Wikimedia user NBonawitz
Humans may be playing with fire, as in apocalyptic flame, by ignoring Mother Nature’s climatic warnings while trashing the planet—her discipline of her children makes the Marquis de Sade look like Goody Two Shoes. A prime example of this lack of maternal compassion is her ruthless punishment of both cicadas and the adversaries that kill them gruesomely.
Don’t get me wrong. I loathe cicadas and their heavy metal music. Periodic red-eyed cicadas with black and orange bodies, the Magicicadas, emerge en masse in broods after thirteen or seventeen years of sipping juice from tree roots underground. Periodic broods appear in specific regions in specific years but can overlap, making cicada numbers and noise swell. They hit us hard in 2011, 2014, and 2015 and will reappear in 2024, but we remain a cicada hot spot thanks to annual green dog-day cicadas that emerge each summer after shorter life cycles to produce a deafening cacophony on sticky summer nights. After being buried for their youth, males know they are but flashes in the pan with four to six ephemeral weeks to attract mates. Frantically they gather in lusty choruses to sing the loudest song of all insects to lure their potential companions. Flexing abdominal membranes called tymbals, popping them in and out of shape, they create percussive love songs that echo in their hollow abdominal cavities, magnifying the sound. As willing females flick their wings in response, males sidle closer and shift to courtship songs varying from a grating “Wheee-whoa!” to “zzz-zing!” to “a high-pitched whine like a power saw cutting wood,” which lingers disturbingly like the sound of hovering alien spaceships.
In a danse macabre, killer and prey glide to the nest, repeating the steps until they reach the burrow, where she stuffs the live cicada into a cell. She neatly tucks an egg under its second leg, then adds a victim or two to the cell if the egg holds a female. She seals the cell to the sound of pounding cicada hearts.
With cicadas cometh cicada killer wasps, a.k.a. cicada hawks. Up to two inches long (!) with reddish brown or black bodies striped with lemony yellow, they are visually alarming, but appearances are deceiving. Fear not unless you are a cicada; if so, woe is you.
Swaggering cicada killer males appear first in June or July. Bumblers without stingers or grace, they hang around in macho gangs, defending their tiny territories, ricocheting off buildings, wrestling with each other ineffectively, upchucking on themselves to cool off, and ogling anything that is mobile as potential mating material. Sipping nectar they inadvertently pollinate while awaiting arrival of their waspy women in numbers exceeding their own. Sources say females control gender of offspring during egg fertilization, ensuring that females outnumber males in the ultimate feminist coup.
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After the necessary mating, mothers-to-be select sunny nursery sites, choosing well drained, workable soil in flowerbeds and lawns or sandy spots bordering driveways, sidewalks, and patio slabs. Shifting into high gear, they burrow ten to twenty inches down to build subterranean tunnels about forty inches long with nest cells off to the side. After their strong jaws rip into the dirt, they back out of the tunnel using hind legs equipped with spines like backward rake tines to shovel out the dirt and make tunnel entry mounds. A woman’s work is never done, and this little woman also brings home the bacon. Cruising on the wing, she hunts cicadas by sight, not sound, as proven by her frequent capture of female cicadas who sing not a note. Slighter and more agile than her bulky prey, she snags cicadas on trees or in mid-air, delivering venom via her stinger to paralyze them. Two to three times heavier than she, a cicada is dead weight. The wasp flings it on its back, stands over it, and grips it in her claws to haul it over land or climbs a tree or shrub to hurl herself and the cicada into the air. In a danse macabre, killer and prey glide to the nest, repeating the steps until they reach the burrow, where she stuffs the live cicada into a cell. She neatly tucks an egg under its second leg, then adds a victim or two to the cell if the egg holds a female. She seals the cell to the sound of pounding cicada hearts. When her eggs hatch in a few days, the larvae rip into the cicadas at the puncture sites of her stings as the living cicadas watch in horror. The diners eat their fill in about two weeks and spin cocoons for their long snooze, emerging to mate, burrow, and continue the cicada terrorizing ritual.
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Killer wasps’ numbers dwindle in August, to the relief of those who are needlessly alarmed by them. Though males are territorially protective and aggressive, with no stingers they are no threat; the worst they do is scare children and annoy adults. Females, obsessed with motherhood, barely acknowledge us but can make human hearts falter by beating their wings in a burrow below our feet to mimic a rattlesnake’s warning to shoo us away.
Many detest the insects for puncturing lawns with holes, but not I. One female can build four burrows and eradicate over a hundred cicadas in her lifetime, lowering the cicada song volume. Dame Nature withholds praise and often turns the tables on the cicada killer, delivering the coup de grâce when a velvet ant, a wasp in ant’s clothing, drops her eggs like tiny bombs into cicada killer nest cells. Her eggs produce larvae with appetites for developing cicada killer pupae in a bug-eat-bug world.
We humans see ourselves as masters of the planet; however, if we consider the extent of Nature’s power and dearth of sentiment and accept the theory that insects will inherit the earth after we orchestrate our own extinction, we may elect to tread more lightly to shrink our heavy carbon footprints and buy more time. It also might be wise to take it a step further and check our armpits for cicada hawk eggs planted to speed our departure from the planet. I’m just saying it couldn’t hurt.
Lucile has tinnitus and gets edgy when cicada choruses harmonize with the ringing in her ears. She heard her first cicada serenade of 2017 on June 13 and became wild-eyed. She will remain so until the last metallic “wheee-whoa” of the season falls silent.
