Chicago’s Field Museum recently received a surprising donation. A 4-year-old named Jack Bailey gifted the museum a rare blue-eyed cicada he found in his family’s yard.
Cicadas are easily recognized by bulgy eyes that are set wide apart. Most specimens have red eyes, but a small percentage, usually one in a million, are born with blue eyes.
Jack was collecting cicadas one evening when his sister noticed one that looked quite different than the others, sporting a set of blue eyes. The family ended up snapping some photos before releasing it. However, once they did some research and discovered how rare it was, they ended up capturing it again.
The blue-eyed cicada caught by Jack was temporarily displayed in a museum and will now be examined by scientists, who will try to discover the secret behind its eye color.
“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,” Jim Louderman, a collections assistant in the insect division of the Field Museum, said in the statement, which you can find here. “I have also seen two emergences of Brood X in Indiana and two emergences of Brood XIX in Central Illinois. These rare [blue-eyed] insect emergences are always infertile and can not have offspring, which is why they remain so rare.”
