Racket or Rebirth: Cicadas

Supper on the deck is one of the summer pleasures these days. We sit as the sun goes down and watch the hummingbirds tank up for the night. We listen to the world of noisemakers from sleepy birds to wind in the trees. Because it’s July, the boom and crackle of distant fireworks accent the evening. On this particular evening, the announcement of high summer comes in the form of a lone cicada practicing his love songs. He starts out joyously, calling in that rising, happy buzz to the ladies out there. The song rises to a crescendo and then fades away, slowing down like a wind-up phonograph record that has run out of steam. We laugh at the comical ending of his song. In two or three weeks, he will be joined by his brothers, emerging from the earth for that one joyful and noisy time of mating. He’s a couple of weeks early by my reckoning since I always associate a full cicada chorus with my birthday in mid-July.

This fellow is not part of the legions of 17-year cicadas that swarmed over Washington D.C. a couple of years ago. By his pulsing song, we identify him as a scissor grinder cicada. He is one of three or four very recognizable cicadas that will sing in late summer on Owl Acres. His cousin, the dogday cicada sounds like a buzz saw when he sings, and gets his name because he appears during the dog days of summer. I used to think that the dog days of summer were so named because it was so miserably hot that all a body wanted to do was lie around and pant like a dog. But, no, the name comes from the presence of Sirius, the dog star, in the sky during that time of year.

A third familiar cicada song is from the Linne’s cicada. His song crescendos to a high-pitched, rapidly pulsating song that ends abruptly. Yet another type of cicada here is the northern dusk-singing cicada. Guess when you might hear his 15-20-second, heavy, pulsating drone. 

We will hear these four varieties and maybe more as the summer ebbs into fall.

Our little scissor grinder and his cousins are annual cicadas with similar two to five year life cycles.

This guy is most likely green with black markings. He has two prominent bulging, faceted eyes with three little eyes between them, the better to find his lady. He has semi-transparent wings that he holds over his head like a roof. At one and five-eighths inches long and a wing span of up to two inches, he’s much larger than most of our insects. He has strong front legs that he’s been using to tunnel in the soil for most of his life. He hatched from an egg laid in a crack in a twig a few summers ago. He fell out of his tree and burrowed into the soil. He’s been living underground ever since, feeding on the sap from tree roots, and going through several growth stages. Just yesterday he crawled out of a hole in the dirt, as a wingless nymph. He got very still, shed his hard outer covering for the last time,  and emerged as a mature winged adult. He climbed up a tree. And now he is practicing with the two noise-making membranes on his sides, trying to get the song right so that a lady will notice him. He has more work to do to get it right, but in a couple of weeks, his brothers will all sing together in that symphony of summer. Their ladies will find them. They will mate. The ladies will lay eggs in cracks in twigs. They will all die, and the cycle begins again.

Annual cicadas like our four singers emerge every year, but may have spent from one to nine years below ground beforehand and do not synchronize their emergence the way that the 13- and 17—year cousins do. Instead, some of each variety will be ready to emerge any given summer, leaving their younger brothers and sisters to grow underground for another year or more until it’s their turn.

The most notable and recognizable aspect of cicadas is, of course, their song. By late summer, no matter where you go outdoors, you are likely to hear one or another of the over 170 species of cicada that sing from the trees all over the United States. But how do they make so much racket?

The answer is that cicadas have evolved a unique set of membranes on their abdomens called tymbals. These membranes are ribbed, and when each rib is flexed, it clicks. The cicada has a special set of muscles specifically to flex these tymbal membranes at a rate of from 120 to 480 times per second. That makes the clicks merge into the buzz that we hear. One writer likened the cicada to a violin because along with the tymbals, they have air sacks that help to amplify the sound. The sound they make is so loud that they actually have to protect their own hearing from it. Each time they sing, they retract a tendon that puts a crease in their tympana, the large, organs they use for eardrums. That way they don’t vibrate.  

The native American tribe the Onondaga Nation celebrates their survival with a cicada festival. The story goes that after the white settlers destroyed their crops and forced them off their lands, they were starving. All they could find to eat was cicadas. So each year they celebrate their survival by eating cicadas. They are said to taste like popcorn with a lovely crunch.

Cicadas are all over the world in over 3,000 varieties. In China they have for millennia  been considered symbols or bringers of rebirth and immortality. During Chinese funerary rites, jade cicadas were placed in the mouths of the deceased in a way similar to the way scarabs were used in Egypt to guarantee rebirth. A carving of a cicada dated to 1500 B.C.E. is the oldest known representation of the cicada. Husks of cicadas, left behind on trees as they make their final molt from nymph to winged adult, are used in Chinese medicine for everything from  convulsions and fever to allergies and sinus troubles.

The Greeks were not immune to cicadas either. Aristotle was apparently fond of eating cicadas and waxed eloquent about their taste and their symbolism for resurrection and immortality.  

And, believe it or not, their singing has also been appreciated to the extent that they were captured and put in cages at various times throughout history. They have also been memorialized in art, poetry, song and legend throughout the world as symbols of immortality.

The cicada life is not always joy, however. A wasp called a cicada killer will capture a cicada in an aerial battle in which she stings the cicada and paralyzes it. She then has to drag the cicada to her burrow and maneuver it into a special chamber she has prepared. She then lays an egg on the cicada, closes up shop and disappears, knowing that her offspring will be well fed.

Cicadas were part of the soundscape of my childhood summer vacations, and now they remind me that the seasons continue to roll along. They also remind me of the amazing life outside my window.

Photo by Paul Krombholz Alt text: A stout green insect with veined, crystalline wings and wide-set, compound eyes, rests on a twig. Scissors Grinder Cicada