[Column] We are to blame for the cicadas’ scream

Jo Hong Seop, environmental reporter for the Hankyoreh

The French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre once fired a cannon next to a bunch of noisy cicadas; he wanted to prove that they cannot hear. The experiment was a success, so he assumed - they didn’t even notice, and went right on singing. But these days, even elementary school students know that cicadas have sensitive hearing, and fly off if you get too close. The sound of Fabre’s cannon was out of the range of sounds cicadas can hear, just as we cannot hear the sounds bats make. Cicadas sing because they’re trying to mate.

These noisy insects have become an annoying presence during the summer in big cities. Their onslaught started around 10 years ago. Without regard to whether it is night or day, the noise they make - without any sense of rhythm - is noise in the truest sense of the word. And they don’t just raise their sound in the trees. They grab on to mosquito nets and sing from there, waking people up who have had a hard enough time getting to sleep in the heat of these tropical nights.

Some say the cicadas’ song symbolizes the mood of summer, but in reality it has become a most annoying noise. There are now more "malmaemi" than ever, a variety that likes to perch near apartments and on trees lining the streets. City streetlights make them think that night is day, and global warming has made the world a more hospitable place as far as these creatures are concerned. Indeed, it is humans who bear the blame for the current noisy situation, not the cicadas.

Every 17 years, the eastern United States is overcome with billions and billions of cicada larvae that come up from the ground, on their peculiar and long life cycle. They most recently paid a visit in 2004, so the next event is expected in 2021. There are so many of them that when they sing, it is as loud as a jet engine. Korean cicadas just don’t compare. Even now, you can go to the Korean countryside and hear a wide variety of the species singing in harmony, rather than discord.

The reason Fabre didn’t know very much about these creatures was that there weren’t that many cicadas in northern Europe at the time. Nowadays they’re a headache, but we have a lot to learn from them: we don’t yet even know how many years the 15 varieties found in Korea stay underground before paying us a visit.