Page 6—SUSQUEHANNA TIMES
the
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Dutch Wonderland
Rt 5 Last ot
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-
Reprinted from the April, 1980,
issue of SUSQUEHANNA MAG-
AZINE. We decided to run this article
after noticing the large number of
cidadas present this year.
by Ken Wolgemuth
Far into the darkening, deserted
countryside a red clay road leads
nowhere anybody cares to go
anymore, and now, nearly overgrown
by weeds, lies in silence in the
mid-summer twilight. An ancient
apple tree, gnarled and also
long-neglected by man, grows by a
bend in the empty track and stands in
sharp silhouette against the indigo of
the western horizon. The stage is set.
The houselights dim as the last hint
of royal blue fades from the western
sky; the orchestra—katydids, crickets,
grasshoppers, owls, whippoorwills,
frogs—strikes up the overture; the
moon, looming over hills to the east,
shines its spotlight onto the stage.
The curtain rises..... 2
In her tiny, lightless chamber nearly
two feet into the earth beneath the old
apple tree Tibicen stopped feeding
and extracted a needle-like proboscis
from the root that had furnished her
dinner of sap. It was time now, and
she waited.
She was by no means pretty, looking
much like an overweight brown
jellybean with six legs and a sucking
beak, but for the past two years the
only eyes laid on her belonged to
fellow burrowing creatures, many
even more grotesque than herself.
Tibicen was the nymph of Tibicen
linnei, the annual cicada, and since
hatching two summers before she had
prowled the perpetual darkness of her
self-dug tunnels, making her way from
root to root, sucking sap, molting and
growing.
But now, as the moon swung over
the countryside, Tibicen was drawn
irresistibly upward, and slowly dug
her way out into the world of grass and
flowers and starlight. So strong was
this impulse to battle gravity that she
kept right on climbing, using her
powerful forelegs to drag herself—
amid scores of fellow nymphs brought
out by the same insistent call—up the
trunk of the gnarled tree.
She climbed until an inborn timer
directed her to stop, then, digging in
with her huge front claws, anchored
herself firmly to the bark. Shortly,
waves of muscular contraction began
to sweep along her body from
abdomen to thorax, building up
pressure until finally her skin gave
way, splitting neatly down the back...
As the sun rose gold to the whistling
of woodchucks, another insect pre-
pared to leave one element behind and
embark on a new existence. Eighteen
inches down in the red clay bank of the
road cut the Cicada-Killer wasp
(Sphecius speciosus), now in her pupal
stage, began to twitch in the
plum-sized earthen chamber where
she'd spent all eleven months of her
larval life.
Eventually the pupal case split and,
cutting through the surrounding
cocoon, the wet and rumpled adult
Sphecius dug her way to the surface.
In the summer sunlight it wasn't long
before her wings had expanded and
her body—all inch and a half of
it—had dried to a polished, yellow-
banded-black.
Having fasted for something over
ten months, her first priority was
finding a meal, so Sphecius quickly
took wing in search of the handiest
flowers. As an adult she would feed on
August 20, 1980
A
A Tale of Tw
nothing but nectar and perhaps some
fermented sap. The young she would
eventually produce, however, would
require a somewhat more substantial
fare....
The sweat-suited jogger, out for a
morning workout, plodded up the
gentle slope to the apple tree and
stood panting, hands on his knees, in
its meager shade. Catching his breath,
he straightened up and spotted on the
trunk the amber husk that had once
contained Tibicen and that now
preserved, as precisely as a plaster
cast, her homely visage. Plucking the
slough from the bark, the jogger
recalled collecting such ‘‘locust
shells’’ as a youngster and proceeded
to pocket the souvenir—just for old
times’ sake—before trotting off once
again. He never noticed, and if he had
would not have recognized, the empty
shell’s former owner, now poised on a
branch directly overhead.
Pale, crumpled and defenseless,
she had emerged into the moonlight,
leaving an obsolete skin and the
greater part of her life behind.
Hanging upside-down, pumping fluid
into her adult body and new wings,
she had slowly dried in the night
breeze, vulnerable for many hours to
any creature that might consider
making a meal of her. Lower on the
trunk, ants had come upon another
such newly-freed cicada, had swarmed
over the helpless insect, and had
dragged her, still kicking feebly, off
into the darkness.
But now the sun was up, and having
survived her first night Tibicen would
be immune thereafter to the attacks of
ants, being hard now, and dry, with
two pairs of sparkling, membranous
wings angled rooflike over her back.
As a nymph she had been vaguely
repulsive; as an adult, two inches long
and a blinding iridescent green, she
looked downright dangerous. The
cicada posed a threat to no one,
however, for being a true bug (in the
order Homoptera) she had no stinger;
she lacked even a pair of jaws. As the
jogger shrank to a blue spot in the
distance, Tibicen raised her jointed
beak and poked it deep into the
branch, intercepting the liquid food
meant to nourish apple tree tissues
and drawing it into her own hungry
body.
It wasn't long after Sphecius flew
off in search of her first meal that she
was intercepted by a male of her
species and inseminated. As is often
the case among wasps, the male
cicada-killers emerge several days
before their prospective mates. After a
long drink of nectar, each takes up a
position on some conspicuous plant
and waits for the females to show
themselves, racing to fertilize as many
as possible.
Sphecius soon found her breakfast
in the form of a nearby thistle, and
after drinking her fill from the blossom
returned to the road cut to set about
about preparing a nest. Selecting a
suitable site she began to dig
downward, flinging soil out to her rear
with swift, bicycling kicks from her
hind legs. Around her, fifty or more
fellow female cicada-killers were
excavating their own burrows,
brought together not so much out of
any desire for companionship as by a
plot of ground of just the right
(
" Drawing by Floyd Runkle
Floyd Runkle is a 1979 graduate of Donegal High School.
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