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Courtesy Dan Mozgai/Cicadamania.com
To Map Billions of Cicadas, It Takes Thousands of Citizen Scientists
Volunteer cicada trackers are preparing to become part of one of the oldest citizen science efforts in the U.S. as Brood X emerges across several states.
At the end of May, Dan Mozgai will spend his vacation from his day job chasing cicadas. The bugs won’t be hard to find; in about a week, billions of the beady-eyed crawlers from Brood X will start coming up from their 17-year-long underground, blanketing parts of 15 states in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest with their cacophony of shrill mating calls.
Mozgai isn’t an entomologist — he does online marketing for DirecTV. But since 2007, he’s worked closely with academic researchers to track various broods of periodical cicadas, as part of one of the oldest citizen science efforts in the U.S.