'One in a million' blue-eyed cicadas found throughout Chicago area

Krist Schroeder was admiring cicadas at a forest preserve in suburban Warrenville Monday afternoon when he suddenly noticed a "one-in-a-million" creature staring at him from atop a plant.

"There was the blue-eyed cicada staring right up at me," Schroeder, a sergeant at the DuPage Forest Preserve Police Department, told the Chicago Sun-Times. "I just think it was a pretty amazing find. It was just a good feeling to find something like that."

Schroeder, who found the insect at the St. James Farm Forest Preserve, knew his colleagues wouldn’t believe him with just pictures, so Schroeder placed the insect in a Tupperware container with sticks and small plant pieces. He took it to work with him the next day to show his colleagues at a morning roll call before releasing it back into the wild.

"They thought it was pretty neat," Schroeder said. "A couple of them took the container from me and were looking up close. ... It's something you don’t get to see that often and they didn’t even know there were blue-eyed cicadas."

As two broods of cicadas emerge together for the first time in more than two centuries, a handful of folks like Schroeder in the Chicago area have been coming across the rare blue-eyed bugs, much to their excitement.

Dr. Gene Kritsky, professor emeritus at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, told the Sun-Times the blue-eyed insects are "certainly rare," though exactly how rare isn’t known.

“We have no idea about how rare they might be,” Kritsky told the Sun-Times. “It could be one-in-a-million; they’re rarely seen.”

Kritsky, who is in his 50th year working with cicadas, designed an app called Cicada Safari to help track the insects in the United States. He has seen two photos of blue-eyed cicadas out of over 40,000 submissions this year.

Aside from their different-colored eyes, blue-eyed cicadas have paler, more cream-colored wings, according to Kritsky.

While there isn’t a definitive answer as to why some cicadas have blue eyes, experts say it could be because of a genetic mutation.

“It probably is not an environmental condition,” Stephanie Adams, plant health care leader at the Morton Arboretum, told the Sun-Times. “It really is like the perfect genes from both parents came together and caused that mutation.”

Phil and Tricia Marx’s 9-year-old son William found the blue-eyed insect outside their home Sunday in the Beverly neighborhood.

“I didn’t know anything about it,” Phil Marx told the Sun-Times. “He actually let it go and then came in and Googled it and saw how rare it was and searched for an hour-and-a-half and found it again.”

After finding the bug and snapping a few pictures, William let the insect back into the

wild.

Even before this year’s cicada emergence, William has a great passion for insects, according to his parents.

“He’s been dying and waiting for the cicadas to come out,” Phil Marx said. “They say [blue-eyed cicadas] are one in a million, I’m sure he’s gone through tens of thousands of them already.”

This is a historic year for cicada emergence, as the breeding group that emerges every 17 years is overlapping with the 13-year breeding group, seen in downstate Illinois. It’s the first time the two broods have overlapped here in 221 years.

Some of the highest reported cicada sightings so far in the Greater Chicago Area are in suburban areas like Oak Park, Downers Grove and Wheaton, according to Cicada Safari’s data tracking map.

One of the blue-eyed creatures found in the Chicago suburbs was donated by a family to the Field Museum and is the first blue-eyed cicada added to the museum’s collection dating back more than a century, the museum announced in a press release Wednesday.

"I have been in Chicago for five periodical cicada emergences of our Brood XIII, and this is the first blue-eyed cicada I have seen,” said Jim Louderman, a collections assistant at the museum. "These rare insect emergences are always infertile and can not have offspring, which is why they remain so rare.”

Kelly Simkins, owners of Merlin’s Rockin’ Pet Show, was looking at cicadas for about an hour when she came across a blue-eyed one at the Orland Grassland on West 167th Street early Monday morning.

"I was surprised, I was like; 'Okay, this is different,'" Simkins told the Sun-Times.

She noticed how the blue-eyed bugs drew intrigue from those who weren’t that interested in cicadas.

"People that are afraid of cicadas or don't know much about them, I noticed they're really interested in my blue-eyed cicada," Simkins said. "They think it's really pretty and they're not as afraid anymore."

For anyone that happens to come across the blue-eyed creatures, Adams suggests storing them in a freezer and submitting them for research.

“If you want [the blue-eyed cicada] to be studied and better understood, then it would need to go to an entomologist who does research and you’d want to preserve that sample,” Adams said. “Otherwise, you can let it go in nature and see if we can breed a small population of blue-eyed cicadas in different areas.”

Kritsky suggests that anyone who encounters a blue-eyed cicada take a picture of the creature and submit a photo voucher through the Cicada Safari app for documentation.

“Submit that photo voucher and let it go back into the environment,” Kritzky said.

Contributing: Mary Norkol and Cindy Hernandez