Kristi Shirley is fascinated by the army of crickets as she marches through trees in a park near her home in southern Illinois.
“There’s nothing like this. It’s just, wow, is this what we’re looking at before our eyes?” said Shirley.
By now you’ve probably seen the headlines: two groups periodical crickets emerging at the same time for the first time in two centuries, bringing with them billions of noisy insects 16 US states.
But biologist Gene Kritsky says there may be a deeper meaning to this insect invasion. The crickets come together at a time when it’s all too easy to see what keeps people apart, as if nature is trying to get our collective attention (again).
In April, large crowds gathered to watch the film total solar eclipse. Earlier this month, millions of people were surprised when the northern Lights danced across the night sky. The two events were accurately predicted by astronomers.
“Now we’re seeing periodic cicadas coming out of the ground, predicted by entomologists. And at a time when people have lost faith in science, this shows that the science is working and we’re doing it right,” Kritsky said.
These natural events offer people a kind of shared experience to put aside their differences and come together to admire Mother Nature.
“I was at an eclipse party and there were people of all political persuasions and we didn’t talk politics. We watched the eclipse,” Kritsky said.
Now Kritsky has created an app called Cicada Safari to track where and when the bugs arrive. It brings together people who find something special in the unique-looking insects — people like Shirley, who calls herself a “super user” of the app, and Blaine Rothauser, who struck up a conversation with Shirley about the crickets just minutes after meeting her . in the park near her house.
The power of the crickets seemed to give these complete strangers something to bond over. Instead of asking questions like ‘What do you do?’, ‘What do you believe in?’ or ‘Who do you support?’, Krisky says: “What’s important is: are we all curious?”
And while it often feels like people live in separate worlds, we actually share one.
Ben Tracy
