Monday, June 05, 2000

Cicada's life short, sweet

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After years underground, big bug emerges for a few frantic weeks of freedom

By Mike Pulfer
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Adult cicada | ZOOM |

        Imagine if this were your life: Your parents die as soon as you're born. You spend your first 17 years of life in your room. You dig your way to freedom, mature and find sex in a matter of days. Within a month, you're dead.

        That's life. At least for periodical cicadas, the noisy little creatures that are now singing in some Greater Cincinnati neighborhoods — four years earlier than expected. If you don't know it already, the singing is the last note for the cicadas. It means the fellas are trying to attract gals. As soon as they mate, their number is up. The female lays eggs, the adults die, and your neighborhood will become quiet again.

        For some reason — nobody's sure why — some 17-year cicadas have grown faster than normal and are emerging from the ground this spring, instead of 2004. A batch of annual cicadas may still arise around the end of June.

        Here are some other things we learned on our way to understanding the bug that counts.

Drop and roll
        Microscopic periodical cicadas hatch from eggs in the twigs of trees, usually by the end of July. Most have 400 to 600 siblings. They fall to the ground, where their dead mothers were eaten and/or crunched about six weeks earlier. They eat.

Going underground
        After chewing on grass for a couple of weeks, cicadas opt for a life in the underworld. They dig their way 12 to 16 inches below the soil surface and begin a new life of tunneling around tree roots and eating their juices. They do not hibernate. They are not as active as they seem to be when we see them, but they do not rest.

Rise and Shine
        After about 10 years, they begin a gradual move toward the surface. After 16 years, most of them will be 4 to 6 inches underground, ready to climb out into open air about mid-May. When they do surface, they continue to move, climbing walls, fences and trees until they find adequate spots to plant their feet and transform, magically, into adults — all in one day.

Guys and dolls
        Cicadas are distinctly male and female. There are a couple of ways to tell the difference. First, only the male cicadas sing. Secondly, on close inspection you can see that the adult female cicada has on its underside, an egg-laying structure called an ovipositor. It is held within an opening at the tip of the abdomen.

How they sing
        Males use sound-producing organs, in their abdomen, to sing. The sound is enhanced and amplified by hollow space in the abdomen. (The females' abdomens are not hollow; they're filled with eggs.)

Special purpose
        As 17-year-old adults, cicadas seem to have one thing on their little minds. Four or five days after they emerge from the earth, male cicadas cluster in trees in “chorusing centers” and sing, calling all females. When the girls arrive, they take a look at the offerings and choose their mates, usually based on size — of the bug. Larger males are preferred. Smaller, unsuccessful males usually move on to another tree, with their fingers crossed (just kidding about the fingers).

Procreating
        After mating, the females, careful to find trees that will live at least 17 years, cut slices in twigs and lay eggs in them. The adults either become part of the food chain or just die. The microscopic eggs hatch. And the Circle of Life repeats. But Elton John doesn't sing.

Cicada watching
        Four years from now, you'll have little trouble finding cicadas in Greater Cincinnati.

        “We'll have billions over the course of the whole city in 2004,” says Gene Kritsky, entomologist and nationally known cicada expert at the College of Mount St. Joseph. “What we're seeing now is barely 1 percent.”

        What we're seeing now, he says, are bugs that grew at an accelerated rate ... for some reason. “I don't want to say it's global warming, but ... something environmental is causing some of the cicadas to grow faster” and come out early in Ohio, Virginia, Maryland, Indiana and Kentucky.

        Ohio is home to three of six periodical-cicada species, ranging from 1 to 1¹/₂ inches long. Some have a solid orange underside; some have a black underside; some have a narrow orange band.

        Annual, or dog-day cicadas, are larger, with black eyes and a green-and-black pattern on their bodies. They are the ones that emerge at the end of June.

        The best places to see 17-year cicadas in this, their 13th year, include Bridgetown, Finneytown, Forest Park, Hyde Park, and Mack. Since a May 11 Enquirer story about early-emerging cicadas, Mr. Kritsky said he has gotten about 1,000 reports from readers about cicada spottings and experiences.

        But don't expect to find them easily.

        “Sometimes you'll see hundreds in the trees in one yard, and one block over, not a one,” Mr. Kritsky said.

The food chain
        So what purpose do cicadas serve? What good do they do?

        “Their purpose in life is to reproduce,” Mr. Kritsky said. But, along the way, they:

        • Provide “a lot of food for a lot of animals,” he said. Among them: chipmunks, squirrels, birds, dogs and cats.

        • Aerate the soil under trees and help rainwater get to the roots. “They turn over more soil that earthworms.”

        • By laying a volume of eggs in branches and snapping some of them off, they provide a natural pruning benefit (called flagging), which results in thicker, lusher growth and better yields the following year.

Cicada pie?
        And, if you're really hungry, they can be eaten as dessert after an early summer dinner. Here's a pie recipe that appeared in The Enquirer in 1902:

        “Take 50 newly emerged white female cicadas and remove the wings, legs and head. Chop up the cicadas into pieces and place in a bowl with stale bread that has been soaked in milk. Add sugar, rhubarb flavor and cream to soften the ingredients. Put the mixture into a pie crust and cover with strips of pie crust placed in a cross pattern similar to that of an apple pie. Bake in an oven at 400 degrees till crust is done.”

        Then throw away the pie and eat your tablecloth.

       

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