The Curious Incident of the Cicada in the Night-Time

I watched a sanitised American nature programme narrated by Tom Hanks. Despite an impressive display of predatory creatures like sharks and golden eagles, nothing was actually killed and consumed. Apart from two fish and a snail, which don’t count, obviously.

One section delved into the extraordinary life cycle of the cicada. The program began with a close-up shot of numerous holes in the ground. Then, as if from a sci-fi alien movie, a swarm of these creatures emerged from the holes, creating a horrifying and creepy mass emergence from the earth. As nymphs, they had been waiting for 17 years, sucking xylem fluids.

Once the nymphs had secured themselves to tree trunks, building walls, etc.,  they underwent a final moulting process. After this, they spent approximately six days in the trees, waiting for their wings and exoskeletons to fully harden. Think of Jeff Goldblum and The Fly.

Like other cicadas, the male cicadas produce a very loud species-specific mating song using their tymbals. Singing males of the same Magicicada species often form aggregations called choruses, whose collective songs are highly attractive to females. Which is just as well as they are no oil painting. Here, a bloke cicada found a potential mate. The courting ritual - she jerked a leg, flapped a wing - was brief, and given that she was no oil painting either, the mating mercifully even briefer than that.

You might have thought, given 17 years in a hole, sucking xylem, that he might have celebrated the moment with his bloke cicada pals down the pub, drawing heavily on a pint of beer and smoking the time-honoured cigarette. But no, he dropped dead.

I mean, what the hell was that about? An out-of-kilter evolutionary event or part of God’s creational tapestry? If it is the latter, one can only assume he was pissed.