They don’t invade our homes or ravage pasture or crops or harass stock so are not in the basket of trouble-making insects that cause grief, so why wouldn’t you like them?
And they have such a clever life cycle.
With the hot weather they have emerged from the ground in large numbers.
I was in the yards this morning with a young vet doing a faecal egg count reduction test to check the efficacy of the drench families and I plucked a discarded skin off a post and stuck it to my shirt as we did as children.
She was from a town and I wrongly assumed millennials, with all the distractions of cell phones, multimedia, the internet and such, wouldn’t know of the simple distractions from the more innocent times of the 1960s. But she did.
The one most of us hear is called the chorus cicada. However, there are 42 different species here. I like it when they suddenly all decide they have had enough chirping and beat their wings against whatever they are sitting on to produce synchronised clicks.
It’s the males that make all the noise. Just like with humans. The louder and better you sing the better you do with the females. Just consider the Beatles or the Rolling Stones for the hominid equivalent.
These little fellows make the noise we hear by rapidly buckling and unbuckling a corrugated structure called a tymbal. When they are merrily chirping away they can turn their own hearing off as they would deafen themselves.
Once they have mated the female lays her eggs into a thin slit on small branches and the eggs are about the size of grains of rice. The adults live for only two or three glorious weeks of singing, mating and just hanging out.
The eggs overwinter then the hatched larvae fall to the ground and burrow into it.
Our chorus cicada spends two to four years down there but some species live as larvae for up to 17 years.
These long larvae life cycles are a clever way of starving the predators like wasps and praying mantises then coming out at a similar time and in such large numbers the predators can’t breed fast enough to make much impact on the host population. Birds enjoy snacking on them.
The other day I heard of another peril of being a cicada. There’s a thing called the vegetable cicada, which is actually a fungus that invades the larvae while it’s burrowed in the soil.
It slowly devours the cicada, just like a horror movie, turning it into a cicada zombie before the fungus puts up a shoot with a reproductive body that sheds spores that fall back into the ground looking for their next victim.
These fruiting bodies or spore sacks that appear in the autumn look a bit like popcorn or sometimes little deer antlers. I’ll be looking for them in a couple of months on the ground beneath my cicada-bearing trees.
This fungus is showing promise as it has a chemical that mitigates MS symptoms and other drugs that might help battle cancer.
So, keep your eyes open for this fascinating fungus because researchers want to hear about its spread around the country.
