Cicada
Compleat Naturalist
By Laura & Hal Mahan
What’s that noise? The incessant trilling, humming racket that never lets up. Sometimes it seems almost deafening. The summer air is filled with the calls of cicadas, crickets and katydids, some in the daytime, different ones at night. The males make all of the racket in an attempt to attract the females for mating.
In Chinese and Japanese culture, these insect songsters are celebrated and even kept as pets. In ancient times, people who lived in congested cities looked forward to summer trips to the country to hear and appreciate different songs and choruses of singing insects. Booths in the markets offered crickets and katydids that could be purchased and taken home in cages so that their songs could be enjoyed all through the winter months.
The loudest by far of our insect songsters are the cicadas. These large insects are heard in the daytime; some especially prefer the heat of the day, but they quit singing at dark. Their very loud buzzing sound is produced by special organs called “tymbals” located in the abdomen.
Cicadas are often mistakenly called “locusts,” when locusts are actually grasshoppers. Although their appearance might be a little frightening, they are quite harmless. They do not bite and are easily handled. Nearly all our cicadas here in the eastern U.S. are annual cicadas, meaning that some adults emerge every year. Females lay eggs in the bark of trees, and the eggs hatch into tiny nymphs that fall to the ground and burrow under, where they feed on roots. They remain underground for several years, until they emerge and shed their last skin to reveal the adult cicada. The periodical cicada has a synchronized emergence, where all the adults emerge together in one summer every 17 years. The Asheville area is due for its next emergence in 2025.
One of the most persistent singers after dark is the Common True Katydid. It is well camouflaged with its leaf-green body and wings and sings loudly from the summer treetops at night, sounding like “ch-ch-ch.” The term “katydid” has an interesting story. As the early settlers came to the east coast of North America, the katydid sound was so pervasive that it became woven into storytellers’ yarns. In one folktale, a young woman named Katy fell in love with a handsome young man, but the young man married another girl. Later the young man and his wife were found dead in their beds. The story goes that no person saw what happened, but surely the bugs were watching, and on hot summer nights they shout out the true story of who was responsible: katy-did, katy-did, katy-did!
Our other nighttime songsters include the crickets. Crickets and katydids produce their songs by rubbing a “scraper” on their hind leg against a “file” on the base of their forewing. One of the most interesting features of insect songs is that their change in frequency is directly related to air temperature. The common Snowy Tree Cricket has a chirp rate that can be used to determine the temperature. All you do is count the number of chirps you hear in 13 seconds and add 40 to that number to yield the Fahrenheit temperature.
Learning about insect noises is a great summertime hobby. Learn to observe by listening and tracking them down. See if you can find what is making the noise.
Laura and Hal Mahan are owners of The Compleat Naturalist, located at 2 Brook Street in the Historic Biltmore Village. To learn more, visit compleatnaturalist.com or call 828.274.5430.
