It’s Cicada Time
Bugs are everywhere. Oh joy.
Everyone in the Midwest knows by now, that it’s Cicada Time.
Cicadas are the famous insects that live underground for most of their lives, and only emerge every 17 years to mate, feed, and make a lot of noise, and die messily on the lawn, the sidewalk, the windshield of the car, etc, etc, etc…
Actually, that’s not quite accurate. There are several species of cicada, with varying emergence cylces. Some cycles are 5 years, some 7, some 9, and then there are the famous 13 and 17 year cicadas. You can see these as a child, and forget all about them until your twenties….
Our focus on their emergence cycle is really a sort of human-parochialism. Cicadas are not dormant while they are underground. They have several molts between the time they hatch and the time they emerge, and the intervening larval and nymphal stages feed, move around, grow, and interact with each other and with their environment. At the end of this multi-year growth period, the final molt occurs, and the adult insect (what we think of as a “cicada”) emerges from the ground, feeds on leaves, mates, lays eggs, and dies.
The multi-year cycle is most likely an evolutionary adaptation to avoiding predators. Cicadas are highly nutritious, and make excellent meals for blue jays, robins, crows, and rodents. None of these predators, however, can depend on cicadas for food, since they can only hunt them when they are above ground. And when the cicadas do emerge, they emerge in such numbers that the predators cannot possibly get them all.
So remember, no matter how much of a nuisance they are when they come out, cicadas’ lives are much longer than you normally think, and for the most part, they are completely unnoticed.
