Rise of the Cicadas, Part 1

off the floor. And Rob you might remember, you know this move from your son's earlier days. You were like, the child reaches down to grab something off the floor, and you have to get there first because you don't know what the thing is and you want to prevent the possible ingestion of the mystery substance. Sometimes it goes straight into.

the insect? No idea, but this random arthropod body part in our house was like just a little taste of the great cicada biomass, both alive and dead that there was outside in the surrounding foliage.

They're not quite out in forced just yet. But over the weekend I ventured up into Tennessee and got to experience the current and explosion of periodical cicadas uh and

it was pretty awesome there. I was. I hadn't been around them in a bit, so I was a bit surprised because they were smaller than I expected them to be, as the periodical cicadas typically are, I'm to understand, But they were still wonderful to observe, to listen to, and in general, that swelling of the cicada song is just such a regular feature of the summer, especially in the most oppressively hot months, you know, those dog days of summer.

So this would you know, we'd definitely be talking about the uh, the the annual cicadas in this scenario. To me, it's always felt like that is the sound of humid southern heat, a heat that often feels like it hits you in waves anyway, just as that cicada song hits you in waves sonically.

has also always enthralled me as well. You know, this monstrous little form that's left behind a kind of monster gym that you can just pick up and you can pocket pocket it, you can clip it onto the end of your finger or a stick, or maybe like an old gi Joe man's head or something. Even before I saw nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds. I love these things, and if I find one to these days, to this day, I will bring it up and give

it a more prominent place on the front porch. You know, like I need to show it to my son, even if he's he's still interested in this sort of thing, but I still have to show it to him. I still have to sort of like put it on display for myself. There's just something special about finding them.

be opposed to them. But yeah, these these these are wonderful because they're if you if you haven't ever encountered one, and I feel like a lot most of you maybe have, they are like full form, like there's a slit down the back where the adults cicada has emerged, but otherwise it's like this perfect little exoskeleton shell. It's not like a snake skin, which you know, doesn't have like the

head of the snake on it or anything. You know, it's it's it's not in any way like you can you can see the full form really the exoskeleton form of the nymph form of the cicada.

and the next one due to scheduling here. We're going to do a little small summer break during which we'll have some reruns, but we'll also have some new omnibus episodes of Monster Fact episodes and Anamalia stipendium, so there'll

be some new content sprinkled in there. But basically there's gonna be a little break and then there will be more Cicada content, which I think is kind of fitting for the cicada, because we're talking about a creature that does go on extended breaks at times before it re emerges, like.

assassin bugs, spittlebugs, moss bugs, bedbugs, and aphids. The Hymiptera are sometimes called true bugs, which I like because it does imply that there are false bugs. And this was a bit of a surprise to me because I always thought of bug. The word bug as just an informal, non scientific term that it had no criteria, and it could be used to refer to basically any arthropod smaller

than a crab, any creepy crawley thing. In common usage, it is that, but bug also has a specific scientific meaning to entomologists referring to the Hymiptera insects, so as an example of the many false bugs. The lady bug is not actually a hymipterin it's a beetle, so it is technically not a bug. The same is true of many insects that have the word bug in their name. June bugs are also not true bugs. They are beetles. So as a side note, this got me kind of

interested in the etymology of the word bug. Where did this confusing term come from? Well, I found a few different sources on this. For one thing, Miriam Webster had an interesting post on this etymological development. So the English term bug did not always refer to an insect at all. It did not necessarily refer to a creepy crawley animal. In Middle English, the word bugs spelled with two g's and an e at the end. Love that bug referred to a monster like a hobgoblin, or to a scarecrow.

The scarecrow usage appears in John Wickliffe's thirteen eighty two English translation of a deuterocanonical biblical text, a text that's not used in all denominations versions of the Bible, but it's used in some Christian traditions. It's called the Book of Baruk and Wickliff's translation goes as a bug either a man of ragis in a place where gordis wexen

keepeth no thing, so bin her goddess of tree. And in modern English that would read something like as a bug or a man of rags in a place where gourds grow guards nothing, So are there gods of wood? So this is a verse I think comparing idols used in religious worship to a scarecrow in a garden, I think the implication being that they are like both an illusion. A common theme in Judaism in Christianity is against the religious use of.

And you can also see this use of bug as monster in the word bug bear, which is attested since the fifteen eighties, meaning a monster or generally a creature or simply a notion which causes terror. I think a bug bear is supposed to imply some kind of demon bear or monstrous bear which frightens children.

a male goat. It does so like bug here as monster shares a root with buck. So if you go all the way back, this may come from ideas of some sort of evil spectral he goat but that's far

from certain. So, according to the Merriam Webster etymology, by the late fifteen hundreds the term referred to earthly insects in some usages, particularly pest insects, and then by the late seventeen hundred's the emerging Linaean classification system scientific terms for taxonomizing and referring to animals that assigned the term bug to the order Hmiptera, though of course it is still commonly used to refer generically to little creeping things.

But how did this transition from like monster or scarecrow to insects happen? I was reading another article, this one for the California Alumni Association, which included interviews with a Berkeley linguist named Jeffrey Nunberg, and this sort of made the point that bug, originally having the association of a monster, came to refer to insects because of their resemblance to monsters, particularly bedbugs, which were probably the first insects to be

called bugs. Because they suck our blood in the night. There is something kind of monstrous and awful about that. And this type of association continues for many other uses of English today, a lot of them have to do with like irritation, disgust, and infestation, a computer bug, a bugged phone line, a flu bug, bugging someone as in bothering them. A lot of them have this kind of conceptual association with like irritation or problems.

as a rostrum. So if you want to picture it, it is like a hinged, segmented, hollow needle. It is used to pierce the outer layer of the food source. And this could be a number of different things. It could be the outside of a plant or the root of a plant, could be the exoskeleton of an insect. And then they're the needle pierces. And then there is sort of a pumping organ operated by muscles that allows the bug to suck up the liquid inside that substrate

for nutrition. Hymipterins typically inject an external digestive enzyme into whatever they are eating to help break down starches and proteins inside the food substrate, and then they suck that

food juice up through the hollow core of the rostrum. Now, the hymiptera include both herbivores and carnivores, so again, this food that they're sucking up through the sucking beak could be a plant based liquid like tree sap or like the xylum in plant roots in the case of a cicada, Or it could be an animal based liquid like your blood in the case of a bed bug, or like the runny liquefied inside of a caterpillar in the case

of an assassin bug. In terms of other body features, many, but not all, hymiptera, according to their name, which again means half wing, have wings with two distinct parts, a leathery or thickened part near the base and a thin membrane toward the tip. But not all hymiptera are like this. A cicadas are an exception. If you look at a cicada wing like the one I found on my floor

the other day. They tend to have fully membranous, transparent wings with just these vein sort of structural veins running through them. Cicadas in particular are a superfamily of insects within Hymiptera. The suborder they belong to is aucinorinka. There are more than three thousand species of cicadas worldwide, found in lots of different environments in the tropics and intemperate environments. They range somewhat in size. The smallest cicadas are less

than an inch long as adults. The largest species, the impress cicada, has a body length of about seven cinemi in a wingspan of up to twenty centimeters and Cicadas have the standard three part insect body division of head, thorax, and abdomen. On the head, cicadas generally have five eyes. They've got two huge, bulbous compound eyes on either side, and then three smaller simple eyes known as o'celli, arranged in a kind of triangle or pyramid pattern in the middle of the head on the top.

And with the larger, I guess mainly the annual cicadas, it's it can be like a like a large ping pong ball hitting you, you know, it can be that level of impact, and then they stick on there for a little bit. Maybe they crawl into your shirt. They've been known to freak out the occasional child or bug adverse person.

You might call it music, you might call it noise. The sounds they make, and in fact, cicadas are the loudest family of insects on Earth. I was reading about a study by Sanborn in Phillips in nineteen ninety five that found that the average sound pressure of the mating call of thirty different species of North American cicada was between eighty and one hundred and six decibels. That is

incredibly loud for a sound made by insects. These noises are often compared to the sounds made by powerful machines. For example, I just looked up some averages of the decibels produced by noisy things. Apparently, a riding lawnmower, if you are sitting on the mower so like at that distance, is about ninety four to ninety five decibels for the rider. A motorcycle is about one hundred and five decibels. A chainsaw in your hands might be more like one hundred

and fifteen. So, especially for their size, cicadas are almost unbelievably loud animals.

their fore wings. Male crickets chirped by rubbing the edges of their wings together in this sort of like file and scraper system like a comb a stick. And these rubbing based systems are called stridulation, you know, causing friction, a loud type of rubbing together. Cicadas do not use

stridulation instead. Most male cicadas have a dedicated pair of sound producing organs called the timbals, which are ribbed corrugated kitenous membranes on either side of the body, near the base of the abdomen, sort of where the abdomen connects to the thorax rob I've attached some pictures for you

to look at here. One is a close up of a cicada showing the timbal is usually tucked under the wings, so you might not see it that easily, but if you move the wing to the side, you can see this interesting little patch in the in the exoskeleton that I don't know exactly what I would compare to, though it does have a clear sort of corrugated appearance. It looks ribbed.

of America. Apparently, these Naval researchers were interested in studying cicadas because cicadas are able to generate an extremely loud sound with a very small body using relatively little energy, and they thought this type of technology could be useful for underwater communications, rescue operations, beacons, ship to ship communication,

remote sensing, that kind of thing. The article quotes a researcher named Dirk Hughes who was part of this team at the NUWC, and also summarizes their conference presentation by saying, quote, the explanation in brief is that a buckling rib is arrested in its rapid motion by impact with the part of the cicada's anatomy called a timble, which functions somewhat as a gong being hit by a hammer. It is set into vibration at nearly a single frequency, and the

vibration rapidly dies out. Hughes tries to make the analogy to human bodies and says, I don't know if this really works all that well, but he's trying. Okay, So Hughes says, you should imagine like using muscles inside your chest to pull your ribs in until they buckle inward, collapsing into your body, and then you relax the muscles and release the ribs and they snap back into place

and they hit this gong's timble. So the collapsing and snapping back process makes this clicking sound with the timble. And then if you do this like three hundred or four hundred times a second, you have the kind of buzz or whirr the cicadas do. And then you can change it to alter frequency and rhythm patterns and so forth.

long distance and help males and females find each other. Apparently, the females respond by also making a sound, not with timbles, but in some cases by snapping their wings together, and this sound in turn attracts the males. There are courtship songs. These are somewhat different, and they occur once a male and female have found each other. It sort of further cements a mating relationship. It's the wooing song. If the female likes what she hears, the cicadas will mate. There

are also interestingly congregational songs. These occur when cicadas gather in large groups, and maybe we can talk more about the function of these later. But then there are also disturbance sounds. These happen if a cicada is caught or feels threatened, it'll make a distress sound. Now, the timbles are very common, but Canon also mentions some cicadas have a different system. Canon writes quote, some cicadas communicate using

a different type of sound production called crepitation. Sound pulses in these species are produced by slapping the wings together over the body or slapping the wings against the body surface. Thus there are both crepitating and timbling cicada species. But as I said, a very important function of the sounds produced by the cicada is for mating. And mating of course,

kicks off the life cycle of the cicada. Which is a fascinating subject in itself that I guess we will need to get into, but maybe in the context of talking about the difference between annual and periodical cicadas.

popping up in the media to chat about them. A couple of weeks ago, on John Oliver's Last Week Tonight program, they had a supercut of people on TV like slamming cicadas, like talking smack about cicadas, and there was actually a clip of Gene in there saying that they stink. Yeah, it's it's funny. It's worth looking up. It's it's a very funny segment. But of course, knowing who Gene Kritsky is, knowing that like few people are going to be as big a fan of cicadas as this guy that kind

of made it even funnier, you know. But anyway, so I'm gona refer to to Kritsky a fair bit. But one thing I want to stress beforehand, this is also citing his work, We need to stress that cicadas are not locusts, despite the fact that they were commonly called locus for a very long time, and this mistake continues to linger in the popular mindset and even in the media to a certain extent, not in terms of like the actual calling them locus, but also but thinking about them in terms of locusts.

called them flies. In the seventeenth century, they called cicadas flies, and then they called them locus during the eighteenth century, again despite the fact that they certainly are not locus. Locus are grasshoppers, so they're in a different order altogether. That's orthoptera locus. As with accounts of biblical plagues, you know, we're talking about creatures that feast on leafy matter and

thus crops. Cicadas consume plant sap. Most of that plant sap consumption is taking place underground, as we'll be discussing, and there was also there are also these long standing superstitions that cicadas caused illness, which on one hand you could probably connect to European biblical ideas about plagues of locusts and so far forth. But native peoples of America is apparently all so believed in this to some extent as well. We may come back to this later on.

At present, i'm not sure how much of this, you know, you're just getting into the idea that, especially in North America with periodical cicadas, there may be just some sort of idea of potential portents in the way things seem to work out in the natural world, like something that is occurring, you know, ever so many years. Well, you can imagine how one might take special notice of that, and maybe that does end up matching up in a non meaningful way with events that have occurred in a

given people or in a given region environmentally. He also points out that there was also an early colonial Early American tradition in which you could predict wars or peace based on whether you could see a W or a P spelled out on the wings of the cicada, and Risky points out that their wing veins only ever make a W. They can't really make a pee unless you again, unless you really really want to see a pe there, I guess, and that in general it was a safe

prophetic bat during this time period to see the W as opposed to the P. Getting back though, to the cicada itself, let's start with the basics of the life cycle. Any sort of cicada you're looking at has three stages egg nymph and an adult an adult female lays an egg, as we teased out earlier, in plant tissue, usually woody plant tissue. This is going to be essentially injected via its ovipositor.

significant amount of metal in the tissues, metal content. And using this metal studded ovipositor, the female cicada slices and gouges these deep slits into the wood of a tree, usually a softer part of the tree, like a new branch with the green wood, and then cuts these gouges in there and lays clutches of eggs inside the slits.

eventually more on this. In a second, they emerge from the ground and undergo one last molt into wing it adult form. This will be their final form, and they use it to complete their life cycle in just a few weeks or less of mating and egg laying.

But there's a lot of there are a lot of scientific questions remaining about that part of the cicada's life cycle because it's not that easy to study.

we live above. They're quietly drinking that plant sap and only ever having to contend with various subterranean threats such as I've read in ants in some cases can go after them, moles may go after them, some other subterranean insectivore or surface world diggers. I've also read, you know certainly about bears or humans digging them up for food. More on that last point later on, But yeah, for the most part, they're down there that they're undergoing additional

moltings as they grow older. They're also going to go deeper and find different roots to feed upon. But how long do they stay underground and when do they emerge? This is where we see the primary difference between the very species of annual cicadas and periodical so annual. Cicadas can be found around the world. As the name suggests, they emerge every year. Now, this doesn't mean they only

spend a year underground. They have Typically this is going to vary from species species, but we're talking about two to five years underground. But the short duration and the timing of their nymph stages just means that every year there's going to be an emergence. Think of it like this.

There are a number of different production companies out there making superhero movies, and they might not all put out a superhero movie every year, but enough of them or in some state of production that it's a pretty safe guess that at least one superhero movie is going to come out every year, And if your life cycle depends on that, then then you're in luck. By the way, by some estimates and criteria, the last year we had seemingly zero superhero films was nineteen sixty five.

Periodical cicadas, however, these might be more comparable to adaptations of the novel Dune, which occur only every sixteen to twenty one years, so nineteen eighty four, twenty twenty twenty one, with nothing in between. As long as you're not counting sequels or part twos and so forth, if you depend on seeing a new adaptation of the novel Dune by

Frank Herbert every year, you are going to starve to death. Okay. So, periodical cicadas are native to the eastern and midwestern United States, and they're famous for these lengthy subterranean nymph stages punctuated by the synchronous emergence. So three species emerge every seventeen years, and four species emerge every thirteen years. It makes them one of the longest living known insects, though I believe

termite queens still top the list. It's something like fifty years or even up to a century of life I believe has also been suggested for turmite queens.

So yeah, it's still amazing spending over a decade underground in this nymph stage before emerging right at the very end to just live out the last few weeks of your life as this flying, breeding, noise making adult after really a stealth existence as far as surface world life is concerned, for just so terribly long as you've no doubt heard on the news and perhaps witnessed in person.

Twenty twenty four is one of those rare years where a seventeen year brood and a thirteen year brood sync up with brood thirteen and brood nineteen emerging and expected to number in the trillions. The brood system can be a bit complex, but in there are multiple broods and they're spread across different regions. Pretty much every year, periodical cicadas are emerging somewhere. Sometimes they emerge later early, but

the count works for the most part. And we'll get into even more about what this means here in a bit.

crazy to put this in human years, Joe. I don't know if you saw this, but there was a Saturday Night Live skit that did a fun send up of this recently, where you had a pair of actors each playing a cicada from each of the two major periodical

broods that are emerging. And so they're sitting there at the news desk in their cicada costumes, one with the two thousand and seven necklace around its neck and the other one with the twenty eleven necklace around their neck, and they're, you know, they're very excited to get out there and mate and to fly into people's faces and shirts.

But they're also like making pop culture references to twenty eleven in two thousand and seven, which I thought was very funny and kind of like drives home the time periods we're talking about.

the case? Why live underground in nymph stage for so long and then remain in nymph stage past that eight year mark when maturity has apparently already been reached, you know, to go back to our hyper sleep sci fi analogy, it's kind of like they haven't reached their destination yet. You don't want to wake up halfway on the trip to the planet that you're headed to in your spaceship,

and that would seem to be part of it. Though it also raises additional questions like why have these cicada species evolved to take such long nymph stages of more than a decade? Like why are they why did they set their why are their sites set so far out?

that long. According to Kritsky, the how involved here of how they do it this in and of itself remains somewhat of a mystery, but one theory is that as they feed on the tree step, as they feed on the xylum, that they're kind of hacked into the information of the tree as well, like the fluid information, the fluid flow of the tree, and that they somehow track and remember fluid flow in such a way as to time themselves.

would make sense of that data. And so you can I feel like you can kind of apply the same thinking here, Like here's a creature living so long underground, and to be clear, like not it's not in a real state of suspended animation here. It's still moving around, feeding and acting as a as an organism. But one of the things that it is frequently connected to is that fluid flow of the host plant, and like that becomes perhaps kind of a sense in and of itself. Now,

as for why they do this. Most sources agree that it has to do with disrupting the evolution of synchronous predators and parasites. So when cicadas emerge, any cicadas emerge annual or periodical, it is a feast. And this alone is an anti predator strategy. It is a predator cetacean so spawn or emerge in such high numbers that predators can't keep up. They can't possibly eat everyone. Like how many cicadas can you possibly eat? You know, random dog, You can eat a dozen ovis, maybe two dozen ovus,

maybe three and get a little sick. But there's way more of us than that. You cannot possibly eat all the cicadas, And we're going to keep going around and doing our business.

divisible only by one and the number itself. It is hypothesized that a long prime number life cycle for our cicadas would make it difficult for predators or parasites to evolve synchronous life cycles with the cicadas because there are no intermediate life cycle steps that could easily evolve synchrony with the cicadas.

with annual cicadas, the ones that come out every year. Remember, parasitoid wasps in general are a great, highly evolved threat to various insects and arachnids, using these other organisms as hosts for their young either as you know, something left in a paralyzed or you know, some half alive state in some sort of a nest or a burrow to then consume when they hatch, or in like true Zenamore style, a warm body or I don't know about warm body, but a body let's in which to deposit the egg

of your young so that it may hatch within and then feast inside of the host organism and then emerge. So this would be a threat worth evolving around and creating strategies to avoid. But again, not every cicadas has gone the periodical route. With the annual cicadas, we do have specific cicada killer or cicada hawk wasps in North America.

With these solitary species, you have a female that captures adult cicadas, paralyzes them with a sting, and then transports them back to a burrow, and she'll collect multiple cicadas. I've read as many as like one hundred cicadas in

this burrow, one for each egg that she lays. And she knows what the sex will be of each egg, so she'll she'll have one egg and she'll put that that it will be a male egg, and she'll put that on one paralyzed cicada and then there'll be a female egg and that's that's going to be a bigger organism. So it needs two to three cicadas to feast upon sick. Yeah, yeah, but again, the cicada hawk wasp praise exclusively on annual cicadas. These are the dog day cicadas, and they target them

during their regular emergence period. The late summer emergence periodicals emerge earlier, so like they're just never synced up to hit them. I have read that if periodicals, if some periodical individuals are emerging late, they may end up being targeted, but it's more of an incidental target. Like for the most part, the periodical cicadas have evolved so that parasitoid wasps cannot be in sync with them. And this has to do again with these long nymph stages and prime numbered emergencies.

a different parasite prey threat array. And I guess in general, when we don't see it more, My read on it is that, on one hand, obviously an organism has to have the capability to go through this sort of lengthy nymph stage to and engage in the prime number of emergence rates and so forth. And then also I guess it's key to realize that there is this There does seem to be this kind of balance between the periodical

and the annuals. So there will be annual cicadas in areas that have periodical cicadas, And one wonders like, what would happen to periodical cicadas if the annual cicadas just stopped, if something, you know, wiped them out. You know, it would certainly disrupt everything, maybe just cataclysmically for all cicada dependent organisms, but maybe it would. It would result in shifts, shifts that they might not be able to keep up

with for existing cicada parasites and predators. But again, the thing that keep in mind about the cicada is that it preys exclusively on annual cicadas, so like it has no plan B outside of cicadas for continuing its life cycle. Now, Kritzky also gets into the evolution of all of this,

which I thought was interesting. He writes that while cicadas themselves date back to the time of the dinosaurs, periodical cicadas again in we're talking about these North American varieties cicadas, they're more of a recent evolution, he writes, Quote, the seventeen years Septindecham and neotradecam ancestor diverged about five hundred

thousand years ago from the thirteen year Tridecam species. The Cassini and Ducula species diverged from their common ancestor about two point five million years ago, and their respective thirteen and seventeen year species separated within the last three hundred thousand years.

general science about them as well. And in the meantime, certainly write in with your experiences and thoughts regarding the cicada, be the observational, culinary, folkloric, mythological, fictional, and so forth. As a reminder, Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast, science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and listener mail episode on Mondays,

a short form episode on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.