The Late Bloomer Bug! (Cicadas!)

In this week's episode, we talk about Cicadas! What do they do for so long in the ground? What happens in a "year of the cicada" and what do they symbolize? Let's get a closer look... Special Thanks as always to lofi girl for supplying some instrumental beats! The artists in this week are, HM Surf, Sátyr, Phlocalyst, and Mitchel Logan. Transcript: Welcome back to another episode of Insects for Dummies, I’m your host Mitchel Logan and today we will be talking about a bug that spends years underground as a teenage shut-in before finally reaching maturity. This of course means we are covering cicadas! The bugs tell us when we finally made it to Summer by screeching through the day and in my case, the evening with Japan’s well-known “Evening Cicada”. There are two major types of cicadas, the periodical cicada, and the annual cicadas. Periodical cicadas are the ones that spend at least a decade in the ground before coming up into the trees. The annual cicadas, despite their name, actually spend 2 to 5 years underground, but we hear them every year because the different broods overlap each other. Cicadas as the title of this episode states are true bugs, which means they do not have a pupal or larval stage. These bugs just stay in the ground feeding off roots and other plant matter as nymphs until they’re ready to hit the stage in our trees. There are two different periodical cicadas, one is a 13 year and the other is a 17 year, which means they spend either 13 years or 17 years in the ground before coming up. You might be wondering what exactly they do for so long or why they wait so long before coming up, and though we don’t have all the answers, we do know they don’t hibernate and are actually building tunnels and feeding during this entire time. Most living things have an internal clock known as a circadian rhythm which is why some of us wake up earlier than normal when we know there is something important or why some of us just naturally wake up later than others. Everyone’s clock is slightly different and the same thing happens with cicadas. Of course, it’s not like this amount of time was arbitrarily given either. Many scientists believe that the periodical cicadas evolved these clocks in this way to avoid predators. If you stay hiding for long enough, you’ll be forgotten about eventually. As for how they know when their time is up, that comes down to seasonal changes in trees and the soil composition as the seasons come and go. The one thing we do know relatively certain is that the cicadas will not emerge from the ground until the temperature of the soil around 8inches below surface reaches 18 degrees celsius. This is why cicadas will emerge sooner or later depending on where you live! Sometimes we have years of the cicada and that just means it's a year where one of the periodical cicadas is ready to surface and that usually means there are going to be a lot of them… for example in North America there are 12 broods of the 17 year cicadas and one brood can have as many as 600 bugs in it, and that, of course, isn’t including the annual cicadas. That’s a lot of bugs and a lot of noise. The buzzing chorus of a cicada reaches up to 90 decibels which is the same as a lawnmower or standing near a chainsaw. This noise is produced from Tymbals which are exoskeletal structures that kind of act as a cymbal. The cicada has one Tymbal on each side of its abdomen and these tymbals produce sound by snapping together and pulling apart like two pieces of velcro. This snapping and unsnapping motion is repeated 300 - 400 times a second! But that’s not the only incredible thing about cicadas. They also have some very interesting wings. Interesting because they are coated with very fine tiny spikes that actually repel water, and break down soft bacteria. In recent years we’ve been able to replicate that complex surface which means we might see some nifty antibacterial surfaces in the near future. As you might ex