Cicada Nymph
On June 4, 2022, Sandy and I were out back planting some hazelnut plants. While watering the last one, I noticed this critter squirming around on top of the soil that I had shoveled back into the hole, so I brought it back to the house, rinsed it off, and got Sam to hold it in her hand for me so I could get some pictures, with her hand for scale. It was pretty big, so I used my TG-3 camera to photograph it rather than my dedicated macro camera (which has such high magnification that I wouldn’t have been able to fit the whole thing into the frame.
Here’s the same picture, zoomed in a bit closer:
This is pretty obviously a cicada nymph. I am amused by the fact that, just a couple of days before finding this, I had commented to Sam that when digging around in the garden we constantly find June Beetle nymphs, but I had never actually dug up a cicada nymph. And then, voila, here is one!
Cicada nymphs grow slowly, and spend several years underground. We are too far north for the periodical cicadas (the famous ones that come out every 17 or 13 years), so this is one of the three cicada species that do live this far north and spend between 3 and 4 years underground before emerging as adults. The Canadian and Says cicadas look pretty similar as adults and emerge in June, while the Dog Day cicadas generally come out in late July and August. I did post pictures of a cicada nymph skin back in 2008, which has a distinctly different shape, so I think whichever species that one was, this one is the other one.
This one wasn’t as big as the adult cicadas that we find sometimes, so I think it probably had at least one more year to go.
The claws look fierce, but they are for digging in the ground, not for defending itself. At least, it didn’t use them to claw at Sam’s hand or anything. It didn’t appear to have anything much in the way of mouthparts, either. Which isn’t surprising, considering that they normally just hide out underground and suck juice out of plant roots.
I had always heard that cicadas sucked juices out of tree roots, but I don’t know. This one came out of a hole that I intentionally did not dig anywhere particularly close to a tree. It must have been getting juices out of non-tree plants, like maybe goldenrod.
Given that I had never seen one of these actually in-situ before (in spite of spending quite a lot of my life digging holes), I kind of suspect that there is very little actually known about what they are up to down there. The “suck on tree roots” thing may just have been an assumption, they may very well feed on just about anything.
So anyway, Sam poked a hole in the ground in an area with a lot of growing things and let the nymph crawl down into it, where it promptly dug in and buried itself. So, if it is a male, maybe we will hear it when it comes back up next summer.
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OK, I got nothing. That’s just disgusting. What a horrible creature.