It was an ordinary day. Late morning when the Morton Arboretum's senior horticulturist arrived at the Children's Garden with a special guest....a rare, blue-eyed female Magicicada cassini cicada, spotted earlier in the day by a visitor. A lucky few saw the cicada Friday at the arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, before its release back into the world in suburban Chicago to join its red-eyed relatives, the more common look for most cicada species, as the 2024 cicada emergence gets underway. As the enclosure opened, the blue-eyed lady took flight into a tree. The unique bug then flew down to land on the leg of Stephanie Adams, plant health care leader. Photos began to snap! "It's a casualty of the job," said Adams, who frequently is decorated with the bugs. Mr. Floyd Shockley, collections manager of the Department of Entomology at the Smithsonian Institute, said the blue-eyed cicada is rare, but just how rare is uncertain. "It's impossible to estimate how rare since you'd have to collect all the cicadas to know what percentage of the population had been blue eye mutation," he said. Periodic cicadas emerge every 13 or 17 years. Only the 17-year brood is beginning to show so far in spots as far north as Lisle, where there different species are digging out of the ground, attaching to trees, shedding their exo-skeleton and putting on a show. "The appearance of them on the trees, just the sheer volume of them, looks like science fiction," Adams said. "It's definitely something to see. I'd love to get to see one of these creatures. Must be exciting! It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
The rare, blue-eyed Magicicada Cassini cicada
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