The BugLady took to the trails this summer as much as her shiny, new knee and the oppressive heat and humidity allowed (her preferred maximum temperature is 72 degrees.��The gods didn’t cooperate).��Here are some of the bugs she found.��

BLUE DASHER OVIPOSITING – A female Blue Dasher bobs up and down as she looses eggs into the water. Blue Dashers don’t oviposit “in tandem,” with the male guarding her by maintaining his grip at the back of her head, but the male stays close, flying around her as she dips the tip of her abdomen into the water, and chasing off rival males that would carry her away.

CICADA – When the BugLady was little, the treetops sizzled with cicada calls in August (she called them “hot bugs,” because when they emerged, it was). The only species she heard back then was the dog day cicada Dogday Cicada (Family Cicadidae) – Field Station, but for the past decade, she has heard fewer and fewer of them each year .��

This year, she has been enjoying the songs of a Linne’s cicada and an dusk-calling Scissor-grinder cicada , too, both of whom are southern/southeastern species that are inching north. Welcome!

CABBAGE BUTTERFLY ON PURPLE LOOSESTRIFE – A dainty, white butterfly on a pretty, fuchsia flower.��Both are non-native (hint: the butterfly’s caterpillar is known as the European cabbage worm), and both are “naturalized,” that is, having been introduced and/or having escaped into the wild, they are doing very well on their own, thank you.��Only a very small percentage of non-native, naturalized species go on to create problems and to get a third label – “invasive.” For a nice discussion, see .��

EASTERN PONDHAWK AND MEADOWHAWK – It’s a dragonfly-eat-dragonfly world out there.

MILKWEED TUSSOCK MOTH AND CRAB SPIDER – The BugLady has been receiving some queries recently from BugFans whose milkweed is looking pretty ratty.��The culprit? The Milkweed tussock moth , whose caterpillar is sometimes called the Harlequin caterpillar.��Mom lays masses of eggs, and the caterpillars feed gregariously for a while, skeletonizing leaves by eating the tender tissue between the leaf veins.��Then they go their separate ways and eat the leaves down to their midribs.��Bugguide.net says, in an understatement, that the caterpillars “May defoliate patches of milkweed.” 

Allegedly, they don’t interfere with Monarch caterpillars because they eat the old, leathery leaves that the monarchs don’t, and because they’re gearing up as the Gen 5 Monarchs are readying themselves for their trip south.

No, the BugLady did not see the crab spider, and what looks like an egg sac, when she took the picture.

PICTURE-WINGED FLY – This spiffy fly (genus Rivelli, family Platystomatidae) walks around, twitching its wings constantly, sending semaphore signals to nearby females. For its story, see Signal Fly (Family Platystomatidae) – Field Station (only, the BugLady misspelled the family name).��What a treat to watch this little fly strutting his stuff!

WOOD/AMERICAN DOG TICK – Yes, they’re everywhere (they prefer grassy areas and forest edges), and yes, most people feel creepy just looking at a picture of one, feeling the phantom feet of phantom ticks tickling their skin. Dog ticks need three different hosts to get through their life cycles, and they can spread Rocky Mountain spotted fever as well as Tularemia (but if your dog comes down with Tularemia, it may be playing with the local bunnies). Various sources say that Wood ticks in Wisconsin don’t often carry diseases and that Rocky Mountain spotted fever (or any Spotted fever rickettsiosis) are (for now) rare here.��They don’t spread Lyme disease.

VIRGINIA CTENUCHA CATERPILLAR –Lepidopterists say that the more spectacular the caterpillar, the more homely the adult, and vice versa. The Virginia Ctenucha moth is one of the exceptions that proves the rule .

The caterpillars are out and about early – this one was photographed in May, but they overwinter as caterpillars, and the BugLady encounters them strolling along on the warm road on a warm day in late winter or early spring.��Adults are large-ish, day-or-night-flying moths that tuck in under a leaf when alarmed.��The “C” is silent. –

WOOLLY ALDER APHIDS AND THEIR ANTS – We’ve seen it before – aphids going about their business, assisted by ants that protect them them in exchange for being able to “milk” them for honeydew, a sugary fluid that is a byproduct of the sap that flows through the aphids when they eat. Honeydew is an important carbohydrate for the ants that farm aphids and treehoppers.��If you’ve ever seen a leaf whose upper surface looks shiny and sticky, look up under the overhead leaves – they’re probably occupied by aphids.��Bees, wasps, flies, and other insects will visit the leaf to eat honeydew. The woolly aphid’s wool consists of waterproof, waxy filaments made in glands in the aphid’s abdomen.

EMERALD ASH BORER – They really are lovely, little beetles, with a surprise splash of crimson when their wings are spread .��But the extensive tunnels (called galleries ) that the larvae make below the bark disrupt the ash tree’s plumbing so that it can’t pump nutrients between its roots and crown.��

SEDGE SPRITES – One of the BugLady’s favorite damselflies, these little beauties are scarcely an inch long. 

WEEVILS ON PURPLE PRAIRIE CLOVER – Purple prairie clover is a lovely, native tallgrass prairie plant. The early settlers on the Great Plains nicknamed it “Devil’s shoelaces” because this skinny, two-foot-high plant may have roots that are six feet long – roots that grew deep enough to reach through the thick prairie sod to find water. That magnificent sod resisted the settlers attempts to plow it with their small, cast-iron plows until 1837, when John Deere invented the steel moldboard plow, which he fashioned from an old sawmill saw.��

At the top of the flower, there are two weevils, probably seed weevils in the genus Apion, making whoopie.��Here’s a BOTW about seed weevils Baptisia Seed Pod Weevils (Family Curculionidae) – Field Station. No, the BugLady did not see the weevils when she took the picture.

STAG BEETLE – Yes, the BugLady���徱�� see this Stag beetle as it emerged from her lawn one evening in July – the beetle looks big enough to trip over, and she moves like a tank.��Here’s her story Stag Beetle Lucanus Placidus – Field Station.

ROBBER FLY – Remember, bumble bees are vegetarians, so if you see a bumble bee with prey, it’s not a bumble bee.��Mimicking a bumble bee is a pretty good survival strategy – no one messes with bumble bees. This fly is in the genus Laphria, one of the “bee-like” robber flies. Their larvae live in rotten wood and feed on insects they find there, and the adults often prey on beetles (though the BugLady saw one make a pass at a Sulphur butterfly once).��Robber flies come in a variety of sizes and shapes – for information about Wisconsin robber flies (and butterflies and tiger beetles) see .

RED-BELTED BUMBLE BEES – are found west of the great plains and across southern Canada and our northern tier of states.��They are one of the short-tongued bumble bees, which means that they prefer “flatter” flowers like clovers, thistles, goldenrods, and asters. The BugLady doesn’t know where this one was hiking to – she saw several others on flowers in the area. A little rusty on bumble bees? Here’s a great bumble bee guide from the Xerces Society:

Go outside, look at bugs,

The BugLady

The post Summer Sights – and Sounds appeared first on Field Station.

A while back, BugFan Laurel shared this picture of a wasp that was photographed by her friend, Joel, who gave the BugLady permission to use it.��Thanks, Joel.��

This is one large wasp.��In an article about it on the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station website, William Sciarappa writes “Few insects can compare with the alarm caused by Cicada Killer Wasps.” At lengths up to 2” (females are larger than males – more about that later), it’s one of the largest in the country, so let’s get this out of the way up front.��No, the male can’t sting, though he does have a “pseudo-stinger,” and he sometimes “pseudo-stings” with it.��Yes, but she’s a solitary rather than a social wasp, with no motivation to defend hearth and home, so you have to mistreat or step on her in order to get stung (or be a cicada).��Though there were a couple of dissenting voices, most sources agree that her bark is worse than her bite – on the Schmidt Insect Sting Pain Index, which rates pain on a scale of one to four, the Cicada killer’s sting is 0.5, lower than that of a honey bee. One article called her “a marshmallow.”

Eastern Cicada-killer wasps (Sphecius speciosus) (speciosus means “showy” or “beautiful”) are in the Square-headed/Sand wasp family Crabronidae.��Four species in the genus (the Pacific, the Western, the Eastern, and the Caribbean Cicada-killers) combine to cover much of the Lower 48, south into Central America (there’s a South American Cicada-killer, and there are more species in the Old World).��They’re also called Giant cicada-killers, Cicada hawks, and Giant ground-hornets. When the Northern giant hornet (formerly known as the Asian giant hornet/Murder hornet) arrived in the far Northwestern portions of the country, panicky folks in the East were mistaking cicada-killers for murder hornets.��

They prefer sunny edges, gardens, banks, berms, and disturbed spots with loose clay to well-drained sandy soil, close to trees that may harbor cicadas.��There are pictures of them using cracks in sidewalks and patio bricks, window boxes and planters as nest sites.��Here’s a nice collection of pictures of .��

Adults feed on tree sap and on nectar from flowers (and, apparently, ), and they’re considered pollinators.��Cicadas are the only food enjoyed by their larvae.��William Sciarappa again, “The female wasp strikes and stuns the Cicada which reacts with a loud shrieking buzz. Both of these very large insects tumble to the ground where the stinger is then utilized to paralyze the Cicada. This relatively huge prey is laboriously dragged up a tree or tall plant. The Cicada is often held upside down and straddled, after which the wasp takes off and glides home to the nest.” If there’s no place for her to gain altitude, she will walk the cicada back to her nest tunnel.��The Western CKW has a preference for male cicadas and the Eastern and Caribbean CKWs for females.��She apparently locates her prey by sight rather than sound (female cicadas are silent).

A Cassin’s Flycatcher was observed flying out and intercepting prey-laden incoming female wasps and relieving them of their cicadas.��Skunks may dig up the larvae, and the odd spider may snag an adult.��A “velvet ant” (), sneaks into her tunnel and lays an egg in an egg chamber (the ECKW leaves the chambers open until they’re fully provisioned), and the velvet ant larva parasitizes the ECKW pupa.

So – were ECKWs in hog heaven during the historic outbreak of Periodical cicadas this summer? They were not – because of their phenology, they missed the show.��ECKWs target several genera of Dog-day cicadas that emerge after the Periodical cicadas are done. The supply of Periodical cicadas is boom or bust, but the supply of Dog day cicadas is more dependable, so ECKWs are tuned into their cycles.�� 

Male ECKWs emerge when the cicadas start calling, and females emerge about a week later.��Males are very territorial, defending their turf against just about anything that enters it, deliberately crashing into intruding insects, while constantly trying to attract females.��They inspect and follow people fearlessly but will fly off if swatted at.��They communicate by buzzing their wings, warning away other males (the largest males make the loudest buzz), and buzzing may also be part of courtship.��They gather in groups (mating aggregations or leks), scouting areas where females might be and duking it out in mid-air.��Females call to males using pheromones.��

They mate  and then .��The female “leads, but his wing beats help power the flight, even though they’re facing opposite directions.��

Females dig burrows that are 10” to 20” deep and 30” to 70” long with as many as a dozen egg chambers. She leaves a U-shaped trench of soil near the entrance, to the dismay of lawn-owners and golf course maintenance crews (the best defense is a well-watered, dense, healthy turfgrass). She loosens the dirt with her jaws and kicks it out with her hind legs, eventually displacing, said one source, several pounds of soil or, said another source, 100 cubic inches of dirt.��Even though they’re not social, several females may share a burrow, each excavating her own set of egg chambers.��She provisions each with a cicada or three, lays an egg on a cicada leg, seals the cell, and , and she may handle 30 or more cicadas in her lifetime.��The eggs hatch, and the larva eats its cicada in a specific order that keeps the cicada alive until the larva is .��

They overwinter as mature larvae in a cocoon, pupate, and dig out of the tunnel as adults in late spring. Their flight period is about two months; males die after mating, and females die after egg-laying.��

Female ECKWs have a superpower, but the BugLady found two different explanations of it.They have, as they lay their eggs, the ability to determine whether the egg will be male or female, or possibly, an awareness of the egg’s gender.��Males may mate several times, but females only mate once, so she stores his bodily fluid in a receptacle called a spermatheca, meting it out as needed as she gradually fills tunnels and egg chambers.��According to one version, if she does not fertilize the egg, the larva will be a male, and if she does, the larva will be female. According to the second version, the female somehow senses whether the egg she’s about to lay is male or female.��In either case, males are allotted a single cicada, but the eventual females are provisioned with two or three.��Females end up twice as large as males, but they have the job of toting around cicadas that are larger and bulkier than they are. And – Mother Wasp also ensures that there are more females than males in the population.��   

Ain’t Nature Grand!

On a different note: After reading the story of the spider that went to the laundromat in last week’s BOITW, two BugFans shared their own experiences with car spiders. One keeps the outside of her car a little dirty, so the spiders have something to grip; the other BugFan (not-so-much of a spider fan) was unnerved by a large jumping spider that was inside the car as she drove, alternately staring at her (jumping spiders are good at that) and then disappearing as she drove (that, too).

The BugLady

The post Eastern Cicada-killer Wasp appeared first on Field Station.

Salutations, BugFans,

Week 2 of National Wetlands Month features an upgrade of an episode that first appeared in March of 2014. 

Water lilies are important plants in aquatic ecosystems.��At the very least, they provide a dry spot for insects (and frogs and others) to perch on – at most, they are hearth and home.��Various parts of the plants are eaten by organisms ranging from snails to moose, and the broad leaves modify/shade/cool the aquatic habitat below (the BugLady was tickled to see a few fish hiding under a lily leaf on a very hot day).��

A water lily’s leaf and flower stay on the water’s surface instead of being dragged under by the weight of its long stem because the flexible, hollow stalk is divided into a series of air bladders that buoy it up.  

A few insect species are serious water lily specialists, living out their days on the plants. Like Lilypad Forktail damselflies, rarely seen away from them, whose connection is so strong that as they sit on a leaf, the tip of their abdomen is bent down touch it.��And like Donacia beetles, whose eggs are laid at the base of the lily leaf and whose larvae attach themselves to the underwater parts of the plant, from which they get both food and oxygen, pupating in a silken cocoon that is dry inside because the air bubbles that leaked from the chewed stem and provided oxygen to the larva have blown the water from the cocoon.��

The rhizome of yellow water lily was an important medicine and food of Native Americans (they ate the seeds like popcorn, too), but white water lily was used more for medicine. Henry David Thoreau (that silver-tongued romantic) associated the white water lily with young men picking its flowers on their way to church in Concord, and also said that the flower “reminds me of a young country maiden…wholesome as the odor of a cow.” He reported smoking a stem once and said that it was the “most noxious thing I ever smoked.” 

The water lily community has many stories to tell, and the BugLady has already written a few of them.��Here’s a tale about some awesome little bugs that she met for the first time at Riveredge Nature Center toward the end of July, 2013 (at the time, BugFan Joanne said, “I’m in wetlands all the time, and I’ve never seen these before!”  Ditto!).��Some of the water lily leaves hosted masses of the planthoppers for a few weeks, but then they disappeared.��Despite searching for them every summer since then, it wasn’t until the summer of 2023 that the BugLady finally found another one (one!).  

COMMON WATER LILY/POND LILY PLANTHOPPERS (Megamelus davisi), known in more rarefied circles as the Davis’s Megamelus, are in the bug family Delphacidae, the Delphacid Planthoppers.��At first, the BugLady thought they were nymphs, because of their short wing pads, but they were adults.��Adult CWLPs come in either reduced-winged (brachypterous) or , and the brachypterous form is more numerous.��

CWLPs are found in the eastern half of the US, but the species has made a surprise appearance in Hawaii.��They like ponds and extremely slow streams where white water lilies (genus Nymphaea) grow, and they are also found on the unrelated broad-leaved pondweed (Potamogeton natans).��Most of their relatives feed on grasses, but CWLPs eat any part of the water lilies or pondweeds that sticks up above the water line. They’re considered pests if you’re trying to propagate young water lilies, but they don’t damage older, established plants.��Another species of Megamelus is welcomed as a biological control of water hyacinth in Florida.��

Their nymphs are meals for ravenous water treaders (); they’re attacked by a big-headed fly called Pipunculus varius, and their eggs are parasitized by an exceedingly tiny fairy wasp with the lovely name of , whose range exactly matches that of the CWLP because it has been introduced to Hawaii to hassle them there.��When a fairy wasp lays her egg on a planthopper egg, she “marks” it with her ovipositor so other females will leave it alone, because there isn’t enough food in the egg for two wasp larvae to share.��CWLPs are also noted in a website dedicated to “Fly Fishing Entomology,” although duplicating a fish food that is less than a quarter-inch long would take dedication, indeed.��  

Females puncture water lily leaves, stems, and midribs to insert single eggs, and the plant obligingly produces tissue that covers the hole (the nymph’s eventual exit does leave a lasting scar, though).��There are three generations each year, and the fall generation, which outlasts the disintegrating water lily leaves, overwinters as almost mature nymphs in the leaf litter of shoreline plants. When they become active again in late spring, they move out over the water and recolonize the lily leaves.��

So, what’s this little critter famous for? 

First, members of the family Delphacidae are outfitted with spurs (calcars) of various sizes and shapes on their hind tibias (“shins”), but CWLPs are overachievers – their spurs are described as “large,” “moveable,” and even .��There are any number of guesses about what these flaps do for the CWLP. Are they oars that help CWLPs move across the water to new plants? Are they skates? According to a note in the 1923 “Bulletin of the State Geological and Natural History Survey of Connecticut,” “its large spurs undoubtedly support it when, by a mischance, it lands on the water.” Or, queried the “Bulletin of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences” (Vol. 5, 1886–97), “Is not the large, foliaceous spur in this species an adaptation of Nature to enable these insects to leap more readily from the surface of the water, about which they make their home?”  [This theory seems to be the current front-runner.]   

Second, in the “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe” category, consider the planthopper-frog connection that has been documented in New York State. Northern cricket frogs (Acris crepitans) love to eat CWLPs during the summer (they also like aquatic springtails). CWLPs are the primary food of cricket frogs as the frogs prepare for their own fall migrations to wintering sites, too.��According to the (terrific) New York State Conservationist magazine, “a single cricket frog might spend several hours on one lily pad, devouring planthoppers as they move by the thousands over a lily pad.” 

In a paper called “Species decline in an outwardly healthy habitat,” forensic ecologist Jay Westerveld describes the crash of Northern cricket frog populations over much of New York State.��It seems that aerial spraying for Gypsy moths (now renamed Spongy moths) in the 1970’s wiped out entire populations of CWLPs.��When cricket frog numbers plummeted, investigators noted that they could find no CWLPs where they had once been plentiful.��Since spraying isn’t done over public water supply areas, pockets of cricket frogs remain in some wetlands adjacent to reservoirs.��Westervelt makes the point that the CWLP is a habitat specialist, and the Northern cricket frog is a food specialist.��Because the majority of CWLPs are wingless, natural recolonization by the species is painfully slow, and the bugs may need to be reintroduced in order for the frog to rebound.��

Forensic ecologist – the BugLady is ready for the TV series. 

And – PERIODICAL CICADAS – .��  

The BugLady

The post Wetlands Month II – Common Water lily Planthopper revised appeared first on Field Station.

Greetings BugFans,

The insect world is gearing up to stage an event that is the entomological equivalent of the recent total solar eclipse. The buzz (if you’ll pardon the term) began a few months ago with articles in the New York Times and the Smithsonian newsletter. The event: the emergence of billions (with a “b”) of Periodical cicadas over a large chunk of the country south and east of Wisconsin. What one entomologist calls a “spectacular, macabre Mardi Gras” and another calls “a David Attenborough show in your backyard.”&�Բ�����;

Part 1: Setting The Stage

Young cicadas – nymphs – live underground, using their piercing-sucking mouthparts to feed on the fluid that’s getting pumped up into the tree from the roots. The length of their subterranean stay is determined by their species (though sometimes over-enthusiastic individuals may jump the gun, and climate change may be affecting their internal chronometers). 

Most of Wisconsin’s cicada species are green and black, bullet-shaped Annual cicadas in the genus Neotibicen, the , who spend just a year or two underground as nymphs and then tunnel to the surface, climb something vertical, and emerge from their nymphal skin into adulthood (). If you’ve seen a nymph trekking across the lawn or climbing a post, you’ve been privileged to see something that looks, and is, prehistoric – they’ve been around for 200 million years.

Cicadas practice what the BugLady calls the “Normandy Beach” strategy of reproduction – throw enough soldiers on the beach and some will get through (real scientists call it “predator satiation”). Cicadas emerge in large numbers into the waiting jaws, bills, claws, and skillets of a myriad of predators.��Another hypothesis involves predator avoidance.��The year after the cicadas are numerous, their predators’ populations peak, because they had all that food last year to feed to all those young, and survival rates were high.��The next year, prey is scarce, and predator numbers adjust themselves (a 13- or 17-year lag seems overly cautious, but there are Prime number variants of this theory that the BugLady is not equipped to explain).��Or it could be that cicadas developed this method to avoid hybridization.��  

Part 2: Periodical Cicadas (Magicicada sp.), aka 13 and 17 Year Locusts.. 

First off, they’re not locusts – locusts are in the Grasshopper order Orthoptera, and cicadas are in the Bug order Hemiptera. Second, although most cicadas have relatively predictable nymphal periods, the genus Magicicada owns the name “Periodical cicada.” North America has three species of 17-year cicadas and four species of 13-year cicadas (and of course, some cicada experts think that those seven Magicicada species might only be three species. Stay tuned). The ranges of the 17-year species are a bit more northern, and the 13-year species are a bit more southern. Third, they’re pretty awesome-looking insects. Many thanks to BugFan Tom for his wonderful pictures.

�Ѳ��������������岹��is divided into 15 groups called Broods, each designated by a different Roman numeral. Broods are defined not by species but by the synchronicity of their internal clocks, and .

Masses of male Periodical cicadas gather in the treetops and “sing” by vibrating an internal membrane (tymbal) that’s stretched between the thorax and the abdomen. It vibrates hundreds of times per second and can, depending on the species, produce sounds of nearly 100 decibels (louder than a vacuum cleaner, leaf-blower, blender, or garbage disposal). Between choruses, males make short flights away from the group looking for mates. (She flicks her wings at him if she’s in the mood.��Female cicadas are silent, but even if she could make sound, he might not hear her in the din.) Females lay eggs by drilling into twigs, and when the egg hatches, the nymph (and often the tip of the twig) drops to the ground.��

Magicicada nymphs spend their lives about two feet underground, molting five times, and some researchers suggest that they note the passing years by registering that the tree sap is richer in amino acids when the tree blooms in spring (but they don’t know how cicadas “count”).��They are transient — starting to emerge at night, in late April, when soil temperature reaches 64 degrees F, and disappearing by mid-July. By then, the nymphs have aerated the soil, the decomposing shells and adults are enriching the soil, and the birds are well-fed.

Conventional wisdom long held that adult cicadas lived briefly and didn’t eat, which wisdom the BugLady imparted to her offspring.��She got a phone call one day from one of her daughters, who was out on the trail with a class.��She had picked up a cicada to show them, and it had stabbed her in the finger (cicadas, the folks at Cicada Mania say, “sometimes mistake us for trees,” and they advise us to “Just remove the cicada from your person, and go about your business”).��Adult cicadas feed on plant juices — in fact, they sip 300 times their body weight in plant sap daily.��

What goes in must come out, and along that vein, some recent articles have noted that because they must ingest so much nutrient-poor plant sap in order to get enough calories, cicadas are prodigious (and powerful) pee-ers and that no one has studied the impact of all that urine on the landscape (as we say in the Nature business — don’t look up with your mouth open).

Cicada nymphs are eaten by moles, and the adults provide a buffet for snakes, lizards, skunks, rodents, possums, birds of all sizes (the BugLady once heard a truncated cicada buzz and looked out the window to see a (smug) Brown Thrasher leaving the scene with a beakful of cicada), and they are collected and cached by . A few sources said that when birds concentrate on cicadas in big years, they ignore caterpillars, allowing caterpillar populations to increase. Historically, American Indians fried or roasted cicadas, and today, the emergence of large broods spawns cook-offs among entomophagists.    

Part 3: Periodical Cicadas Are Around All The Time — What’s The Big Deal About 2024?

Billions of cicadas, that’s what!  Enough cicadas to stretch to the moon and back 33 times – more than 15 million miles of cicadas, nose to tail. As many as 1.5 million cicadas per acre, with 20 to 25 exit holes in a square foot of soil. The simultaneous appearance over a 16 state area of two geographically adjacent broods, Brood XIII (the Northern Illinois Brood) and the periodical cicadas with the widest range, Brood XIX (the Great Southern Brood). The simultaneous emergence of two broods – a 13-year species and a 17-year species – that last emerged together when Thomas Jefferson was president and that won’t appear together for another 221 years (by comparison, the – OK, 2044 if you insist on staying in North America).    

How far will Wisconsin eco tourists will have to travel? Just to our .

As always, the question is “Can you get high on Periodical cicadas (beyond the sheer joy of witnessing the exuberance of Nature, of course)? Well —- maybe. 

About 5% of Magicicada nymphs may become infected with a fungus called Massospora (a so-called Zombie fungus) that produces both the psychedelic chemical psilocybin (think “magic mushrooms”) and an amphetamine/stimulant called cathinone. The nymphs are exposed when they enter the soil after hatching, or while they’re living underground, or even as they tunnel up to emerge as adults.  When the adult matures, its butt falls off and is “replaced” by a  – “what entomologists affectionately call ‘flying salt shakers of death,’” says the National Audubon Society website. With the fungus calling the shots, behaviorally, infected adults initiate a lot of romantic encounters, and they often walk along the ground, dragging their nether portions and thereby depositing spores on the soil.

Part 4: Cicada Miscellania

Cicadas aren’t known to carry diseases, but after a Brood XIII emergence in 2007, lots of suburban Chicagoans had nasty, itchy rashes. Turns out that a tiny mite called the Oak gall mite (aka the “itch mite”) eats cicada eggs when it’s not eating Oak leaf gall midges. More cicada eggs = more mites = more human-mite encounters. 

During the Brood X emergence a few years ago, a disease was seen in birds in the same geographical area. It was suspected that there was a link to the cicadas that suddenly dominated their diet (biological magnification), but it was not determined whether the problem was the extra load of cicada “meat” itself, chemicals that the nymphs or adults may have been exposed to, or soil bacteria or fungi that came to the surface with the nymphs. The disease eased as the cicadas died off.

History geeks please note the History section of the Wikipedia write-up on Periodical cicadas, .  

And speaking of biological exuberance, our skies are suddenly filled with Red Admiral butterflies (and some Painted Ladies, too) migrating up from the South and Southwest. Early butterflies don’t rely on flowers; they feed on sap dripping from trees.

The BugLady

The post The Cicadas are Coming – a Tale in Four Parts appeared first on Field Station.

A few years ago, the BugLady wrote an article about entomophagy – the fine art of cooking and eating insects. In the past, the emergence of a big brood of cicadas has signaled recipe contests, and so, as periodical cicada Brood X gets serious (the BugLady almost said “gets cooking), .

looks pretty different than the .

What a fantastic article from BugFan Molly – .

Finally – ?

The BugLady

The post Closed for June – Brood X appeared first on Field Station.

The BugLady started hearing cicadas recently, so she spruced up this episode from 2007 (many new facts and photos). Warning: Parenthesis alert.

Cicadas

Cicadas that whine monotonously from the treetops in the heat of July and August are heard far more often than they are seen. They are commonly (and erroneously) referred to as “locusts,” named after members of a noisy-but-completely-unrelated grasshopper group. It’s a mistake that we owe, apparently, to the early English settlers, who heard cicadas (in Biblical numbers) in the canopy of the vast Eastern forest and assumed they were some unfamiliar locust. Interestingly, the Greek word for grasshopper (tettigonion) is the diminutive of the Greek word for cicada (tettix) (the BugLady loves the etymology of entomology. Bonus: The Latin word cicada means buzzer). Because of their appearance and the noise they make, cicadas are on a lot of people’s radar, and they’ve collected names like “Annual cicada,” “Dogday Harvestfly,” “Jar fly,” “17-year Locust” and “Periodical Locust” and more.

There are about 170 species of cicadas, family Cicadidae, in North America north of Mexico. Wisconsin has nine species — Periodical cicadas like the famous 17-year locust, genus Magicicada; and Annual/Dogday Cicadas, mostly in the genus Neotibicen (formerly called Tibicen).

Magicicada 17-Year Locusts

The Rock Stars of the cicada world are the , whose range barely crosses our southern border. Our soils have traditionally been too cold for Magicicada, but Climate Change may bring this insect—and others less pleasant—farther north. Their predictable 13 and 17 year irruptions spawn cicada festivals and cook-offs and modifications of the outdoor concert schedules at Ravenna and Tanglewood. One source, the ( website, said that planners of outdoor weddings also keep track of the cicada calendar; another said that the historic cycles of the periodic cicadas may be shifting due to Global Warming.

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Neotibicen

Neotibicen adults are green, black, and brown, bullet-shaped, and one-to-two inches long; they have four wings (the front pair twice as long as the rear pair), short antennae, two small compound “bug-eyes,” and three simple eyes. They look fearsome, but they’re harmless. Our Annual/Dogday cicadas have overlapping two to five year cycles so they are with us each summer. “Dogday” is a nod to the dog days of summer when hot/cicada weather coincides with the appearance of Sirius, the Dog Star, in the Big Dog constellation. Neotibicen canicularis is a common species in Wisconsin.

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Most male cicadas emerge during a relatively compressed period of time and vocalize to attract females, and their calls also draw competing males to the party (females don’t speak, but in some species, they do flick their wings). Kaufman, in his Field Guide to Insects of North America, mentions that some yard-care machinery sounds like cicadas and will attract throngs of females. Sounds Hitchcockian. The BugLady calls theirs a “Normandy Beach” strategy of reproduction—if you throw enough soldiers onto the beach, some will get through. Ecologists call it “predator satiation”—mobilize more than enough cicadas to fill up your predators in order to ensure the next generation. Cicadas provide a super-sized meal for songbirds, mantises, and big spiders; and large, solitary “Cicada-killer” wasps snag them and stash them for the future dining pleasure of their offspring. Gulls and terns will take advantage of boom years.

Males of each species have a characteristic call which is produced by internal structures called “tymbals.” Large cavities, located at the juncture of the thorax and abdomen, are covered with membranes, effectively turning them into drumheads. When these drumheads are vibrated by powerful muscles, they produce a series of rapid clicks, and the almost-empty abdomen acts like an amplifier for the sound. The buzz can be modified depending on the position of the abdomen and can be softened if the insect is alarmed. Cicadas in southeastern Wisconsin tend to be monotone, diurnal callers, but some species in other parts of the country make a throbbing sound that continues well into the evening. See website (On the far left of the webpage, see the black text “Navigate to the Species Pages,” and choose “Cicadas”).

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They have other sounds in their vocabulary, too—a you’re-invading-my-personal-space “encounter call,” a soft, one-on-one courtship call (some species), and a stuttering distress call (the BugLady has heard this as a catbird chased a cicada outside her window, a chase that ended with a triumphant, if muffled, “meow”).

A pair of auditory organs is located on the abdomen—if sound is produced, there must be “ears” (tympana) to hear it. Males can decrease the sensitivity of their tympana while they’re calling, damping down the volume by about 20 dB so they don’t damage their own hearing. Cicadas are one of our loudest singers, with some calls weighing in at 120 dB (chain saw, riveter, thunder, fireworks)—loud enough so that an extended “close encounter” could damage human hearing, too.

Along with their calls, cicadas are famous for the years they spend underground as nymphs. Ms. C. makes a slit in a twig with her tough ovipositor and inserts her eggs (often causing the bark to scar and twig tips to die and even drop off). When the tiny nymph hatches, it falls to the ground, burrows in, and spends the next years feeding on the sap of plant roots (Neotibicen canicularis likes oak and especially pine roots). Despite their numbers, cicadas don’t do much damage to the plants they sip on. Like its call, the number of years it spends in the soil depends on its species. When its appointed time has elapsed, the prehistoric-looking nymph tunnels up and excavates a cavity/”waiting room” just below the surface.

Donald W. Stokes, in A Guide to Observing Insect Lives reports that it uses its raptorial-looking front legs to excavate, rake and tamp the soil in order to camouflage the exit to its chamber (the BugLady uses empty cicada skins in an observation exercise, and those front legs inevitably fool her students into guessing that cicadas are predators). Under the cover of night, it hauls itself up out of the ground and climbs a vertical surface. There it splits the skin on its back and pulls out its adult body, pumps up its wings, and flies away, leaving behind an empty husk that Kaufman describes as “gnome-like” thanks to BugFan Laurel for providing the shot of the recently emerged cicada sitting on its shell. The newly-emerged (pinkish) cicada on a rock in two of the shots was happy that the BugLady couldn’t see it, because its wings were a bit soft for evasive maneuvers). For a , scroll down to the “Life Cycle” section.

One theory about periodical cicadas’ long hiatus as nymphs is that it makes dinnertime totally unpredictable for the wasps—the nymphs’ life cycle is longer than that of its predators.

Adults live only a few weeks, siphoning sap from twigs (prior folklore held that they did not have operational mouthparts, but they do). The BugLady once got a phone call from a surprised naturalist who was stabbed while holding a cicada for the kids to see; after a while, it probably decided that she was a tree and was attempting to feed.

And, of course, grilled and fried cicadas, said to taste like almonds, are staples on the menus of many entomophagists (bug-eaters). Aristotle relished them. On that topic, according to Wikipedia, “In 2011, cicadas were incorporated into a single batch of ice cream in Columbia, Missouri, at Sparky’s. The ice creamery was advised by the public health department against making a second batch, a suggestion with which store owners complied.”

In the folklore department, cicada emergence is a metaphor for resurrection and immortality in some cultures. On a darker note, counting forward from the first Dogday cicada call is supposed to give us the date of the first frost, though some folklorists suggest that we should start counting at the peak or even the end of the calling period. Winner of the “Blatant Sexism Award” is the Greek writer Xenarchus, who said “Happy are cicadas, for they all have silent wives.”

The Songs of Insects by Elliott and Hershberger is a great source of information about the sounds of cicadas, katydids, crickets and locusts, the pictures are super, and it has a CD.

 
The BugLady

The post Dogday Cicada (Family Cicadidae) appeared first on Field Station.

Cicadas

In the heat of July and August, cicadas whine monotonously from the treetops. Heard far more often than they are seen, they are commonly (and erroneously) referred to as “locusts,” named after the noisy but completely unrelated grasshopper group. When the BugLady was a naiad, she called them “Hot Bugs,” and other monikers include “Dogday Harvestfly,” “17-year Locust” and “Periodical Locust.” They are the poster child for the concept of “biological clock.”

Each species has a characteristic call which is produced by internal structures called tymbals. Two large cavities, located at the juncture of the thorax and abdomen, are covered with membranes, effectively turning them into drumheads. When these drumheads are vibrated by powerful muscles, the almost-empty abdomen acts like an amplifier for the sound (several species also make clicking sounds with their wings). A pair of auditory organs is also located on the abdomen; if all that sound is being produced, there must be “ears” to hear it. Cicadas in southeastern Wisconsin tend to be monotone, diurnal callers, while species along the Mississippi and in the south may make a throbbing sound that continues into the night.

Most males emerge during a relatively compressed period of time and “vocalize” to attract females (their calls also draw competing males to the party), and anyone who has enjoyed a hot, Wisconsin summer has experienced the din. The BugLady calls this the “Normandy Beach” philosophy of reproduction—if you throw enough soldiers onto the beach, some will succeed. Kaufman, in his Field Guide to Insects of North America, mentions that some yard-care machinery sounds like cicadas and will attract hoards of females. Sounds Hitchcockian. The Rock Stars of the cicada world are the 17-Year Locusts (genus Magicicada), whose range lies barely south of us and whose predictable irruptions spawn festivals, recipe contests (the science of eating insects is called entomophagy) and modifications of the outdoor concert schedules at Ravenna and Tanglewood.

Cicadas are equally famous for the years they spend as nymphs. Ms. C. makes a slit in a twig with her tough ovipositer and inserts her eggs (often causing the twig tips to die). When a nymph hatches, it falls to the ground, burrows in, and spends its next years feeding on the sap of plant roots. The number of years it spends in the soil—pick a number between 4 and 17—is determined by its species. When the appointed time has lapsed, it tunnels up and excavates a cavity/”waiting room” just below the surface. Donald W. Stokes, in A Guide to Observing Insect Lives reports that it uses its predatory-looking front legs to excavate, rake and tamp the soil to camouflage the exit to its chamber. Under the cover of night, it hauls itself up out of the ground, appearing incredibly prehistoric, and looks for a vertical surface to climb. Once attached, it splits the skin on its back and pulls out its adult body, leaving behind an empty husk that Kaufman describes as “gnomelike.”

The green-and-black, bullet-shaped, one-to-two inch long adults, with their clear, stiff wings are impressive but harmless. Adults live only a few weeks, feeding on the sap from twigs. They may provide a meal for songbirds (the BugLady often hears a Hot Bug’s whine choked off abruptly, followed by high fives from a catbird or towhee), and big spiders and large, solitary “Cicada-killer” wasps may snag cicadas for their own immediate use or for the future dining pleasure of their offspring. Gulls and terns will take advantage of the emergence of the large “broods.” In the folklore department, several veins in the forewing of the adult meet to form a “W;” and “seers” claim that their emergence is a portent of war. Winner of the “Blatant Sexism Award” is the Greek writer Xenarchus, who said “Happy are cicadas, for they all have silent wives.”

The BugLady once got out of a meeting and observed a cicada that, during course of the meeting, had hiked across the driveway and up onto the tire of a fellow attendees’ car, had pulled itself completely out of its nymphal exoskeleton, and had almost completed pumping up its wings. Confirmation from the insect world that it had, indeed, been a long meeting!

 
The BugLady

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