The Seventeen-Year Locust.
By Charles P. Bollman
The seventeen-year locust, so-called, is not a locust at all, and belongs to an entirely different family. Its proper name is the seventeen-year cicada. The first part of the name is given them from the fact that they make their appearance in considerable numbers only once in seventeen years. The lifetime of the cicada is seventeen years, and all but a few weeks of this is spent in the earth. Its life is thus described in St. Nicholas. “Just fancy spending the best part of your life prowling about in the darkness underground and then coming up into the sunlight with a gorgeous pair of wings, only to die in a short time! This is what the seventeen-year cicada does. In the first place, it is an egg which its mother deposits in a tiny hole in a twig. In a few weeks it makes its way out of the egg and drops to the ground, into which it burrows, and in which it remains for nearly seventeen years before it is prepared for life above ground. When, at last, it is ready for the bright sunlight, it may be one foot from the surface, or it may be ten feet deep in the ground. In either case it begins to dig upward until it finds its way out, when it climbs up the nearest tree and fastens itself by its sharp claws to a leaf or twig. There it remains until its back splits open, and behold! it immediately crawls out of itself,” so to speak. “The new insect is a soft, dull fellow at first, but he grows as if he had been storing up energy for seventeen years for just that one purpose. Within an hour two pairs of most beautiful wings have grown, and in a few hours more it becomes hard and active. The female cicada are quiet enough, but the males are as noisy as so many little boys with new drums. Indeed, they do have drums themselves. Just under their wings are drums made of shiny membrane, as beautiful as white silk, and these are kept rattling almost all the time. One cicada can make noise enough; but imagine the din of millions of them all going at the same time. It sounds as if all the frogs in the country had come together to try to drown the noise of a saw-mill.” The cicada are often very numerous. The writer has seen many thousands of them, and can readily credit another who says: “I have counted over a thousand cast-off shells on one small tree, and on one birch leaf I have seen twelve shells. And the earth in some places is like a sieve from the holes made by the cicada.” But notwithstanding there are so many, in a few weeks from their first appearance they have all died, and no wonder; for so far as any one can see, the cicada never eat anything after they emerge from the ground. Some people think that they suck the juice from the leaves of trees and shrubs; but from careful personal observation, the writer is of the opinion that such is not the case. The female cicada does, however, injure trees, especially young fruit trees, by stinging the twigs to make the “tiny” holes in which her eggs are deposited. The twigs thus injured soon die, and sometimes the whole tree dies. The female is armed with a very strong “sting,” which is about half an inch in length, and has the appearance of blued steel; and it is with this that she does so much damage to trees. When these insects first make their appearance they are plump and full, and when opened or crushed present much the same appearance as a grasshopper or a well-fed beetle; but while they remain unchanged outwardly, before they die they are all dried up till they are little more than a mere shell. It is no doubt the exhaustion of the juices stored in his body that is the immediate cause of the death of the cicada who has escaped his natural enemies, birds and chickens, and who finally succumbs to what in the higher orders of animal life is called old age.