Episode Seven - A Bustle in the Hedgerow: Listening to Insects
Episode Description:
Industrialized monoculture tends to treat insects as pests to be exterminated. What can we do to make them partners? For starters, listen. In this episode of Grounded Hope we learn about a unique Ohio State University research project that records the daily, seasonal and annual rhythms of farm life. We go into the woods at the Aullwood Audubon Center in Dayton to listen to the Brood X cicadas and learn how their periodical emergence will benefit the bluebird population and other wildlife this year. We ask people what they think the future will be like 17 years from now when Brood X emerges again in 2038. And we talk with Kat Christen, the Farm Education Manager at Agraria, to find out how the simple act of not mowing your lawn can increase the biodiversity of wildlife, both in your community, and on the planet.
Aullwood naturalist Sam Romeo with cicada
Photo Credit: Renee Wilde
Podcast Script:
HOST INTRO: Industrialized monoculture tends to treat insects as pests to be exterminated. What can we do to make them partners?
For starters, listen.
In this episode of Grounded Hope we learn about a unique Ohio State University research project that records the daily, seasonal and annual rhythms of farm life.
We go into the woods at the Aullwood Audubon Center in Dayton to listen to the Brood X cicadas and learn how their periodical emergence will benefit the bluebird population and other wildlife this year.
We ask people what they think the future will be like 17 years from now when Brood X emerges again in 2038.
And we talk with Kat Christen, the Farm Education Manager at Agraria, to find out how the simple act of not mowing your lawn can increase the biodiversity of wildlife, both in your community, and on the planet.
I’m Renee Wilde. From the Highways to the hedgerows, we bring you grounded hope.
MELLINGER FARM ACOUSTICAL RESEARCH PROJECT
RENEE WILDE: The Mellinger farm lies about 15 minutes west of Wooster, Ohio. This former family farm is now a research center for the Ohio State Universities AMP: Agroecosystem Management Program.
When visiting this farm, you might not even notice one of the projects being conducted by OSU researchers. Tucked among the white barnyard buildings is a thin metal stake with a small, faded green, metal box attached to it.
On one end of the metal box are three small plastic knobs. One of the knobs sticks out about 3 inches from the box, with what looks like a small, yellow sponge on the end.
CASEY HOY: This is a song meter. It’s actually an older style. We’re about to replace them with some of the newer units that they have.
You can program the little computer in there and it’s set to record for thirty seconds, every thirty minutes, all day, every day.
My Name is Casey Hoy. I’m a professor of entomology. I hold the Kellogg Chair in Agricultural Ecosystems Management and lead the Agroecosystems Management Program (AMP).
WILDE: These song meters are part of AMP’s Acoustical Monitoring of Agricultural Sites project. They have been recording the daily, seasonal, and annual rhythms of the farm's ecosystems since 2012.
HOY: I can’t say we have it all analyzed. We have an enormous amount of data, and this is where I’m hoping my colleagues in computer science, and the ones that are really good in artificial intelligence and dealing with the extracting patterns from those kinds of huge data sets, that we’re going to be able to make progress that way.
And we’re hoping with this unit, which is on the farmstead, and another one just like it that’s back there by the woods, can give us an idea of how patterns of biodiversity have changed as that change in the farming practices has taken place.
WILDE: Did you come from a farming background? How did you get into this agricultural research?
HOY: You know, where I was always out in the woods and fields. I was always interested in insects since I was a little kid. My PHD is in entomology.
And, where a lot of this biological diversity using sound came from was marine systems. So sonar has been used for a long time in marine systems, and biologists started looking at whale song.
We have the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics at the Ohio State Campus. Donald Borror was a pioneer in this area and used bioacoustics as a way of looking at the biology of birds, insects, amphibians, and so on.
That kind of work tended to be focused on a particular type of organism. So a lot of time the particular challenge was trying to pick out one kind of bird song from the rest of the sounds, or frequency of cricket chirps, or something like that.
What we’re doing here is really all of the animals that are making sound are part of biodiversity. So it’s more about how full is the soundscape. How diverse is it. And that’s a very different kind of analytic challenge to pick that out.
And in an undisturbed ecosystem, if you can find one these days, good luck with that. But in an ecosystem that is far from the anthro-phonic sound, the sound that we generate as people, you would be able to look at just the biological part of the soundscape and analyze that.
That doesn’t work in agriculture. It's agriculture, we’re supposed to be here.
So we expect machine noise. And the question isn’t is there an absence of machine noise. It’s how complete is the biological part of the soundscape, and how does it interact with our activity, and does it change if you change the way you're managing your land, and so on.
WILDE: You can check out some of the sound recordings from this project on the AMP website at amp.osu.edu.
BROOD X
(CICADA CHORUS)
SAM ROMEO: My name is Sam Romeo and I am an environmental educator and naturalist here at the Aullwood Audubon Center.
RENEE WILDE: We’re standing in the parking lot of the Aullwood Nature Center in Northwest Dayton.
Brown, thumb sized, insects with red eyes are flying everywhere.
ROMEO: Yes. These are the 17 year cicadas. This is Brood X, the largest of the broods. People call it brood x, but it’s the romal numeral ten.
When I hear people call it brood x, it's like Generation X, or something, but it is brood ten.
WILDE: How did they come up with that name, Brood X.
ROMEO: So they’ve all categorized them by geography. There are twelve - seventeen year cicadas and those are broods one through twelve. And then there are thirteen year cicadas, which are kind of the other end.
But, there have been many broods that have gone extinct. So there are technically thirty broods but we only see about fifteen or sixteen of them today.
WILDE: Periodical cicadas are the longest lived insect on the planet, dating back 5 million years. Their evolutionary success lies in their sheer numbers when they emerge for 6 to 8 weeks in the late spring.
In the past, cicadas could number as many as one million insects per acre.
In an Indianapolis Star article, Martin Edwards, a professor of biology at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, states that “The range of cicadas that we see now is a fraction of what it would have been when the Native Americans were the only people around, before so many of our forests were cleared for farming and for wood.”
ROMEO: In Ohio, before European settlement, it was said that a squirrel could jump tree to tree all across the state of Ohio without touching the ground.
WILDE: Cicada nymphs spend their time underground feeding on the fluid flowing from the roots of trees and plants with a straw like tongue, growing bigger over the years until it's time to burrow out.
ROMEO: So they’re essentially feeding on the xylem. The xylem is the portion of the tree that brings nutrients to and from, carbohydrates, and fluids to the tree.
WILDE: Scientists speculate that cicadas measure the seasons through the fluid they drink from trees, and use that fluid to count the number of years before they emerge.
ROMEO: The thing about cicadas is that every seventeen years, you only get a year to study them. It’s not like if you were writing a dissertation paper on them, you could get it done in two years. No, you have to wait a long time till that next one comes back to really be able to study them.
WILDE: Benjamin Banneker, a Black naturalist, has only recently been credited as one of the first scientific observers to calculate the 17 year life cycle of the periodical cicadas.
He was a 17-year-old tobacco farmer when he first observed the Brood X cicadas emerge in Maryland in 1749, which he thought were a plague of locusts.
ROMEO: You know, they probably called them locusts back then in those papers. A locust is more of a grasshopper, while these cicadas that we see are more in the true bug family.
WILDE: The periodical cicadas make a high-pitched humming sound, which can reach 85 - 100 decibels. The sound equivalent of a lawnmower or a train. In some cases cicadas have reached sound levels that have drowned out jet engines at airports.
ROMEO: So that is what we call the male chorus. A lot of males sit in a big tree and they all kind of call like that. But what we just heard (was) a wave there. Once a couple of them start singing they all kind of jump in, like, ‘oh we’re all singing now! Ok let's sing now!’.
(CICADA WAVE)
In Brood X we have 3 different species of cicadas. Each one has it’s kind of different call.
But the ones we have that kind of say, pharaoh, pharaoh. So it’s kind of a slow roll. Where some of the other cicadas it’s more of a clicking or a buzzing.
The males, actually, are the only ones that call, and the females will actually do a wing flick. And if you’re lucky and you find a male cicada and flick your fingers next to it, you might actually get the male to sing for you.
WILDE: How do you tell if they are a male or a female?
ROMEO: I think the females are a little bit bigger. What you can do is pick one up and flip it over, and on the abdomen is what we call the tymbles. Those are what the males make their call with.
You know those little bendy straws that have the little stretchy parts? If you were to take that and compress it and open it up really, really fast a lot, that’s kind of how they make their call. And the females do not have them.
WILDE: There were many places that didn’t hear the periodical cicadas singing this year.
ROMEO: I was in Tipp City, Ohio in a neighborhood that I didn’t hear any cicadas. And I asked, did you guys treat your yard, do you spray chemicals, and almost everybody said yes.
Also you have to think of how old is the forest? How old is the deforestation in that area?
They think a lot of brood cicadas have gone extinct because of (the) expanding of farmland and removal of trees. If you don’t have those roots that are transferring the xylem to and from the tree, and if you cut a tree down it’s not processing those carbohydrates through the xylem, those cicada broods will eventually die.
That’s maybe the reason why, or maybe the cicadas just didn’t lay eggs in those areas and make it down to the tree roots.
WILDE: Although the female cicadas will lay hundreds of eggs in trees, and the nymphs feed on the fluids through the roots, the cicadas will rarely cause damage to a host tree.
ROMEO: They can actually be helpful. There is also what’s called flagging in more mature trees. You might see a couple dead ends on your tree becoming dead and falling off, and that’s just like a natural pruning for them.
The only kind of effect that we saw that’s somewhat negative where there’s been some studies is that it can affect the Grey Squirrels, because the next year that flagging can actually affect the mast, the acorns, and the food crop for those squirrels.
But pretty much everything other than that pretty much benefits from the cicadas. They are pretty much alive right now to mate, and die and become food for all the birds.
I’m in charge of the bluebird monitoring projects here and I’m estimating we might have four, maybe even five clutches of bluebirds.
Sometimes they, maybe, have, like, two sets of eggs, three, but during cicada years they can have four or five.
So the population of animals is going to skyrocket this year.
WHERE WILL WE BE WHEN BROOD X EMERGES IN 2038
RENEE WILDE: The last time the Brood X cicadas emerged was 2004, when Roland Emerich’s movie The Day After Tomorrow, and Micheal Crightons book State of Fear, were forerunners in creating an entirely new genre, called ‘cli-fi’: climate based science fiction.
The number of storms had doubled in 2004 from the previous 2 decades and research would link global warming to a record US hurricane season, accelerated melting of Arctic sea ice and Siberian permafrost, and scientists would issue a warning that the west Antarctic ice sheet was starting to collapse
2004 would mark the beginning of a warming trend of the 10 hottest years on record over the next 15 years.
We asked people at Agraria, Ohio’s first center for regenerative practices, to imagine what the future will be like when the Brood X cicadas emerge again in 2038.
Here’s Susan Jennings, the Executive Director of Agraria.
SUSAN: As the years go by, the world is going to become more and more agrarian, both here in the U.S. and abroad.
And, so, in a way, I feel like the agriculture of the future is a back to the future, where we have more and more diverse small farms.
Again, not just here in the United States, But across the planet.
DAVID: Hello, I’m David. I see us moving towards a system of agriculture that’s a lot healthier for the atmosphere and for the planet.
Everyone’s going to be doing a lot more farming on their lawns, and people are going to be growing their own food, hopefully spreading out from the big cities and living more in the country and communities.
EZRA: Hello, my name is Ezra. What I’m hoping is that in the future, soon, people will realize that climate change is a big deal, and people will actually start taking a stand in trying to change it.
When I see littering it breaks my heart, but, I believe in people and I have immense hope that people will come together and find a common solution because in the end we’re all just trying to fight for happiness and a world we can be proud of.
KATE: I am Kate. I want to have kids. So hopefully in 17 years I do have kids, and I want to be a grandparent eventually, and I want there to be this prosperous Earth for them that was here for me.
KENISHA: Hi, my name is Kenisha. Obviously, what we’ve found is that depleting, and just taking, taking, taking and never giving back causes a domino effect everywhere else.
MARK: Hello, I’m Mark. I see a population that’s highly distracted and disempowered. There’s many other examples in other countries that we could see that there is clearly hope.
The question is, is the willpower and the attention span and the community empowerment of people to make one of these two choices, and what that adds up to.
SAMIR: I think we’ll need to make drastic changes for things to stay the same as they are now. We’ll definitely need to think about what we’re gonna to do.
AMY HARPER: What gives you hope that things are going to be the same.
SAMIR: People who are activists for environmental changes and who care about the environment.
HARPER: What are you going to do?
SAMIR: I will try my hardest to encourage in my family, water saving, energy saving, and food saving. We’ll try to limit the amount of resources we use.
HARPER: That sounds like a good plan. Thank you Samir.
WILDE: That was Amy Harper. Editor of the Agraria Journal and Communications Manager for the Center. Amy produced this segment.
CREATING WILD AREAS
WILDE: One simple climate-positive action that everyone can take right now is to adopt what Sam Romeo calls the 50/50 rule.
Try growing 50% of the food you eat. Try buying 50% less stuff. Try using an alternative form of transportation, like walking or riding a bike, 50% of the time.
ROMEO: Try making 50% of your yard a conservative, sustainable area.
WILDE: And the easiest way to do that, is to simply stop mowing your yard. Here’s Kat Christen.
KAT CHRISTEN: I’m the Farm Education Manager at Agraria.
I think the things we enjoy the most as humans are things that are beautiful, like butterflies and birds, toads and amphibians, reptiles, little rodents like bunnies and voles and mice.
So lots of different critters can live around the edges of farms.
And one of the things I think about is like this moment of awe that we feel when we see wild things or experience wild things as humans. And so this moment when you can be, like, gardening or in your regular space, or in your backyard, and here comes a hummingbird, or a butterfly, or you see a toad and how exciting that can be in that moment.
All these wild things, they need places to live. So we only have that experience if we provide the habitat for them.
So I think it’s really important to have wild spaces in any area that you can and encourage wild spaces anywhere that you can that you have.
Any spaces that you garden in, or that you own, or that you have the ability to impact, you know, to allow a little bit of wild-ness there.
WILDE: How would people do that?
CHRISTEN: Well, I think the easiest way is to not mow an area of your yard.
I think the other thing is when you let your lawn grow, and let spaces grow, food actually grows.
Food and medicine, they just come from the ground and they grow on their own. They come in from other wild spaces.
So you can also have a whole wild area of things that you can forage and eat. So you can take some of that biodiversity into your body and help your own well being and health in that way.
You can plant trees that are fruit bearing. There are all kinds of wild berries and nuts that wildlife love.
You can plant native flowers, like bee balm is one of my favorites. The hummingbirds love it. It's a wild, native wildflower. You can also use the leaves for tea, like bergamot tea.
So it has multiple purposes. It’s beautiful. It outcompetes weeds.
You know without these spaces we don’t have these animals. And if we have whole counties without those spaces, and we have whole states without those spaces, and we have a whole country without those spaces, and then a whole world without those spaces. Which means none of those animals have a place to live.
So when I think about the impact you can have on the places that you own or care for, or the spaces you have access to, whether you're talking about playgrounds, or churches, parks in your neighborhood, or your own private property, you can have a huge impact on the local wildlife.
You can put up a bluebird box and you can be responsible for hosting a habitat for a couple bluebird families on a very small amount of land.
It’s really exciting the stuff you can do to help us have experiences and interactions with wildlife.
WILDE: You can learn more about the benefits of creating wild areas by going to our website at GroundedHope.org and clicking on the resources tab.
Sign up for one of The Nature School programs at Agraria which holds outdoor programming for kids and families, year round on their website www.communitysolution.org. Their mission is to connect children and families to nature, themselves, and each other.
You can sign up at that same website to join Beth Bridgeman’s seed school and learn how to collect and save seeds on August 14th and 15th.
This podcast is brought to you by the people at Agraria, Ohio’s first center for regenerative practices and funded in part by a grant from the Ohio Humanities.
Our webmaster is Rachel Isaacson, Staff Member at Agraria.
Our scholars are Beth Bridgeman, who teaches a series of reskilling and resilience courses at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
And Rick Livingston, the Assistant Director of the Humanities Institute at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
I’m Renee Wilde, and you’ve been listening to Grounded Hope.
Agraria Farm at Sunset