Ode to the Cicadas Outside

Texas is definitely the land of the bugs, and I've discovered a new one, worthy of a Blog. It's called a Cicada. Many of you probably know exactly what they are, but I'd never seen or heard of them before.

Cicadas pop out of their shells and leave them discarded (like the top picture) in odd places like my porch posts. I have to hose them off almost every day. They leave a big hole in the back of the shell. It reminds me of a scene from the movie Alien.

What pops out is this really pretty creature, which we never see. We hear them, though. They sit in the trees and sing their creepy song constantly. I decided to hop online and do a very small bit of research on them, and here is what I found out:

• After mating, the female cuts slits into the bark of a twig, and into these she deposits her eggs. She may do so repeatedly, until she has laid several hundred eggs. When the eggs hatch, the newborn nymphs drop to the ground, where they burrow. Most cicadas go through a life cycle that lasts from two to five years. Some species have much longer life cycles, e.g., such as the North American genus, Magicicada, which has a number of distinct "broods" that go through either a 17-year or, in the American South, a 13-year life cycle. These long life cycles both happen to be prime numbers, perhaps developed as a response to predators such as the cicada killer wasp and praying mantis.^[9][10][11]. A predator with a shorter life cycle of at least 2 years could not reliably prey upon the cicadas.^[12]

So this would explain the holes in the dirt that I have been finding all summer!

• There is a fable called The Cicada and the Ant where the ant stores food all summer while the Cicada sings its summer away (they only come out in the summer and they sing and sing and sing in the trees), and the Cicada finds itself unprepared when the cold weather comes in the winter.
  

• The song comes from loud noise makers called timbals on their abdomen. As they expand and contract their abdomens, the song is created. It gets amplified (these guys are REALLY loud) by enlarged chambers derived from the tracheae (sorry for the plagiarism, but didn't know a better way to put that).
• Cicadas are also EATEN in some parts of the world!! :

Cicadas have been eaten in China, Malaysia, Burma, Latin America, the Congo and even in the United States. Fried Cicadas is a popular treat in the Chicago, Illinois area. In North China, cicadas are skewered or stir fried as a delicacy.