CICADAS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 865, 8 January 1930, Page 6

CICADAS

NOW when the nun shines the cicadas are out, making the trees ring with their strange music. Even the plane trees in the city streets are green mysteries of song. In some countries cicadas are valued as much as singing birds, and people capture them and keep them in cages. It is only the male cicada that sings, but liis tune is not produced by any vocal organ. If you watch one on a tree you will see him clicking his wings briskly together, a tightened membrane in each wing producing the music. The life of the matured cicada is brief, hut the period it spends underground as a grub may extend over several years. Dropping as a grub from the twig on which the mother cicada has laid her eggs, the larva burrows into the ground and lives a subterranean existence, feeding on the sap of grass and other rools. A species in America lives for seventeen years underground before emerging into the sunshine as a winged insect. But sooner or later the urge comes to leave the old life for the new. Even for a brief time the grub desires to be a winged tiling in the sunshine. Creeping up any convenient tree it clings to a twig and waits for the miracle to happen. At length its head emerges, its legs, its fantastic wings. “Yes,” it seems to say, “it is quite time I made myself known in this world of yours.” If it is a male it sings; if it is a female it does the next best thing—it listens. REDFEATHER.