in fact, a lot of people around the world enjoy eating them.  Apparently the females are nice and fleshy.

Yum!  Appetizing, eh?

It is also the case, apparently, that many species of cicada do have a 17 year lifecycle - well, 13-17 years, which might explain everyone's confusion around here. 

For the most part, however, we don't see cicadas at all.  They live most of their lives underground.  When they come up (after about 17 years), they moult their pupal skin and grow wings.  After that, they mostly get eaten by birds and other wildlife (including humans).

Look at all of those spent exoskeletons.  That's what was so crunchy under my feet!

I looked around the rest of the yard, but it seems like they are all concentrated in the front foundation bed.  The back yard hardly has any - although, we may blame the dogs for that.  Here's how my poor helleborus looked this morning.

Covered in bugs!

Almost all of my research was courtesy of Wikipedia - it's a great resource.  Here is an excerpt from the cicada page.

A cicada is an insect of the order Hemiptera, suborder Auchenorrhyncha, in the superfamily Cicadoidea, with large eyes wide apart on the head and usually transparent, well-veined wings. There are about 2,500 species of cicada around the globe, and many remain unclassified. Cicadas live in temperate to tropical climates where they are among the most widely recognized of all insects, mainly due to their large size and remarkable acoustic talents. Cicadas are sometimes colloquially called "locusts",^[1] although they are unrelated to true locusts, which are a kind of grasshopper. They are also known as "jar flies". Cicadas are related to leafhoppers and spittlebugs. In parts of the southern Appalachian Mountains in the United States they are known as "dry flies" because of the dry shell they leave behind.

Cicadas do not bite or sting, are benign to humans, and are not considered a pest. Many people around the world regularly eat cicadas: the female is prized as it is meatier. Cicadas have been (or are still) eaten in Ancient Greece, China, Malaysia, Burma, Latin America and the Congo. Cicadas are employed in the traditional medicines of China.

The name is a direct derivation of the Latin cicada. (In classical Greek it was called a tettix, and in modern Greek tzitzikas.)

In 2004, "cicada" ranked 6th in Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year.

Update!  I found a really great resource for cicadas at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology site.  Lots more info there.  It looks to me like these are Magicicadas.  Here's a brief snippet.

Periodical cicadas can cause physical damage to small trees or shrubs if too many feed from the plant or lay eggs in the twigs; such damage can cause "flagging", or breaking of peripheral twigs. Orchard and nursery owners probably should not plant young trees or shrubs in the years preceding an emergence of periodical cicadas, because young trees may be harmed by severe flagging. Mature trees and shrubs, however, usually survive even dense emergences of cicadas without apparent distress.