Their grating screech has inspired the greatest haiku poets and driven collectors deep into forests, but the glory days for Japan’s beloved cicadas may be over: their deafening mating call is now officially noise pollution.

And for the thousands of athletes and fans who will arrive in Osaka for the world championships next week there is just one piece of advice — bring earplugs.

Increasingly hot summers and a traditional reluctance in Japan to harm the insects has prompted a population explosion of kumazemi — a variety of cicada from southern Japan that has an astonishing capacity to emit noise throughout the night.

But the assault of the cicadas, which measure 6cm (2½in), goes beyond mere aural onslaught. As the kumazemi cicadas have migrated north into the big urban areas, they have made the disruptive discovery that Japan’s world-class network of fibre-optic internet cables is the perfect place to lay their eggs.

Their relentless drive north has brought a racket that can measure 95 decibels to cities that used to sleep peacefully. In parts of Japan that have never experienced the noise, the deafening love-call easily drowns out the more sedate call of the darker-winged aburazemi.

In Osaka, the vast industrial city that until a month ago had never experienced the dry screech of the kumazemi, people are finding it hard to sleep. For babies and young children the sound is particularly disruptive. The burgeoning population of kumazemi creates a din equivalent to spending the night in a karaoke bar in full party mode, according to experts at Osaka University. The equivalent street noise — a pneumatic drill at a distance of 10 metres (33ft) — is banned in Japanese cities between the hours of 5pm and 9am.

Shigehiko Shiyake, the curator of the Osaka Museum of Natural History, and Professor Eiji Numata, Professor of Biology at Osaka University, are keeping track of the sharp increase of kumazemi. By counting the shells of maturing cicadas, they have been able to calculate that this year’s population will be more than twice that of last year.

“We don’t hear so many examples of such huge and such noisy populations of cicadas in big cities in other countries,” Mr Shiyake said. “I can well anticipate that a lot of athletes and their fans are going to be quite upset by this sound.” Despite their official designation as noise pollution, little will be done to harm the cicadas, which for centuries have been regarded in Japan as the ultimate symbol of the happy arrival of summer.

Telecoms companies, which have had to respond to thousands of broad-band internet customers being cut off because their cables have become hatching grounds, have begun to instal cabling with a rougher plastic coating. The still-untested theory is that cicadas are less likely to lay their eggs in a substance that feels more like rotten wood.

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