THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, May 13, 1995 TAG: 9505130259
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
Southwest Virginia and the Valley soon will be buzzing with the eerie, haunting song of the cicada, often called the 17-year locust.
They are emerging now from dime-sized holes in the ground.
Sighting clouds of the huge insect on the wing, colonists at Jamestown thought they were biblical hordes of locusts that ravage grains and fruits, the sort that Joseph called down upon the Egyptians.
The cicadas - pronounced suh-KAY-duhs - don't bother most crops, animals, or people.
Locusts are a type of grasshopper; cicadas are related to scale insects, such as leaf hoppers and aphids. In some areas, cicadas are kept in check by the cicada killer.
A wasp, long as your little finger, has a curving, black, yellow-barred abdomen, scimitar-like, with a stinger at the end. Its rakish wings slant back like Superman's cape.
It dives upon the cicada on the ground or tree trunk or catches it in air, paralyzes it with the stinger, and lays eggs on it. Wasp larvae emerge with a larder handy.
In childhood we saw the huge wasps all the time. No more. People now dose lawns with chemicals and douse shrubs and flowers with pesticides that wipe out insects and upset nature's balance.
Further, they panic at the sight of an insect. Don't fret, the wasp isn't looking for you. It's after a cicada. If you're lucky enough to see the great-winged wasp, show it to children and then tell it: Buzz off, old sort, and be about the business the Creator ordained for you.
And then you go about yours.
Not a sprig of grass grows uninteresting to me, Thomas Jefferson cried.
Not a sprite that flies or crawls grows uninteresting to me.
God put them here for a purpose, as with us.
The female cicada lays eggs in small holes she cuts in twigs with a sawlike organ near the tip of her abdomen. Herein damage can occur to orchards.
In a few weeks the eggs hatch, young cicadas (nymphs) fall and enter the ground where they feed on roots.
In the warmer deep South the 1.5 inch nymphs come out in 13 years instead of 17. They climb trees and, clinging to the trunk, shed their shells.
Overnight they harden, turn black, and inflate little stubs into orange-veined wings, their legs darken and turn reddish, and their eyes take on a reddish glint. Within a few days they are ready to mate.
To attract females, the males produce a droning racket by making two drumlike membranes on the abdomens vibrate rapidly.
It is a hard, dry screeching, rising and falling, never ceasing as symphonic thousands are at work, sawing away, with the strident noise of some beginning to rise as that of others is starting to fade.
It is a summer, country sound, not too displeasing if you grew up with it. Or are another cicada. by CNB