The “Seven-Year” Insect Itch

Of all non-human forms of Nature that many people in the U.S. encounter, there is one form that may be the oddest.  Some people consider the species to be just noisemakers.  Other people find the "background music" they make somehow relaxing.  (Maybe they're an acquired taste.) Whatever you think of them, they are the Cicadidae family, or cicadas.

When I first moved to the southern U.S. and encountered these insects, a few southerners called them "locusts." But that is a misnomer.  Cicadas do not come in Biblical-type plagues sweeping across the sky.  Cicadas don't congregate in those kind of numbers, nor do they travel far.  In fact, they are more of home-bodies, their entire life journey extending not much further than down the height of tree and back up again.

The adult form, which makes that controversial drone, looks like a giant green fly that has bulked up.  However, despite the inescapable summer sound of cicadas in the South, we humans rarely get a close look at the adults with their large delicate wings folded back over the body.  What we can get a close look at is the shell-like remnant of the nymphs that preceded the adults.  Rather than emerging from a cocoon, the adult emerges out of the exoskeleton of a wingless kind of brown "bug," which is left behind on the bark of a tree.

When several such remnants are on a single tree, they demonstrate visually the life story of the cicada.  All the nymphs' empty shells will be oriented away from the ground they left behind and will be marching upward (where the adults went to mate and lay eggs).  The nymphs make this short trek partway toward the treetops after having lived underground, frequently for 13 years.  (Sometimes the cicadas are called "seven-year cicadas," but that number "7" probably comes form our biblical heritage, seven being in the Bible a symbol of completion.)

It is this long life underground that makes the cicadas so odd.  We may think that a cicada population is being reborn every summer, but what we see are in most species the offspring of adults who laid eggs several years ago. There are actually multiple synchronized populations of cicadas, each set waiting for its turn to appear.

This could be real inspiration for a science-fiction story.  Imagine a planet on which there are ten sets of people -- each set looking exactly like each other set.  Only one set at a time appears out of a subterranean hiding place.  But our Star Trek crew who has landed on the planet does not know there are multiple sets of people.  As a result, the Star Trek crew becomes totally baffled in trying to deal with the planet's inhabitants.  It would be bizarre, and yet this is happening with the cicadas on our planet Earth!

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Looking back upon your own life, is there something you now see as having taken years to come to fruition and completion?