Eric Richards, age 14, of Vanderprift, Pennsylvania, for his question:
What are cicadas?
The cicadas are the rock musicians of the insect world. Every summer, the leafy looking katydid soloist toots his favorite phrase and chirping crickets chorus in the evening air. After a silence of 17 years, swarms of cicadas arrive for a rock festival and their humming drums resound far and wide.,
In May of 1957, the country folk of Pennsylvania were astounded by what they called swarms of big noisy bugs. Similar reports came from the Midwest, from the Northeast and southward to the Carolinas. Popular opinion decided that this must be a plague of the 17 year locust. After all, the large insects looked somewhat like greedy locusts even though they did not devour a morsel of the greenery.
The entomologists patiently explained to one and all that these handsome hummers with ruby red eyes and large gauzy wings were not even related to the locust order of insects. Specifically, they were of the 17 year cicada. The next appearance for their resounding rock festival is expected in May and June of 1974. Mark this down in your 5 year diary for a visit to their woods and shrubbery. Their teeming numbers will astound you. So will their frantic excitement. And you will never forget the resounding hum of their united singing.
For the past 17 years, these ardent insects have lived grubby underground lives as wingless nymphs, feeding on the sap of tree roots and molting as they grow. At last they crawl to the surface for their final molt and emerge as mature adults. The frenzied rock festival is their mating season. Only the male cicada makes music and he has the most elaborate sound instrument in the entire insect world. His echo chambers are cavities in his thorax and the humming vibrations are controlled by flaps of surface skin.
Cicadas belong to the insect order Homoptera, a term meaning equal wings. The locusts of the order Orthoptera wear a pair of gauzy flying fans, folded under a stiff pair of front wings. The cicadas have two pairs of large, iridescent gauzy wings attached to their shoulders. Throughout the world, there are 1,500 cicada species in the family Cicadidae and 75 of them are native North Americans.
Periodic cicadas that startle the world with rock festivals, also have annual cicadas that come upstairs every year.
The music festival lasts several weeks and the males die soon after mating. The females use their needle like ovipositors to pierce slits in twigs, where they lay their eggs in the tender tissue just below the bark. The thin oval eggs hatch in a few weeks. The nymphs drop down and use their strong digging claws to burrow into the ground. They attach their hungry beaks to tree roots and sip sap until they are ready to emerge for their final molting.