Molly Bilinski
ALLENTOWN Seventeen years ago, Rick Crist and Michael Sitvarin put 1,000 miles on Crist’s Jeep Wrangler driving to state parks and municipalities, listening for screams.
The Muhlenberg College undergraduates, equipped with flip phones, paper and pencils, were working on a summer research project alongside their biology professor, Marten Edwards, mapping the places where periodical cicadas had crawled out from the earth to scream, mate and die.
This year, the next generation of those cicadas is set to emerge, and the trio aren’t going to miss the unique, loud, natural phenomenon.
“It’s something, really, just this past week or so, that I’ve started thinking about the cicadas more often, that I have realized that there’s a personal connection,” said Sitvarin, now a biology professor at Clayton State University in Georgia.