After I graduated few years ago, I was working at a national
park and living in a beautiful country house out in the middle of a Louisiana
cornfield. It was a historic home, built in the 1840’s. I’d crawl into bed each
night, surrounded by memories of generations of Creole culture. It was a beautiful
experience. But one thing about a rural Louisiana home in the summer: bugs.
Lots and lots of bugs.
Bugs are not beloved animals. Of course, there are
entomologists and naturalists who find friends amongst the arthropods. And then
there are the moth-loving Buffalo Bill types (it puts the lotion on its skin or
else it gets the hose again). But most people either feel unkindly towards or
downright terrified by our jointed, exoskeleton-bearing cousins. Spiders don’t bug me so much (see what I did there?),
but put a roach or flying insect in my room, and I will immediately start
crying like a girl. I appreciate them when viewed through glass or in a book,
but for the love of all that is holy, keep them away from me.
I was climbing into bed in my little summer home one night,
exhausted and ready to konk out. All of the sudden, a horrible, stinging pain
hit my right ass cheek. I flew out of bed, and lo and behold: a red wasp was
buzzing around the bed. It had crawled in between my sheets and was waiting for
my bare hiney to climb into bed before stinging the living daylights out of it.
I couldn’t sit for 24 hours after that horrible incident.
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| (Wikicommons) |
Not long after that, I was reading before bed when “buzzzz
buzzzz,” a humongous, black, loud, fast, and terrifying cicada started flying
around the house. I mustered up all my courage to approach the beast with a
broom. I tried to beat it to death- didn’t work. So I cornered it and drenched
it in wasp spray. The monster subdued, and certain that it was dead, I put it
in the trash. I fell asleep soundly, knowing the nightmare was over.
Sometime during the middle of the night, I was stirred awake
by a sound that struck terror in my heart. The beast was somehow still alive,
making its sound from inside the
trashcan. Panicked, I put the entire trashcan outside on the porch, locked the
door, got back into bed, and put a pillow over my head. Rocking back and forth
in fetal position was not enough to put me to sleep that night.
Since then, I’ve felt a little guilty about my behavior
towards this cicada. I’ve learned a little more about them since. They aren’t
so bad. Yes, they still strike fear into my heart, but it’s not their fault.
And their calls are perhaps one of the most comforting sounds in the world to
me- it takes me back to porch-sitting, sweet-tea drinking, ceiling-fan spinning
summer sunsets back home.
One particular genus of cicada has a fascinating lifecycle. Magicicada lays its eggs in tree bark.
After a few weeks, the little nymphs crawl out of the nests, down the trees,
and underground, where they stay for 17 years. In the soil, they spend their
time maturing into adults. Long, sub-terrenean incubation periods are not
uncommon for cicadas, but Magicadas are
special because theirs are synchronized. This means that instead of a batch
emerging each year, each generation emerges at the same time. For a few weeks,
this huge population of newly emerged adults breeds like crazy and then dies. When
you figure in the 17-year incubation period, it means that every 17 years, a
huge emergence of horny cicadas occurs. And folks, 2013 is one of those years.
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| Mmmmm. |
What a strange event this seems, millions of bugs coming out
of the ground all at once. Literally, all at once, in a single night. And so
many! Densities have reached up to a million and a half PER ACRE. It’s truly a
massive invasion. Why in the world would this genus of bugs have such a
drastically different lifecycle from even its closest cicada relatives?
This is a strategy called predator satiation. You see, these cicadas are prey species. They
are eaten by birds, raccoons, spiders, lizards, you name it. But by occurring
in such massive bursts, predation can’t put much of a dent in their numbers. Predators
can eat until they can’t fit another bug in their mouths and the Magicicada population is relatively
untouched. Predators love these kinds of reproductive events- they absolutely
gorge themselves, eating until they are in a stupor. Other animals exhibit this
sort of reproductive strategy in coordination with predation (salmon runs
satiate bears), but this Magicicada
business is truly extreme.
Can you imagine being a Magicicada?
You spend seventeen years growing
underground, only to emerge for a few weeks to have sex and then die. I mean,
it seems more reasonable for things like gnats, whose entire life spans no more
than a matter of days. But an insect, living longer than your average dog, and
accomplishing no more than reproduction during that span is remarkable.
Here’s to wishing the Magicicada
Brood II luck in its impending emergence. They may be kind of icky, but bugs
are really cool. That being said, I hope there is not a wasp, or a cicada for that matter, waiting in your
bed for you tonight. Wear thick panties just in case.
Here’s a great, interpretive website that can tell you more
about these little suckers.
http://www.magicicada.org/magicicada_ii.php
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