And they are devastated by a sexually transmitted disease that turns them into zombies.
RARE SIMULTANEOUS CICADA EXPLOSION EXPECTED FOR FIRST TIME IN 221 YEARS
Inside trees is sweet, nutrient-rich sap that passes through a tissue called phloem. Most insects like sap. But not cicadas: they’re looking for a tissue called xylem, which basically carries water and some nutrients.
And it’s not easy to get into the xylem, which doesn’t just happen when an insect gets in because it’s under negative pressure. The cicada can get the liquid because its large head is equipped with a pump, said Carrie Deans, an entomologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
They use their proboscis as a small straw (about the width of a human hair) and the pump sucks in the liquid, said Saad Bhamla, a professor of biophysics at Georgia Tech. They spend most of their lives drinking, year after year.
A periodic cicada nymph extends a limb in Macon, Georgia, on March 27, 2024, after being discovered while digging holes for rose bushes. Billions of cicadas are poised to emerge in numbers seen in decades, if not centuries. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
“It’s hard to make a living,” Deans said.
All that watery liquid has to come out in the end. And the child does.
In March, Bhamla published a study on the urinary rates of animals around the world. Cicadas were obviously queens, urinating two or three times harder and faster than elephants and humans. However, he used the video to record and measure the speed of his Amazonian cousins, which reached about 10 feet per second.
They have a muscle that pushes them through a small gap like a jet, Bhamla explained. He said he learned this when in the Amazon he came across a tree that locals called “the weeping tree” because the liquid flowed downward, as if the plant was crying. The cicada pees.
“You’re walking through a forest where they’re actively composing a song on a hot, sunny day. It feels like it’s raining,” said John Cooley, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut. What comes out is your molasses or your waste. from the back-end. . . This is called cicada rain.
In the years and spaces where cicadas emerge, caterpillars get a break.
Dan Gruner, an entomologist at the University of Maryland, studied the caterpillars after cicadas emerged in 2021 in the mid-Atlantic. He found that the insects that turn into moths survived the spring in greater numbers because the birds that ate them were too busy chasing cicadas. .
Periodic cicadas are “lazy, fat and slow,” Gruner said. “They are extremely easy for us and their predators to capture. “
There’s a deadly sexually transmitted disease, a fungus, that turns cicadas into zombies and causes their portions to fall off, Cooley said.
It’s a real-life challenge that’s “even stranger than science fiction,” Cooley said. “This is a sexually transmitted zombie disease. “
Cooley saw pockets in the Midwest where as many as 10% of Americans were infected.
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The mushroom is also the kind that has hallucinatory effects on birds that would like to eat it, Cooley said.
This white fungus takes over the male, its gonads are torn from its structure and its calcareous spores spread to other nearby cicadas, he explained. Insects are sterilized, killed. In this way, the fungus uses cicadas to spread to others.
“They’re at the mercy of the fungus,” Cooley said. “They’re undead. “