Trailing Bartram, a bi-monthly Precipitate blog feature, investigates the flora and fauna of Florida.
We are back in the land of cicadas here in Florida. I had forgotten about them during my brief life out west and even in Michigan, but now I couldn’t forget them if I tried.
Their abandoned shells might be the most fascinating thing to little boys and girls under the age of, oh, eight. They’re great for hanging on clothes, fingers, a squeamish friend’s hair, and they are easy to find, clasped onto a tree trunk like there’s still someone inside holding on.
But the reason no one in my neighborhood can forget them is the sound. The relentless crescendo of a not-quite-buzzing mass of cicadas quickly becomes a nearly frightening roar. The male cicadas make the sound with timbals, a sound-producing organ on their abdomen, while the females remain silent. Apparently the loudest of them could render permanent hearing loss if the sound was created right outside of your ear.
My other half, a desert native, has never lived in a place with cicadas, but I remember my experiences with them in South Carolina growing up. Those cicadas-at least the ones that made an impression on me-are periodical cicadas and only emerge once every 13 or 17 years. I always wondered about a species that remained dormant underground for so many years only to emerge, leave behind a shell that looks occupied and then mate and die. Last year was the most recent emergence of Brood XIX. There’s also a project that tracks all the 13- and 17-year broods, which you can read about here.
Cicadas’ wings are fascinating. Much more interesting than butterfly wingspan, their wings look like a coloring book outline of stained glass windows. Finding a cicada wing on the ground, you might be tempted to pick it up and try to color it in. Those wings aren’t visible until the cicada molts from its outer shell, and the ones here have bright green wings, which make them look even more otherworldly.
If you’ve ever played around with Google autocomplete, you might know that as you begin to type a question or keyword into the Google search bar, autocomplete will finish with the most frequently typed phrase that begins the way that you are beginning. As I typed “Are cicadas?” google guessed that I was going to ask “Are cicadas locusts?” The short answer is no, but it’s much more fun to find this out by reading through things like Cicada FAQs and National Geographic’s information page, complete with sound effects.
Though clearly many people think of cicadas as the modern incarnation of the plague of locusts, they don’t create a particular threat in most ecosystems, beyond damaging some weak or young trees, the assault on the ears (which can be quite terrifying).
Leslie Wolcott, Staff Blogger