Cicadas Singing in the Dog Days of Summer
Deep into this unbearably hot summer, when most of us have retreated into air conditioning, one creature is reveling in its moment in the sun. Hear that loud buzz-saw song during the middle of our heat wave? That's the annual cicada screaming its amazingly loud love song.
Cousins of the 17-year cicada that popped out of the ground only last spring, a number of cicada species live in our region-- and they have wonderfully colorful names. Since the constellation Canis Major-- the “big dog”-- is in the night sky during summer months, “dog days'' are named for the constellation, not the animal (surprise!). That also explains the name for one of our cicadas, Davis’ southeastern dog-day cicada, a singer of the Coastal Plain from New Jersey deep into Louisiana, the long name differentiating itself from its cousin, the more vanilla-named dog-day cicada, an insect found west and north of Wild Philly. But other species inhabit our region, too, with wonderful names like the lyric cicada and the scissor-grinder, the latter the one pictured above.
These cicadas don’t get the attention of their more-famous 17-year cousins, and are often called annual cicadas because they emerge every summer. But they are not actually annual critters at all-- they take three to five years to mature underground. Since their populations are staggered, cicada adults sing every summer. Like right now!
On a walk down my street only this morning, I found two empty husks of cicada nymphs on a sidewalk, as the adults are now up in the trees buzzing away-- or listening for that buzzing.
Members of the order Hemiptera-- the “true bugs,” along with aphids, water striders, and more-- cicadas have needle-like mouthparts they use to spear plants, sucking on plant juices as their diet. These handsome insects have chunky bodies, brightly colored eyes, and clear wings marked with colorful veins. Do check one out closely next time you find one. Its colors are often surprising.
Like cricket song and firefly flash, the loud buzz is its mating call, made with a tympanum, a stretched-skin akin to a drum, vibrating like mad. After mating, female cicadas lay their eggs in and on trees, and young nymphs, smaller wingless versions of the adult, crawl into the ground to latch onto tree roots to suck the xylem, the water flowing through them. And there they live for several years, slowly maturing, awaiting their time in the sun, when they crawl up the tree to shed their skin on tree bark-- or on the sidewalk-- and begin their cicada solos, so many Cyranos poetically calling to their Roxanes.
Later in the summer, it’s not surprising to find dead and dying adult cicadas rattling on the sidewalk, even in their death throes still trying to sing. Fear not, their nymphs have simply gone underground, sucking the juice out of life, or at least trees.