Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 2: name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I am Joe McCormick. And hey, folks, if I
Speaker 3: sound a little bit unusual today, it is because I
Speaker 3: am recording with a bit of a cold, yet another
Speaker 3: respiratory infection that I believe I caught from my toddler.
Speaker 3: And this actually, in a strange kind of indirect way,
Speaker 3: does connect to what we're talking about today, because just recently,
Speaker 3: it was over this past weekend, I saw my toddler.
Speaker 3: She was running around in our living room, and I
Speaker 3: saw her stop and reach down to pick something up
Speaker 3: off the floor. And Rob you might remember, you know
Speaker 3: this move from your son's earlier days. You were like,
Speaker 3: the child reaches down to grab something off the floor,
Speaker 3: and you have to get there first because you don't
Speaker 3: know what the thing is and you want to prevent
Speaker 3: the possible ingestion of the mystery substance. Sometimes it goes
Speaker 3: straight into.
Speaker 2: The mouth, exactly. Yeah, you need to know what has
Speaker 2: been picked up. It could be harmless, it could be,
Speaker 2: you know, one of the various dreaded items and so forth.
Speaker 3: Right, so in this case, I was like, what is that?
Speaker 3: But I got to it first, and I picked it
Speaker 3: up and realized it was a large, transparent wing, an
Speaker 3: insect wing. In fact, it was a wing belonging to
Speaker 3: a cicada, just sitting there by itself on the floor.
Speaker 3: How it got in the house, I do not know.
Speaker 3: I guess we may have tracked it in on our
Speaker 3: shoes from outside. But it was kind of this evocative
Speaker 3: little clue, this mystery, like where was the rest of
Speaker 3: the insect? No idea, but this random arthropod body part
Speaker 3: in our house was like just a little taste of
Speaker 3: the great cicada biomass, both alive and dead that there
Speaker 3: was outside in the surrounding foliage.
Speaker 2: And maybe almost a literal taste. But you got there first,
Speaker 2: like you said.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, don't I don't know where insect body parts
Speaker 3: factor in when it comes to like full mites and
Speaker 3: transmitting germs. No, I have not read into that. But
Speaker 3: fortunately it did not go in any mouths, but we
Speaker 3: got sick.
Speaker 2: Anyway, this will be discussing. You know, circadas are are
Speaker 2: are good eats, so I don't know if it would
Speaker 2: have been that bad. And also going back to our
Speaker 2: multi part episode on dust It's like, sorry, there are
Speaker 2: insect parts in the house, either in whole, partial or
Speaker 2: dustified particleized formats. So it's just part of part of
Speaker 2: our living environments. So yeah, cicadas are a regular annual
Speaker 2: cicadas anyway, our regular feature of summer down here in Atlanta.
Speaker 2: They're not quite out in forced just yet. But over
Speaker 2: the weekend I ventured up into Tennessee and got to
Speaker 2: experience the current and explosion of periodical cicadas uh and
Speaker 2: it was pretty awesome there. I was. I hadn't been
Speaker 2: around them in a bit, so I was a bit
Speaker 2: surprised because they were smaller than I expected them to be,
Speaker 2: as the periodical cicadas typically are, I'm to understand, But
Speaker 2: they were still wonderful to observe, to listen to, and
Speaker 2: in general, that swelling of the cicada song is just
Speaker 2: such a regular feature of the summer, especially in the
Speaker 2: most oppressively hot months, you know, those dog days of summer.
Speaker 2: So this would you know, we'd definitely be talking about
Speaker 2: the uh, the the annual cicadas in this scenario. To me,
Speaker 2: it's always felt like that is the sound of humid
Speaker 2: southern heat, a heat that often feels like it hits
Speaker 2: you in waves anyway, just as that cicada song hits
Speaker 2: you in waves sonically.
Speaker 3: Rob, did you mention the dog days of summer, because
Speaker 3: there is a specific cicada species known as the dog
Speaker 3: day cicada?
Speaker 2: Exactly, yes, And that's the that's the connection there that
Speaker 2: they or so the late in the summer during you know,
Speaker 2: the off like the sweatiest, hottest time, the time when
Speaker 2: you go outside and you feel like you've landed on
Speaker 2: mercury or something.
Speaker 3: H also known as the heat bug.
Speaker 2: They do like it hot. And that's another feature too.
Speaker 2: It's like, you know, early in the morning you might
Speaker 2: not hear them yet, and then you know, very late
Speaker 2: in the afternoon slash evening when you dare venture out again,
Speaker 2: their song might be dying off for the night and
Speaker 2: so forth. So that's one aspect of just sort of
Speaker 2: life with cicadas. But the shed exoskeleton of the cicada
Speaker 2: has also always enthralled me as well. You know, this
Speaker 2: monstrous little form that's left behind a kind of monster
Speaker 2: gym that you can just pick up and you can
Speaker 2: pocket pocket it, you can clip it onto the end
Speaker 2: of your finger or a stick, or maybe like an
Speaker 2: old gi Joe man's head or something. Even before I
Speaker 2: saw nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds. I love
Speaker 2: these things, and if I find one to these days,
Speaker 2: to this day, I will bring it up and give
Speaker 2: it a more prominent place on the front porch. You know,
Speaker 2: like I need to show it to my son, even
Speaker 2: if he's he's still interested in this sort of thing,
Speaker 2: but I still have to show it to him. I
Speaker 2: still have to sort of like put it on display
Speaker 2: for myself. There's just something special about finding them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree. There there was a time a few
Speaker 3: years back when my sister in law was like collecting
Speaker 3: the the molted cicada exoskeletons, which have been named by
Speaker 3: the way they're They're called the exsuvia or the exuvier.
Speaker 3: These these exoskeletons after the the cicada molts and leave
Speaker 3: leaves it behind. Yeah, you can find them all over
Speaker 3: the place, and they are a lot of fun to collect. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're already like pre dried out, ready to go.
Speaker 2: There's nothing really gross about them. I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: respect to anyone who who is grossed up by cicadas
Speaker 2: will get into it. But well also probably probably dispel
Speaker 2: some of the reasons, the logical reasons anyway you might
Speaker 2: be opposed to them. But yeah, these these these are
Speaker 2: wonderful because they're if you if you haven't ever encountered one,
Speaker 2: and I feel like a lot most of you maybe have,
Speaker 2: they are like full form, like there's a slit down
Speaker 2: the back where the adults cicada has emerged, but otherwise
Speaker 2: it's like this perfect little exoskeleton shell. It's not like
Speaker 2: a snake skin, which you know, doesn't have like the
Speaker 2: head of the snake on it or anything. You know,
Speaker 2: it's it's it's not in any way like you can
Speaker 2: you can see the full form really the exoskeleton form
Speaker 2: of the nymph form of the cicada.
Speaker 3: That's right, because Rob correct me if I'm wrong. But
Speaker 3: I think most of the exuvia that you will find
Speaker 3: these shells are the final form of the of the
Speaker 3: young cicada, the nymph form when it comes up out
Speaker 3: of the ground, crawls up a tree, and then it
Speaker 3: molts and emerges in its adult form.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I saw one rite up even that kind of
Speaker 2: stressed the idea that essentially what we have emerging is
Speaker 2: the adult cicada, the adult winged cicada, but it is
Speaker 2: still wearing the exoskeleton, hasn't like pushed off that final
Speaker 2: molt just yet, which is kind of an interesting and
Speaker 2: slightly grizzly and suitably alien idea to.
Speaker 3: Give adult humans ready to vote and buy beer were
Speaker 3: like coming out of the house still wearing their child
Speaker 3: skin and they had to like burst out of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that sort of thing. So, yeah, I figured a
Speaker 2: lot of us have cicadas on the brain, either via
Speaker 2: direct experience or via a lot of media coverage, So
Speaker 2: I figured let's actually dive into them and do some
Speaker 2: episodes on them. And I want to stress that there
Speaker 2: will be a two week break between this Cicada episode
Speaker 2: and the next one due to scheduling here. We're going
Speaker 2: to do a little small summer break during which we'll
Speaker 2: have some reruns, but we'll also have some new omnibus
Speaker 2: episodes of Monster Fact episodes and Anamalia stipendium, so there'll
Speaker 2: be some new content sprinkled in there. But basically there's
Speaker 2: gonna be a little break and then there will be
Speaker 2: more Cicada content, which I think is kind of fitting
Speaker 2: for the cicada, because we're talking about a creature that
Speaker 2: does go on extended breaks at times before it re emerges, like.
Speaker 3: The god Tamuz disappears into the underworld and reappears again
Speaker 3: later exactly. All right, Well, I'm going to start off
Speaker 3: with some basics about cicadas as a family of insects
Speaker 3: and a bit about their taxonomic context. So, cicadas are
Speaker 3: a family of insects within the order Hemiptera. The order Hymiptera,
Speaker 3: meaning half winged, contains insects such as plant hoppers and leafhoppers,
Speaker 3: assassin bugs, spittlebugs, moss bugs, bedbugs, and aphids. The Hymiptera
Speaker 3: are sometimes called true bugs, which I like because it
Speaker 3: does imply that there are false bugs. And this was
Speaker 3: a bit of a surprise to me because I always
Speaker 3: thought of bug. The word bug as just an informal,
Speaker 3: non scientific term that it had no criteria, and it
Speaker 3: could be used to refer to basically any arthropod smaller
Speaker 3: than a crab, any creepy crawley thing. In common usage,
Speaker 3: it is that, but bug also has a specific scientific
Speaker 3: meaning to entomologists referring to the Hymiptera insects, so as
Speaker 3: an example of the many false bugs. The lady bug
Speaker 3: is not actually a hymipterin it's a beetle, so it
Speaker 3: is technically not a bug. The same is true of
Speaker 3: many insects that have the word bug in their name.
Speaker 3: June bugs are also not true bugs. They are beetles.
Speaker 3: So as a side note, this got me kind of
Speaker 3: interested in the etymology of the word bug. Where did
Speaker 3: this confusing term come from? Well, I found a few
Speaker 3: different sources on this. For one thing, Miriam Webster had
Speaker 3: an interesting post on this etymological development. So the English
Speaker 3: term bug did not always refer to an insect at all.
Speaker 3: It did not necessarily refer to a creepy crawley animal.
Speaker 3: In Middle English, the word bugs spelled with two g's
Speaker 3: and an e at the end. Love that bug referred
Speaker 3: to a monster like a hobgoblin, or to a scarecrow.
Speaker 3: The scarecrow usage appears in John Wickliffe's thirteen eighty two
Speaker 3: English translation of a deuterocanonical biblical text, a text that's
Speaker 3: not used in all denominations versions of the Bible, but
Speaker 3: it's used in some Christian traditions. It's called the Book
Speaker 3: of Baruk and Wickliff's translation goes as a bug either
Speaker 3: a man of ragis in a place where gordis wexen
Speaker 3: keepeth no thing, so bin her goddess of tree. And
Speaker 3: in modern English that would read something like as a
Speaker 3: bug or a man of rags in a place where
Speaker 3: gourds grow guards nothing, So are there gods of wood?
Speaker 3: So this is a verse I think comparing idols used
Speaker 3: in religious worship to a scarecrow in a garden, I
Speaker 3: think the implication being that they are like both an illusion.
Speaker 3: A common theme in Judaism in Christianity is against the
Speaker 3: religious use of.
Speaker 2: Idea fascinating all right, I had no idea.
Speaker 3: So bug is a scarecrow there in the fourteenth century
Speaker 3: bug is a scarecrow, but by the time of Shakespeare
Speaker 3: it seems to have lost this meaning and refers to
Speaker 3: a type of monster or spirit or specter. So consider
Speaker 3: the line in Hamlet. Hamlet is he's complaining, he's lamenting,
Speaker 3: and he says, oh, such bugs and goblins in my life.
Speaker 3: That's an Act five, scene two. He's talking to Horatio.
Speaker 3: And you can also see this use of bug as
Speaker 3: monster in the word bug bear, which is attested since
Speaker 3: the fifteen eighties, meaning a monster or generally a creature
Speaker 3: or simply a notion which causes terror. I think a
Speaker 3: bug bear is supposed to imply some kind of demon
Speaker 3: bear or monstrous bear which frightens children.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that usage still kind of remains.
Speaker 2: And then of course in the world of dungeons and dragons,
Speaker 2: you have the bug bear as an actual monster and
Speaker 2: I think sometimes playable species. So the bug bear lives on.
Speaker 3: So yeah, bug as monster or bug as kind of
Speaker 3: a devil. You know, it's a like a devil version
Speaker 3: of a bear. So there seems to be a common
Speaker 3: root of bog or bug observable in Scottish and Welsh
Speaker 3: terms referring to terrors, devils, inspectors. You can think of
Speaker 3: later derived terms like bogie, which seems to be it's
Speaker 3: like a later word that has the same root, I think.
Speaker 3: And according to the online Etymological Dictionary, some linguists have
Speaker 3: guessed that there is a root in terms used for
Speaker 3: a male goat. It does so like bug here as
Speaker 3: monster shares a root with buck. So if you go
Speaker 3: all the way back, this may come from ideas of
Speaker 3: some sort of evil spectral he goat but that's far
Speaker 3: from certain. So, according to the Merriam Webster etymology, by
Speaker 3: the late fifteen hundreds the term referred to earthly insects
Speaker 3: in some usages, particularly pest insects, and then by the
Speaker 3: late seventeen hundred's the emerging Linaean classification system scientific terms
Speaker 3: for taxonomizing and referring to animals that assigned the term
Speaker 3: bug to the order Hmiptera, though of course it is
Speaker 3: still commonly used to refer generically to little creeping things.
Speaker 3: But how did this transition from like monster or scarecrow
Speaker 3: to insects happen? I was reading another article, this one
Speaker 3: for the California Alumni Association, which included interviews with a
Speaker 3: Berkeley linguist named Jeffrey Nunberg, and this sort of made
Speaker 3: the point that bug, originally having the association of a monster,
Speaker 3: came to refer to insects because of their resemblance to monsters,
Speaker 3: particularly bedbugs, which were probably the first insects to be
Speaker 3: called bugs. Because they suck our blood in the night.
Speaker 3: There is something kind of monstrous and awful about that.
Speaker 3: And this type of association continues for many other uses
Speaker 3: of English today, a lot of them have to do
Speaker 3: with like irritation, disgust, and infestation, a computer bug, a
Speaker 3: bugged phone line, a flu bug, bugging someone as in
Speaker 3: bothering them. A lot of them have this kind of
Speaker 3: conceptual association with like irritation or problems.
Speaker 2: Interesting.
Speaker 3: Interesting, So that was all sidebar, But I thought that
Speaker 3: was interesting. I never knew any of that before. So
Speaker 3: to come back to actual insects, Cicadas belong to the
Speaker 3: order of true bugs, the Hymiptera, of which there are
Speaker 3: probably about eighty thousand or more species. The most distinctive
Speaker 3: body features shared by the species of Hymiptera are the
Speaker 3: piercing and sucking mouth parts. So these insects have what
Speaker 3: could be referred to as a sucking beak, technically known
Speaker 3: as a rostrum. So if you want to picture it,
Speaker 3: it is like a hinged, segmented, hollow needle. It is
Speaker 3: used to pierce the outer layer of the food source.
Speaker 3: And this could be a number of different things. It
Speaker 3: could be the outside of a plant or the root
Speaker 3: of a plant, could be the exoskeleton of an insect.
Speaker 3: And then they're the needle pierces. And then there is
Speaker 3: sort of a pumping organ operated by muscles that allows
Speaker 3: the bug to suck up the liquid inside that substrate
Speaker 3: for nutrition. Hymipterins typically inject an external digestive enzyme into
Speaker 3: whatever they are eating to help break down starches and
Speaker 3: proteins inside the food substrate, and then they suck that
Speaker 3: food juice up through the hollow core of the rostrum. Now,
Speaker 3: the hymiptera include both herbivores and carnivores, so again, this
Speaker 3: food that they're sucking up through the sucking beak could
Speaker 3: be a plant based liquid like tree sap or like
Speaker 3: the xylum in plant roots in the case of a cicada,
Speaker 3: Or it could be an animal based liquid like your
Speaker 3: blood in the case of a bed bug, or like
Speaker 3: the runny liquefied inside of a caterpillar in the case
Speaker 3: of an assassin bug. In terms of other body features, many,
Speaker 3: but not all, hymiptera, according to their name, which again
Speaker 3: means half wing, have wings with two distinct parts, a
Speaker 3: leathery or thickened part near the base and a thin
Speaker 3: membrane toward the tip. But not all hymiptera are like this.
Speaker 3: A cicadas are an exception. If you look at a
Speaker 3: cicada wing like the one I found on my floor
Speaker 3: the other day. They tend to have fully membranous, transparent
Speaker 3: wings with just these vein sort of structural veins running
Speaker 3: through them. Cicadas in particular are a superfamily of insects
Speaker 3: within Hymiptera. The suborder they belong to is aucinorinka. There
Speaker 3: are more than three thousand species of cicadas worldwide, found
Speaker 3: in lots of different environments in the tropics and intemperate environments.
Speaker 3: They range somewhat in size. The smallest cicadas are less
Speaker 3: than an inch long as adults. The largest species, the
Speaker 3: impress cicada, has a body length of about seven cinemi
Speaker 3: in a wingspan of up to twenty centimeters and Cicadas
Speaker 3: have the standard three part insect body division of head, thorax,
Speaker 3: and abdomen. On the head, cicadas generally have five eyes.
Speaker 3: They've got two huge, bulbous compound eyes on either side,
Speaker 3: and then three smaller simple eyes known as o'celli, arranged
Speaker 3: in a kind of triangle or pyramid pattern in the
Speaker 3: middle of the head on the top.
Speaker 2: I've always thought they were quite cute they have I
Speaker 2: think they have kind of like cute heads slashed faces
Speaker 2: if you will. Yeah, and the size is notable as well,
Speaker 2: because if you are in an area where there are
Speaker 2: lots of cicadas, they're going around doing their thing. They're
Speaker 2: kind of oblivious to your thing, so they may bop
Speaker 2: into you at various times and or land on your shirt.
Speaker 2: And with the larger, I guess mainly the annual cicadas,
Speaker 2: it's it can be like a like a large ping
Speaker 2: pong ball hitting you, you know, it can be that
Speaker 2: level of impact, and then they stick on there for
Speaker 2: a little bit. Maybe they crawl into your shirt. They've
Speaker 2: been known to freak out the occasional child or bug
Speaker 2: adverse person.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and some cicadas in particular are kind of seem
Speaker 3: kind of brazen, seem less threatened by large animals like
Speaker 3: us than some other insects would be. The average adult cicada,
Speaker 3: they've got these relatively short antennae, kind of like little
Speaker 3: bristles on the head, and a thick, stout body with
Speaker 3: folded wings usually reaching back beyond the end of the abdomen. Now,
Speaker 3: I wanted to do a brief thing here on cicada singing,
Speaker 3: because of course, cicadas are famous for the music they make.
Speaker 3: You might call it music, you might call it noise.
Speaker 3: The sounds they make, and in fact, cicadas are the
Speaker 3: loudest family of insects on Earth. I was reading about
Speaker 3: a study by Sanborn in Phillips in nineteen ninety five
Speaker 3: that found that the average sound pressure of the mating
Speaker 3: call of thirty different species of North American cicada was
Speaker 3: between eighty and one hundred and six decibels. That is
Speaker 3: incredibly loud for a sound made by insects. These noises
Speaker 3: are often compared to the sounds made by powerful machines.
Speaker 3: For example, I just looked up some averages of the
Speaker 3: decibels produced by noisy things. Apparently, a riding lawnmower, if
Speaker 3: you are sitting on the mower so like at that distance,
Speaker 3: is about ninety four to ninety five decibels for the rider.
Speaker 3: A motorcycle is about one hundred and five decibels. A
Speaker 3: chainsaw in your hands might be more like one hundred
Speaker 3: and fifteen. So, especially for their size, cicadas are almost
Speaker 3: unbelievably loud animals.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can pretty much sound like there are leaf
Speaker 2: blowers or weed whackers running in like all adjacent yards
Speaker 2: to the property on. They're just incredibly loud. But it's
Speaker 2: even louder than that, especially if you are in an
Speaker 2: environment surrounded by like a lot of trees forests, because
Speaker 2: it's like the forest itself feels like it's alive. With
Speaker 2: this buzzing again, it can feel like it's the sound
Speaker 2: the world is making, as opposed to creatures in the world.
Speaker 3: Yeah, cicadas can produce sounds that come pretty close to
Speaker 3: the pain threshold for human hearing. Now, because cicadas make
Speaker 3: these chirping and worrying sounds, you might be tempted to
Speaker 3: lump cicadas in with other noise producing insects like crickets
Speaker 3: and assume that they all make their sounds the same way.
Speaker 3: But cicadas actually have a unique mechanism. Locusts and grasshoppers
Speaker 3: usually the males chirp by rubbing their hind legs against
Speaker 3: their fore wings. Male crickets chirped by rubbing the edges
Speaker 3: of their wings together in this sort of like file
Speaker 3: and scraper system like a comb a stick. And these
Speaker 3: rubbing based systems are called stridulation, you know, causing friction,
Speaker 3: a loud type of rubbing together. Cicadas do not use
Speaker 3: stridulation instead. Most male cicadas have a dedicated pair of
Speaker 3: sound producing organs called the timbals, which are ribbed corrugated
Speaker 3: kitenous membranes on either side of the body, near the
Speaker 3: base of the abdomen, sort of where the abdomen connects
Speaker 3: to the thorax rob I've attached some pictures for you
Speaker 3: to look at here. One is a close up of
Speaker 3: a cicada showing the timbal is usually tucked under the wings,
Speaker 3: so you might not see it that easily, but if
Speaker 3: you move the wing to the side, you can see
Speaker 3: this interesting little patch in the in the exoskeleton that
Speaker 3: I don't know exactly what I would compare to, though
Speaker 3: it does have a clear sort of corrugated appearance. It
Speaker 3: looks ribbed.
Speaker 2: It's like they're in a jug band and they play
Speaker 2: like the washboard, right, but the washboard is part of
Speaker 2: their anatomy.
Speaker 3: They have solved it, yes, except in the washboard you
Speaker 3: play by rubbing a stick on it, so that would
Speaker 3: be more like a form of stridulation. That's not how
Speaker 3: the timble works. So it's like if the washboard worked
Speaker 3: instead by collapsing in on itself and then snapping back
Speaker 3: into place.
Speaker 2: It's like, I want to compare it to some there's
Speaker 2: some sort of like a fidget toy of some sort
Speaker 2: that I'm half imagining here.
Speaker 3: That you're thinking of the whirly tube, the like that
Speaker 3: plastic tube that you can make sounds into and you
Speaker 3: like snap the ribs in and pull them out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, though I guess there's probably that probably produces it
Speaker 2: sound in part by air as well. I haven't messed
Speaker 2: around with one of those in a bit, but maybe
Speaker 2: akin to that, if we're sort of tragulating things like
Speaker 2: a little bit of washboard, a little bit of that toy,
Speaker 2: maybe something else thrown in there as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So I actually got curious about the mechanics of
Speaker 3: how the timble makes the sound because I couldn't based
Speaker 3: on what I was reading, I couldn't quite picture it.
Speaker 3: And I finally found a source that got into the
Speaker 3: details here. So this was in a press release tied
Speaker 3: to a twenty thirteen acoustics conference presentation by a team
Speaker 3: from the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island,
Speaker 3: and the press release was published by the Acoustical Society
Speaker 3: of America. Apparently, these Naval researchers were interested in studying
Speaker 3: cicadas because cicadas are able to generate an extremely loud
Speaker 3: sound with a very small body using relatively little energy,
Speaker 3: and they thought this type of technology could be useful
Speaker 3: for underwater communications, rescue operations, beacons, ship to ship communication,
Speaker 3: remote sensing, that kind of thing. The article quotes a
Speaker 3: researcher named Dirk Hughes who was part of this team
Speaker 3: at the NUWC, and also summarizes their conference presentation by saying, quote,
Speaker 3: the explanation in brief is that a buckling rib is
Speaker 3: arrested in its rapid motion by impact with the part
Speaker 3: of the cicada's anatomy called a timble, which functions somewhat
Speaker 3: as a gong being hit by a hammer. It is
Speaker 3: set into vibration at nearly a single frequency, and the
Speaker 3: vibration rapidly dies out. Hughes tries to make the analogy
Speaker 3: to human bodies and says, I don't know if this
Speaker 3: really works all that well, but he's trying. Okay, So
Speaker 3: Hughes says, you should imagine like using muscles inside your
Speaker 3: chest to pull your ribs in until they buckle inward,
Speaker 3: collapsing into your body, and then you relax the muscles
Speaker 3: and release the ribs and they snap back into place
Speaker 3: and they hit this gong's timble. So the collapsing and
Speaker 3: snapping back process makes this clicking sound with the timble.
Speaker 3: And then if you do this like three hundred or
Speaker 3: four hundred times a second, you have the kind of
Speaker 3: buzz or whirr the cicadas do. And then you can
Speaker 3: change it to alter frequency and rhythm patterns and so forth.
Speaker 2: It's slightly horrifying, but I think I do get what
Speaker 2: he's going for here. That does make more sense.
Speaker 3: So I was reading more about the function of cicada
Speaker 3: sounds in a book called Courtship and Mate Finding an
Speaker 3: Insects A Comparative Approach by Raymond J. C. Cannon, And
Speaker 3: according to canon, adult male cicadas emit sounds for a
Speaker 3: variety of different reasons. There are very importantly mate attraction calls.
Speaker 3: These are produced by males to attract females across a
Speaker 3: long distance and help males and females find each other. Apparently,
Speaker 3: the females respond by also making a sound, not with timbles,
Speaker 3: but in some cases by snapping their wings together, and
Speaker 3: this sound in turn attracts the males. There are courtship songs.
Speaker 3: These are somewhat different, and they occur once a male
Speaker 3: and female have found each other. It sort of further
Speaker 3: cements a mating relationship. It's the wooing song. If the
Speaker 3: female likes what she hears, the cicadas will mate. There
Speaker 3: are also interestingly congregational songs. These occur when cicadas gather
Speaker 3: in large groups, and maybe we can talk more about
Speaker 3: the function of these later. But then there are also
Speaker 3: disturbance sounds. These happen if a cicada is caught or
Speaker 3: feels threatened, it'll make a distress sound. Now, the timbles
Speaker 3: are very common, but Canon also mentions some cicadas have
Speaker 3: a different system. Canon writes quote, some cicadas communicate using
Speaker 3: a different type of sound production called crepitation. Sound pulses
Speaker 3: in these species are produced by slapping the wings together
Speaker 3: over the body or slapping the wings against the body surface.
Speaker 3: Thus there are both crepitating and timbling cicada species. But
Speaker 3: as I said, a very important function of the sounds
Speaker 3: produced by the cicada is for mating. And mating of course,
Speaker 3: kicks off the life cycle of the cicada. Which is
Speaker 3: a fascinating subject in itself that I guess we will
Speaker 3: need to get into, but maybe in the context of
Speaker 3: talking about the difference between annual and periodical cicadas.
Speaker 2: That's right now. As we get into this, I want
Speaker 2: to turn. I want to point out that one of
Speaker 2: my sources here is a book by one of our
Speaker 2: past guests, Gene Kritsky. We chatted with him a while
Speaker 2: bag this was years ago about his excellent book The
Speaker 2: Tears of ray Bee Keeping in Ancient Egypt. He's an
Speaker 2: excellent authority on that topic, but he has also authored
Speaker 2: numerous books about the cicada, and you even see him
Speaker 2: popping up in the media to chat about them. A
Speaker 2: couple of weeks ago, on John Oliver's Last Week Tonight program,
Speaker 2: they had a supercut of people on TV like slamming cicadas,
Speaker 2: like talking smack about cicadas, and there was actually a
Speaker 2: clip of Gene in there saying that they stink. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's funny. It's worth looking up. It's it's a
Speaker 2: very funny segment. But of course, knowing who Gene Kritsky is,
Speaker 2: knowing that like few people are going to be as
Speaker 2: big a fan of cicadas as this guy that kind
Speaker 2: of made it even funnier, you know. But anyway, so
Speaker 2: I'm gona refer to to Kritsky a fair bit. But
Speaker 2: one thing I want to stress beforehand, this is also
Speaker 2: citing his work, We need to stress that cicadas are
Speaker 2: not locusts, despite the fact that they were commonly called
Speaker 2: locus for a very long time, and this mistake continues
Speaker 2: to linger in the popular mindset and even in the
Speaker 2: media to a certain extent, not in terms of like
Speaker 2: the actual calling them locus, but also but thinking about
Speaker 2: them in terms of locusts.
Speaker 3: M yeah, so like, oh, when the when the brood
Speaker 3: of cicadas emerged, they're they're like locusts, a plague of
Speaker 3: locusts descending upon the land right now.
Speaker 2: Not to say the cicadas cannot be destructive to a
Speaker 2: certain degree. I mean, they can litter their bodies everywhere,
Speaker 2: and and animals will be hard pressed to keep up
Speaker 2: with eating them all. So that can kind of make
Speaker 2: a mess.
Speaker 3: And then the reasons we can talk about they can
Speaker 3: damage some plants.
Speaker 2: That's true. That's the other big thing is that via
Speaker 2: the way and the place that they lay their eggs,
Speaker 2: there can be some plant damage, but these not like
Speaker 2: the locusts that you think of in terms of like
Speaker 2: big biblical plagues of locus descending on crops. However, the
Speaker 2: thing is, as Kritsky points out, Europeans in the Americas
Speaker 2: called them flies. In the seventeenth century, they called cicadas flies,
Speaker 2: and then they called them locus during the eighteenth century,
Speaker 2: again despite the fact that they certainly are not locus.
Speaker 2: Locus are grasshoppers, so they're in a different order altogether.
Speaker 2: That's orthoptera locus. As with accounts of biblical plagues, you know,
Speaker 2: we're talking about creatures that feast on leafy matter and
Speaker 2: thus crops. Cicadas consume plant sap. Most of that plant
Speaker 2: sap consumption is taking place underground, as we'll be discussing,
Speaker 2: and there was also there are also these long standing
Speaker 2: superstitions that cicadas caused illness, which on one hand you
Speaker 2: could probably connect to European biblical ideas about plagues of
Speaker 2: locusts and so far forth. But native peoples of America
Speaker 2: is apparently all so believed in this to some extent
Speaker 2: as well. We may come back to this later on.
Speaker 2: At present, i'm not sure how much of this, you know,
Speaker 2: you're just getting into the idea that, especially in North
Speaker 2: America with periodical cicadas, there may be just some sort
Speaker 2: of idea of potential portents in the way things seem
Speaker 2: to work out in the natural world, like something that
Speaker 2: is occurring, you know, ever so many years. Well, you
Speaker 2: can imagine how one might take special notice of that,
Speaker 2: and maybe that does end up matching up in a
Speaker 2: non meaningful way with events that have occurred in a
Speaker 2: given people or in a given region environmentally. He also
Speaker 2: points out that there was also an early colonial Early
Speaker 2: American tradition in which you could predict wars or peace
Speaker 2: based on whether you could see a W or a
Speaker 2: P spelled out on the wings of the cicada, and
Speaker 2: Risky points out that their wing veins only ever make
Speaker 2: a W. They can't really make a pee unless you again,
Speaker 2: unless you really really want to see a pe there,
Speaker 2: I guess, and that in general it was a safe
Speaker 2: prophetic bat during this time period to see the W
Speaker 2: as opposed to the P. Getting back though, to the
Speaker 2: cicada itself, let's start with the basics of the life cycle.
Speaker 2: Any sort of cicada you're looking at has three stages
Speaker 2: egg nymph and an adult an adult female lays an egg,
Speaker 2: as we teased out earlier, in plant tissue, usually woody
Speaker 2: plant tissue. This is going to be essentially injected via
Speaker 2: its ovipositor.
Speaker 3: We should stop for a second and dwell on the
Speaker 3: organ that the female uses to lay these eggs. So
Speaker 3: it is a fairly remarkable mechanism. As you said, Rob,
Speaker 3: it's this external appendage called an ovipositor, and this ovipositor
Speaker 3: organ is essentially a knife that lays eggs. It's like
Speaker 3: a hollow, sharp, rigid spike knife thing. It contains a
Speaker 3: significant amount of metal in the tissues, metal content. And
Speaker 3: using this metal studded ovipositor, the female cicada slices and
Speaker 3: gouges these deep slits into the wood of a tree,
Speaker 3: usually a softer part of the tree, like a new
Speaker 3: branch with the green wood, and then cuts these gouges
Speaker 3: in there and lays clutches of eggs inside the slits.
Speaker 2: That's right, and this is why you know technically they
Speaker 2: the cicadas can damage plants and so forth, So this
Speaker 2: is how the eggs are laid. The eggs then of
Speaker 2: course end up hatching, and this will take a matter
Speaker 2: of weeks, and what emerges is a wingless nymph which
Speaker 2: burrows down into the ground to suck the juices from
Speaker 2: the roots of perennial plants. So they're little subterranean plant vampires.
Speaker 2: And while they feed, they grow and they mold and
Speaker 2: eventually more on this. In a second, they emerge from
Speaker 2: the ground and undergo one last molt into wing it
Speaker 2: adult form. This will be their final form, and they
Speaker 2: use it to complete their life cycle in just a
Speaker 2: few weeks or less of mating and egg laying.
Speaker 3: Now there are a lot of interesting scientific questions about
Speaker 3: what happens while the cicadas are in their their various
Speaker 3: nymph forms. The different periods between the moltings are referred
Speaker 3: to as in stars, the different nymph in stars. Underground,
Speaker 3: they're doing something down there. They're feeding on the plant roots.
Speaker 3: They're sucking xylum up from the plant roots with their
Speaker 3: little rostrums. They're you know, sucking beaks, and they're growing.
Speaker 3: But there's a lot of there are a lot of
Speaker 3: scientific questions remaining about that part of the cicada's life
Speaker 3: cycle because it's not that easy to study.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because when they're out and about in their full
Speaker 2: adult adult forms. You are at great pains to ignore them,
Speaker 2: like good luck. Just eventually you just kind of get
Speaker 2: used to it, I guess, but you cannot deny that
Speaker 2: they are there. But when they're underground, it's kind of
Speaker 2: out of side, out of mind. You may turn one
Speaker 2: up on digging in the yard, I've done that before,
Speaker 2: but otherwise we simply live in different worlds. They live below,
Speaker 2: we live above. They're quietly drinking that plant sap and
Speaker 2: only ever having to contend with various subterranean threats such
Speaker 2: as I've read in ants in some cases can go
Speaker 2: after them, moles may go after them, some other subterranean
Speaker 2: insectivore or surface world diggers. I've also read, you know
Speaker 2: certainly about bears or humans digging them up for food.
Speaker 2: More on that last point later on, But yeah, for
Speaker 2: the most part, they're down there that they're undergoing additional
Speaker 2: moltings as they grow older. They're also going to go
Speaker 2: deeper and find different roots to feed upon. But how
Speaker 2: long do they stay underground and when do they emerge?
Speaker 2: This is where we see the primary difference between the
Speaker 2: very species of annual cicadas and periodical so annual. Cicadas
Speaker 2: can be found around the world. As the name suggests,
Speaker 2: they emerge every year. Now, this doesn't mean they only
Speaker 2: spend a year underground. They have Typically this is going
Speaker 2: to vary from species species, but we're talking about two
Speaker 2: to five years underground. But the short duration and the
Speaker 2: timing of their nymph stages just means that every year
Speaker 2: there's going to be an emergence. Think of it like this.
Speaker 2: There are a number of different production companies out there
Speaker 2: making superhero movies, and they might not all put out
Speaker 2: a superhero movie every year, but enough of them or
Speaker 2: in some state of production that it's a pretty safe
Speaker 2: guess that at least one superhero movie is going to
Speaker 2: come out every year, And if your life cycle depends
Speaker 2: on that, then then you're in luck. By the way,
Speaker 2: by some estimates and criteria, the last year we had
Speaker 2: seemingly zero superhero films was nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 3: That's funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not going to go too deep on that.
Speaker 2: I went slightly deep trying to figure this out, but
Speaker 2: a similar case could probably be made for Dracula movies.
Speaker 2: I could not give it get an exact year on this,
Speaker 2: but I think the last year without a Dracula movie
Speaker 2: was probably in the nineteen fifties of the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2: Periodical cicadas, however, these might be more comparable to adaptations
Speaker 2: of the novel Dune, which occur only every sixteen to
Speaker 2: twenty one years, so nineteen eighty four, twenty twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: with nothing in between. As long as you're not counting
Speaker 2: sequels or part twos and so forth, if you depend
Speaker 2: on seeing a new adaptation of the novel Dune by
Speaker 2: Frank Herbert every year, you are going to starve to death. Okay. So,
Speaker 2: periodical cicadas are native to the eastern and midwestern United States,
Speaker 2: and they're famous for these lengthy subterranean nymph stages punctuated
Speaker 2: by the synchronous emergence. So three species emerge every seventeen years,
Speaker 2: and four species emerge every thirteen years. It makes them
Speaker 2: one of the longest living known insects, though I believe
Speaker 2: termite queens still top the list. It's something like fifty
Speaker 2: years or even up to a century of life I
Speaker 2: believe has also been suggested for turmite queens.
Speaker 3: But even if they're not the longest living individual insects
Speaker 3: like that, period of development is crazy to think about.
Speaker 3: So they in the case of seventeen years cicadas, the
Speaker 3: hatchling falls from its egg, it goes underground, and then
Speaker 3: it takes seventeen years before it comes up out of
Speaker 3: the ground as an adult and adult again ready to mate.
Speaker 2: Exactly Now. I've read as well that that scientists something
Speaker 2: of scientistsically think that by like eight years in they're
Speaker 2: essentially ready to come up again. But they don't, and
Speaker 2: we'll get into the whys of this, and a bit
Speaker 2: like they still remain in this nimph stage, more or
Speaker 2: less safely underground until the time of emergence has arrived.
Speaker 2: So yeah, it's still amazing spending over a decade underground
Speaker 2: in this nymph stage before emerging right at the very
Speaker 2: end to just live out the last few weeks of
Speaker 2: your life as this flying, breeding, noise making adult after
Speaker 2: really a stealth existence as far as surface world life
Speaker 2: is concerned, for just so terribly long as you've no
Speaker 2: doubt heard on the news and perhaps witnessed in person.
Speaker 2: Twenty twenty four is one of those rare years where
Speaker 2: a seventeen year brood and a thirteen year brood sync
Speaker 2: up with brood thirteen and brood nineteen emerging and expected
Speaker 2: to number in the trillions. The brood system can be
Speaker 2: a bit complex, but in there are multiple broods and
Speaker 2: they're spread across different regions. Pretty much every year, periodical
Speaker 2: cicadas are emerging somewhere. Sometimes they emerge later early, but
Speaker 2: the count works for the most part. And we'll get
Speaker 2: into even more about what this means here in a bit.
Speaker 3: Right, So, even in the case of the long dormant
Speaker 3: periodical cicadas, there are often still some emerging somewhere, but
Speaker 3: they might not be emerging in your region in any
Speaker 3: given year, right.
Speaker 2: Right, So for this long period of time they're down there,
Speaker 2: they're drinking the asylum. The nymphs dig deeper as they age,
Speaker 2: they feed on larger roots. But this is key. They
Speaker 2: always feed very slowly. Their metabolic rate is very slow
Speaker 2: during the nymph stage, almost like they're in a state
Speaker 2: of suspended animation, you know, and so their thirst does
Speaker 2: not overpower healthy trees. But again, you can't help but
Speaker 2: come back to this thirteen to seventeen year that it's
Speaker 2: crazy to put this in human years, Joe. I don't
Speaker 2: know if you saw this, but there was a Saturday
Speaker 2: Night Live skit that did a fun send up of
Speaker 2: this recently, where you had a pair of actors each
Speaker 2: playing a cicada from each of the two major periodical
Speaker 2: broods that are emerging. And so they're sitting there at
Speaker 2: the news desk in their cicada costumes, one with the
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven necklace around its neck and the
Speaker 2: other one with the twenty eleven necklace around their neck,
Speaker 2: and they're, you know, they're very excited to get out
Speaker 2: there and mate and to fly into people's faces and shirts.
Speaker 2: But they're also like making pop culture references to twenty
Speaker 2: eleven in two thousand and seven, which I thought was
Speaker 2: very funny and kind of like drives home the time
Speaker 2: periods we're talking about.
Speaker 3: Here, seems like such an innocent time, all.
Speaker 2: Right, So we can sit around and wonder at this
Speaker 2: you all day and just talk about how amazing it
Speaker 2: is that they're so long lived and there's been so
Speaker 2: much of it in this Nymph phase. But you know,
Speaker 2: you come back to the basic question, why is this
Speaker 2: the case? Why live underground in nymph stage for so
Speaker 2: long and then remain in nymph stage past that eight
Speaker 2: year mark when maturity has apparently already been reached, you know,
Speaker 2: to go back to our hyper sleep sci fi analogy,
Speaker 2: it's kind of like they haven't reached their destination yet.
Speaker 2: You don't want to wake up halfway on the trip
Speaker 2: to the planet that you're headed to in your spaceship,
Speaker 2: and that would seem to be part of it. Though
Speaker 2: it also raises additional questions like why have these cicada
Speaker 2: species evolved to take such long nymph stages of more
Speaker 2: than a decade? Like why are they why did they
Speaker 2: set their why are their sites set so far out?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a fascinating question, and also the why, but
Speaker 3: the how how do they manage that sort of timing?
Speaker 3: How do they count the years?
Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't have iPhones down there with the alarm
Speaker 2: clocks on them, and even if they did, even if
Speaker 2: they put them in a battery mode, they wouldn't last
Speaker 2: that long. According to Kritsky, the how involved here of
Speaker 2: how they do it this in and of itself remains
Speaker 2: somewhat of a mystery, but one theory is that as
Speaker 2: they feed on the tree step, as they feed on
Speaker 2: the xylum, that they're kind of hacked into the information
Speaker 2: of the tree as well, like the fluid information, the
Speaker 2: fluid flow of the tree, and that they somehow track
Speaker 2: and remember fluid flow in such a way as to
Speaker 2: time themselves.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So like the nutrition they get from the tree
Speaker 3: varies seasonally, and with that mechanism, they can track the
Speaker 3: passage of seasons.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is crazy. Like I think it's one of
Speaker 2: these things to kind of come back to David Eagleman's
Speaker 2: Mister Potato Head explanation of how brains work with sensory input.
Speaker 2: You know, it's like, if you have certain sensory input
Speaker 2: coming into the brain, it will the brain will make
Speaker 2: sense of that and use that information. So if you
Speaker 2: could plug the stock market into your brain, like it
Speaker 2: would make sense of that data. And so you can
Speaker 2: I feel like you can kind of apply the same
Speaker 2: thinking here, Like here's a creature living so long underground,
Speaker 2: and to be clear, like not it's not in a
Speaker 2: real state of suspended animation here. It's still moving around,
Speaker 2: feeding and acting as a as an organism. But one
Speaker 2: of the things that it is frequently connected to is
Speaker 2: that fluid flow of the host plant, and like that
Speaker 2: becomes perhaps kind of a sense in and of itself. Now,
Speaker 2: as for why they do this. Most sources agree that
Speaker 2: it has to do with disrupting the evolution of synchronous
Speaker 2: predators and parasites. So when cicadas emerge, any cicadas emerge
Speaker 2: annual or periodical, it is a feast. And this alone
Speaker 2: is an anti predator strategy. It is a predator cetacean
Speaker 2: so spawn or emerge in such high numbers that predators
Speaker 2: can't keep up. They can't possibly eat everyone. Like how
Speaker 2: many cicadas can you possibly eat? You know, random dog,
Speaker 2: You can eat a dozen ovis, maybe two dozen ovus,
Speaker 2: maybe three and get a little sick. But there's way
Speaker 2: more of us than that. You cannot possibly eat all
Speaker 2: the cicadas, And we're going to keep going around and
Speaker 2: doing our business.
Speaker 3: If there are sharks in the water, you would rather
Speaker 3: be one of a thousand fish than one of ten.
Speaker 2: Right, And so it ultimately comes into hitting these long
Speaker 2: nipt stages just right, so that you prevent any sort
Speaker 2: of to a certain extent, specific parasite predator threats from
Speaker 2: evolving to depend on your emergence. So Kritzky writes, quote,
Speaker 2: both seventeen and thirteen are prime numbers integers that are
Speaker 2: divisible only by one and the number itself. It is
Speaker 2: hypothesized that a long prime number life cycle for our
Speaker 2: cicadas would make it difficult for predators or parasites to
Speaker 2: evolve synchronous life cycles with the cicadas because there are
Speaker 2: no intermediate life cycle steps that could easily evolve synchrony
Speaker 2: with the cicadas.
Speaker 3: So if they were to emerge every year, like some
Speaker 3: cicadas do in the same place, local predators could adapt
Speaker 3: their life cycle to you know, to sort of like
Speaker 3: save up, save up their appetite for that time when
Speaker 3: all the cicadas are hanging around. Maybe they might you know,
Speaker 3: they could adapt in a number of different ways, but
Speaker 3: maybe they are able to starve themselves for some other
Speaker 3: part of the year, knowing that the cicadas will reliably
Speaker 3: arrive in May or June at this every year.
Speaker 2: Right right, And to be clear, we do have examples
Speaker 2: where specifically parasitoid wasps have evolved to be in sync
Speaker 2: with annual cicadas, the ones that come out every year. Remember,
Speaker 2: parasitoid wasps in general are a great, highly evolved threat
Speaker 2: to various insects and arachnids, using these other organisms as
Speaker 2: hosts for their young either as you know, something left
Speaker 2: in a paralyzed or you know, some half alive state
Speaker 2: in some sort of a nest or a burrow to
Speaker 2: then consume when they hatch, or in like true Zenamore style,
Speaker 2: a warm body or I don't know about warm body,
Speaker 2: but a body let's in which to deposit the egg
Speaker 2: of your young so that it may hatch within and
Speaker 2: then feast inside of the host organism and then emerge.
Speaker 2: So this would be a threat worth evolving around and
Speaker 2: creating strategies to avoid. But again, not every cicadas has
Speaker 2: gone the periodical route. With the annual cicadas, we do
Speaker 2: have specific cicada killer or cicada hawk wasps in North America.
Speaker 2: With these solitary species, you have a female that captures
Speaker 2: adult cicadas, paralyzes them with a sting, and then transports
Speaker 2: them back to a burrow, and she'll collect multiple cicadas.
Speaker 2: I've read as many as like one hundred cicadas in
Speaker 2: this burrow, one for each egg that she lays. And
Speaker 2: she knows what the sex will be of each egg,
Speaker 2: so she'll she'll have one egg and she'll put that
Speaker 2: that it will be a male egg, and she'll put
Speaker 2: that on one paralyzed cicada and then there'll be a
Speaker 2: female egg and that's that's going to be a bigger organism.
Speaker 2: So it needs two to three cicadas to feast upon sick. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: but again, the cicada hawk wasp praise exclusively on annual cicadas.
Speaker 2: These are the dog day cicadas, and they target them
Speaker 2: during their regular emergence period. The late summer emergence periodicals
Speaker 2: emerge earlier, so like they're just never synced up to
Speaker 2: hit them. I have read that if periodicals, if some
Speaker 2: periodical individuals are emerging late, they may end up being targeted,
Speaker 2: but it's more of an incidental target. Like for the
Speaker 2: most part, the periodical cicadas have evolved so that parasitoid
Speaker 2: wasps cannot be in sync with them. And this has
Speaker 2: to do again with these long nymph stages and prime
Speaker 2: numbered emergencies.
Speaker 3: Now that's parasitoid wasps. But I've also read that when
Speaker 3: the periodical cicadas do emerge, they are a food source
Speaker 3: for basically every type of predatory organism out there, Like
Speaker 3: everything eats them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, humans eat them too, And like I said, I
Speaker 2: think in a later episode, we'll get into some of
Speaker 2: the human culinary traditions surrounding the cicada. And in the meantime,
Speaker 2: if you have eaten cicadas and or have any like
Speaker 2: cultural experience with cicada cuisine right in, we would love
Speaker 2: to hear from you.
Speaker 3: Well, if this strange prime number staggered periodical emergence has
Speaker 3: these benefits in protecting against predator and parasite adaptation, why
Speaker 3: don't we see more cicadas doing that? Like, why don't
Speaker 3: all of the annual cicadas eventually evolve to be like that?
Speaker 2: Well? Yeah, Kritsky goes into this a little bit in
Speaker 2: this latest book. He points out that we have actually
Speaker 2: discovered a periodical cicada outside of the US that is
Speaker 2: on an eight year cycle. This is a species in Fiji.
Speaker 2: He points to another cicada species in India that's only
Speaker 2: four years. I don't have additional information on these species,
Speaker 2: but I guess one would assume that they benefit from
Speaker 2: a different parasite prey threat array. And I guess in general,
Speaker 2: when we don't see it more, My read on it
Speaker 2: is that, on one hand, obviously an organism has to
Speaker 2: have the capability to go through this sort of lengthy
Speaker 2: nymph stage to and engage in the prime number of
Speaker 2: emergence rates and so forth. And then also I guess
Speaker 2: it's key to realize that there is this There does
Speaker 2: seem to be this kind of balance between the periodical
Speaker 2: and the annuals. So there will be annual cicadas in
Speaker 2: areas that have periodical cicadas, And one wonders like, what
Speaker 2: would happen to periodical cicadas if the annual cicadas just stopped,
Speaker 2: if something, you know, wiped them out. You know, it
Speaker 2: would certainly disrupt everything, maybe just cataclysmically for all cicada
Speaker 2: dependent organisms, but maybe it would. It would result in shifts,
Speaker 2: shifts that they might not be able to keep up
Speaker 2: with for existing cicada parasites and predators. But again, the
Speaker 2: thing that keep in mind about the cicada is that
Speaker 2: it preys exclusively on annual cicadas, so like it has
Speaker 2: no plan B outside of cicadas for continuing its life cycle. Now,
Speaker 2: Kritzky also gets into the evolution of all of this,
Speaker 2: which I thought was interesting. He writes that while cicadas
Speaker 2: themselves date back to the time of the dinosaurs, periodical
Speaker 2: cicadas again in we're talking about these North American varieties cicadas,
Speaker 2: they're more of a recent evolution, he writes, Quote, the
Speaker 2: seventeen years Septindecham and neotradecam ancestor diverged about five hundred
Speaker 2: thousand years ago from the thirteen year Tridecam species. The
Speaker 2: Cassini and Ducula species diverged from their common ancestor about
Speaker 2: two point five million years ago, and their respective thirteen
Speaker 2: and seventeen year species separated within the last three hundred
Speaker 2: thousand years.
Speaker 3: Oh, so that's fairly recent. Yeah.
Speaker 2: He says the current array of North American periodical cicadas
Speaker 2: was seemingly influenced by ice age glacial movements, specifically, quote
Speaker 2: the formation of glacial refugia caused by the advancing ice
Speaker 2: sheets and the subsequent habitat expansion that resulted from glacial retreats.
Speaker 3: Ah okay, So as yes, the ice is creeping down
Speaker 3: closer to the equator and then retreating up that that
Speaker 3: may have had something to do with the emergence of
Speaker 3: these these differently these long dormant species. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just you know, in general, changing and upsetting the
Speaker 2: local ecosystem, creating niches and opportunities for changes in the
Speaker 2: ways these organisms are operating and leading to speciation. And
Speaker 2: so this is out of this we see the emergence
Speaker 2: of these these new varieties of cicada that are engaging
Speaker 2: in these long periodical emergence life cycles.
Speaker 3: Amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, well, I think that's where we're gonna
Speaker 2: cut it off for today. Joe, thanks again for for
Speaker 2: working through the illness, but putting the sick in cicada,
Speaker 2: so I think it ultimately works out. Again. We're going
Speaker 2: to be back in a couple of weeks with more
Speaker 2: on the cicada. We'll get into certainly get into some
Speaker 2: history and myth and folklore, and probably some more just
Speaker 2: general science about them as well. And in the meantime,
Speaker 2: certainly write in with your experiences and thoughts regarding the cicada,
Speaker 2: be the observational, culinary, folkloric, mythological, fictional, and so forth.
Speaker 2: As a reminder, Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily
Speaker 2: a science podcast, science and culture podcast, with core episodes
Speaker 2: on Tuesdays and Thursdays and listener mail episode on Mondays,
Speaker 2: a short form episode on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We
Speaker 2: set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
Speaker 2: weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact stuff to Blow your
Speaker 3: Mind dot com.
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