As temperatures warm in the northern states and with June just around the corner, we're starting to see some stragglers from Brood XIII territory (the greater Chicago area especially, and parts of Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Iowa)!

I recently spent some time digging into the question of whether and where septendecula appears in Brood XIII, particularly in Illinois, and found that there are county-specific records from past emergences. A search of The UConn Magicicada Database turned up 159 unconfirmed records and distribution records for the counties shown in green, and Sanborn and Heath 2009 involved septendecula collected in Cook County, IL, in 2007 (shown in orange). (Base map © GISGeography)

M. septendecula records make up just 1.5% (159/10,715) of the records in the UConn database, so it's evident that it is quite rare within Brood XIII.

Spring is in full swing, and with the big double emergence coming up next year of Magicicada broods XIII (17-year, Chicago area) and XIX (13-year, southeast US), we are fixin' to see a lot of stragglers...those unlucky cicadas who lose track of time and emerge off-cycle, generally doomed to a short and lonely adulthood. Stragglers are of interest to Magicicada researchers because they can provide clues as to how the cicadas mark time (or lose count of the years) and to how the broods may be accelerating, decelerating, or changing their boundaries.

I created the 2023 Magicicada Stragglers project to collect observations of Magicicada emerging off-cycle in 2023. We've already got 40 observations at the time of writing, representing at least four broods: X, XIII, XIX, and XXII, with a "mystery cicada" here and there. Stragglers are expected to emerge through May and into mid-June (especially in northern states, where they'll come out a bit later), so keep an eye and ear out for them, and happy iNatting!