The Late Bloomer Bug! (Cicadas!)

In this week's episode, we talk about Cicadas! What do they do for so long in the ground? What happens in a "year of the cicada" and what do they symbolize? Let's get a closer look... 

 

Special Thanks as always to lofi girl for supplying some instrumental beats! 

 

The artists in this week are, HM Surf, Sátyr, Phlocalyst, and Mitchel Logan.

 

Transcript: 

 

Welcome back to another episode of Insects for Dummies, I’m your host Mitchel Logan and today we will be talking about a bug that spends years underground as a teenage shut-in before finally reaching maturity. This of course means we are covering cicadas! The bugs tell us when we finally made it to Summer by screeching through the day and in my case, the evening with Japan’s well-known “Evening Cicada”. There are two major types of cicadas, the periodical cicada, and the annual cicadas. Periodical cicadas are the ones that spend at least a decade in the ground before coming up into the trees. The annual cicadas, despite their name, actually spend 2 to 5 years underground, but we hear them every year because the different broods overlap each other.

 

Cicadas as the title of this episode states are true bugs, which means they do not have a pupal or larval stage. These bugs just stay in the ground feeding off roots and other plant matter as nymphs until they’re ready to hit the stage in our trees. There are two different periodical cicadas, one is a 13 year and the other is a 17 year, which means they spend either 13 years or 17 years in the ground before coming up. You might be wondering what exactly they do for so long or why they wait so long before coming up, and though we don’t have all the answers, we do know they don’t hibernate and are actually building tunnels and feeding during this entire time. Most living things have an internal clock known as a circadian rhythm which is why some of us wake up earlier than normal when we know there is something important or why some of us just naturally wake up later than others. Everyone’s clock is slightly different and the same thing happens with cicadas. Of course, it’s not like this amount of time was arbitrarily given either.

Many scientists believe that the periodical cicadas evolved these clocks in this way to avoid predators. If you stay hiding for long enough, you’ll be forgotten about eventually. As for how they know when their time is up, that comes down to seasonal changes in trees and the soil composition as the seasons come and go. The one thing we do know relatively certain is that the cicadas will not emerge from the ground until the temperature of the soil around 8inches below surface reaches 18 degrees celsius. This is why cicadas will emerge sooner or later depending on where you live! 

Sometimes we have years of the cicada and that just means it's a year where one of the periodical cicadas is ready to surface and that usually means there are going to be a lot of them… for example in North America there are 12 broods of the 17 year cicadas and one brood can have as many as 600 bugs in it, and that, of course, isn’t including the annual cicadas. That’s a lot of bugs and a lot of noise. The buzzing chorus of a cicada reaches up to 90 decibels which is the same as a lawnmower or standing near a chainsaw.

This noise is produced from Tymbals which are exoskeletal structures that kind of act as a cymbal. The cicada has one Tymbal on each side of its abdomen and these tymbals produce sound by snapping together and pulling apart like two pieces of velcro. This snapping and unsnapping motion is repeated 300 - 400 times a second! But that’s not the only incredible thing about cicadas. They also have some very interesting wings. Interesting because they are coated with very fine tiny spikes that actually repel water, and break down soft bacteria. In recent years we’ve been able to replicate that complex surface which means we might see some nifty antibacterial surfaces in the near future. 

 

As you might expect, cicadas have some interesting folklore due to their unavoidable presence and we’re going to take a look at that next. 

The earliest documented cases of lore surrounding these bugs come from China, with stone statues of the bugs dating back to 1500 BCE. The Chinese regarded these insects as a symbol of rebirth because of their transformation upon breaching the surface. Cicadas were carved out of jade and placed on the tongues of those who died. This was so that after burial those people could break free of their deceased physical bodies to find eternal life much like that of the jade statue placed within them. In the Hopi native american folklore, there exists a Cicada Kachina, or spirit guide that aided people in their travels from the underworld, which is where we all originated from (apparently). The cicada Kachina would appear in early summer/late spring before the true cicadas made their appearance. 

My favorite mythology of cicadas comes from Ancient Greece where many poets and philosophers were awestruck by the insects and used them as a muse for many written works. To the ancient Greeks, cicadas symbolized death and rebirth, but they were also a symbol of love. One story in Greek mythology is of a mortal known as Tithonus. Tithonus was a handsome man who was sought after by the goddess Eos. Eos knew one day that Tithonus would die and asked Zeus to make the man immortal. Unfortunately, she failed to ask for eternal youth so the man became too old and eventually could only babble. Eos didn’t have the power to take life so she turned him into a cicada. Another story written by the philosopher Plato has a slightly different tale. The story goes that Socrates and Phaedrus were having a pleasant walk in the evening and remarking on the “Summery sweet song of the cicadas chorus” Socrates then goes on to state that he feels the cicadas were watching them, and how cicadas were once people who lived before the muses aka daughters of Zeus, but after the muses came to existence and created the first song, some of the people became too infatuated with singing and forgot to eat eventually dying. The muses noticed this and gifted the departed by turning them into cicadas where they can sing freely with no need for nourishment.

 

Thanks for listening to this episode of Insects for Dummies. Intro music credit goes to myself, if you wanna check out some chill music you can find my music on all streaming platforms under Mitchel Logan. If you liked this episode please leave a review on iTunes or Whatever platform you’re on and you can check out my Instagram page @Insects4Dummies. I also take listener emails so if you have a special insect you want to learn more about or a question you can drop an email at Insects4Dummies@gmail.com. I’ll see you next week.