PZ Myers. 2005 Oct 22. Cicadas. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/cicadas/>. Accessed 2006 Jan 28.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Saturday, October 22, 2005
Cicadas
The winner of the AAAS Multimedia Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge is this very nifty movie of the 17 year cicadas. The whole above-ground part of their life cycle is right there to creep everyone out.
Posted by PZ Myers on 10/22 at 11:18 AM
Science • Organisms • 2 Trackbacks • Other weblogs • Permalink
Science • Organisms • 2 Trackbacks • Other weblogs • Permalink
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Cicadas are some of my favourite critters! Great movie!
And speaking of movies, this one is really funny!#: Posted by coturnix on 10/22 at 01:18 PM -
That's right! GO HOOSIERS!!!
Considering how badly we just lost a football game to OSU, I'm glad to see we're still good for something.#: Posted by on 10/22 at 02:58 PM -
My cat was extremely interested in the film. She votes "two paws up!"
In WV we had a 17 year cycle in 1999 and it was insane. Where I grew up we had yearly cicadas, and they sang in the mango trees, but there wasn't too much interaction. When they came out here, you could not walk down the sidewalk without them hitting you in the face, the chest, getting tangled in your hair, in your car. All the trees had sagging branches, some were killed from the extent of the damage. My dogs thought they were in snack heaven with all the easily available crispy crunchy critters. To me it was very cool, but man, those are destructive little buggers.#: Posted by binky on 10/22 at 03:34 PM -
Creeped out? By adult cicadas?! Those darling little flying cigar stubs???!!!
The nymphs, now, they can look creepy. Specifically, those empty husks clinging to the side of a tree or the shutters of a window, dirty translucent brown, still perfectly formed but with that ominous slit down the back whence something has emerged... those empty, staring eye-covers... those grotesquely powerful forelimbs.... Until, one afternoon, completely at random, you happen upon an imago shucking off its youthful skin and spreading its wings, and you see how beautiful all 17 of these creatures' years are.
Noisy little bastards, mind you. Thank heaven it only lasts a few days.#: Posted by Mrs Tilton on 10/22 at 05:50 PM -
Beautiful, amazing, inspiring. I remember that brood, and the time I spent lying on my belly with a 50mm Zuiko macro lens shooting the little buggers. (I much prefer digital now!)
#: Posted by decrepitoldfool on 10/22 at 09:24 PM
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What an achievement! But I agree with Mrs Tilton. Cicadas are flying jewels.
They don't bite, they aren't an economic pest and in Australian suburbia where they flourish, unlike in most other cities, children were the first to coin their common names, which have been preserved through many generations of tree-climbing cicada hunters.
Names like Green Grocer, Cherrynose, Redeye, Floury Baker, Yellow Monday, Double Drummer and the best known and most mythologised Black Prince.
I discovered early in my childhood that the Black Prince favoured Casuarina groves around the river and thus earned much kudos with my princely display (in the requisite cardboard shoebox with punched airholes).
That noise is protective. Green Grocers, Yellow Mondays and Double Drummers, all very big lads, have been clocked at greater than 120dB at close range. They will group to produce even greater intensity and this will repel birds. Their noise organ, uniquely in inverts, is an abdominal drum, the tymbals.
Summer wouldn't be summmer in cities like Sydney and Brisbane without cicada song. Through having a range of 5 and 7 through to 17year (all of which can default to shorter periods) cicadas, the Australian suburbs will have cicadas thrumming right through from November to February.
I don't find the noise at all annoying, it always provokes gin and lime on the verandah.#: Posted by on 10/22 at 10:23 PM -
I'm a former entomologist living in South Korea right now. Around here, cidadas ("mae mi") emerge every year and shrill for MONTHS. I have 2 questions for any Cidada specialists out there:
1) Is this a 1-year cycle? (I doubt it, since they're the size of mice and I can't see a xylem-sucker growing to this size so quickly) or a staggered series of populations(species?) each with a longer life cycle? Can anyone point me to any studies attempting to distinguish groups (say, genetic fingerprinting)?
2) Is there any explanation of why the North American species are restricted to certain years? Was the metapopulation once pseudo-annual as in Asia, and an extinction/extirpation event occurred that left only a few surviving broods? Was there an intercontinental colonization event involving only a subset of the Asian (?) species?
and a third tangential question:
3) It seems that all cicadas have periods with a prime number of years (3,5,7,11,13,17, but no 9 or 15). I speculate that this occurs because any with a non-prime cycle, (say 15) co-emerged with the species whose life cycles are factors (3, 5) and lost a large part of their offspring through hybridization (assuming hybrids are sterile), ultimately going extinct (the shorter-term cycles would have an advantage in having more generatons to recoup their losses). Is there any evidence along these lines?
Curious as always...#: Posted by on 10/22 at 11:55 PM -
Hi djlactin, I'm no cicada expert. There are heaps of biological mathematics papers on the period problem. Plenty come up with google.
It has explanations from both the competitive exclusion and the evolutionary arms race camps.
I like the arms race one because I like thinking about eons instead of ages and because I can imagine that there may have been many many many parasites and predators that have all disappeared all the while that cicadas have persisted. In that scheme, there's plenty of room for side stories of speciation, which are just another angle to the whole view. In that frame, hybridisation is a disruptor of the non-hybrid period and is to be avoided both in light of bringing species into competition and in putting them in the way of predation. But if periodicity is already established in the arms race, then prime differences will prevent hybridisation disrupting separate periods and so etc. etc. in a bit of circular arguing - all a bit too hand-wavey for me. I suppose it depends on what you see as the more powerful kick-starter to period differentiation. Can you imagine an explanation where both the arms race and competition are working at the same time?
Whichever explanation, primes are certainly powerful. And nothing in evolutionary biology is ever simple. Which is why the Creationists are trying to get people to leave their brains at the door.
And what the hell is bamboo doing only flowering every 120 years and doing it synchronously all over the place to boot?
See the master's essay:
S. Jay Gould, "Of bamboos, cicadas and the economy of Adam Smithâ, in Ever Since Darwin#: Posted by on 10/23 at 01:39 AM -
WOW
What a spectacular movie. This is exacly why I come back to Pharyngula every day.#: Posted by on 10/23 at 11:28 AM -
Chris Simon did a lot of work on genetics and evolution of periodic cicadas.
#: Posted by coturnix on 10/23 at 12:48 PM
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Wow, that's simply awesome.
#: Posted by on 10/23 at 08:48 PM
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Excellent... thanks.
#: Posted by on 10/23 at 09:47 PM
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late to the party as usual . . .
did you catch this short cranial evolution piece in the honorable mentions:
http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/vis2005/show/slide8.dtl#: Posted by tony g on 10/26 at 12:04 AM -
The NSF link appears to be dead. This page has the movie.
#: Posted by Radagast on 11/14 at 12:28 PM