Somebody kick me if I’m wrong, but, I’m pretty sure it’s now the start of cicada season in Australia.
October 25, 2005
UC Engineering Researchers Find Mercury In Cicadas
I came across this article thanks to Google’s news alerts: UC Engineering Researchers Find Mercury In Cicadas. I’ve never eaten a cicada and I don’t plan on doing so in the future, but a lot of “cicada maniacs” do, so here’s your PSA.
Think twice before you eat one of Cincinnati’s Brood-X cicadas. That’s the warning from researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Engineering, who have found surprising levels of mercury in these insects.
October 11, 2005
Three new galleries and 23 new cicada photographs
We have three new galleries:
NEW! Gina Scarborough’s Florida Cicada. 18 great pictures of a pink cicada. We need help identifying this cicada, so let us know if you have a clue what it is.
NEW! Giant pictures of Bill Lesar’s Tibicen dorsatus. You’ve seen this cicada in an earlier post — now you can see huge versions of Bill’s photographs.
NEW! Andrea’s 2005 Cicada Nymph Exoskeleton Gallery. Three big pictures of discarded exoskeletons.
Return of the 17-Year Cicadas
Way back in July a man by the name of Samuel Orr mailed me a DVD trailer of a film he had a part in making called Return of the 17-Year Cicadas. At the time my reaction was “I am simply blown away by its excellence. That might be the best cicada video I’ve seen so far”. Somehow I let it slip through the cracks and I forgot to write about it. In the mean time the movie has won first prize in the Non-Interactive Media category of the 2005 Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge. I’m sure once the film reaches a wider audience — perhaps PBS or the Animal Planet channel (hint! hint!) — it will win more awards.
Read all about the new, award winning cicada documentary Return of the 17-Year Cicadas on the excellent EurekAlert! Science Reporting Alert website. Make sure you download and watch the video too. It is incredible.
Thanks to Roy and Dona for reminding me to post something about this film.
Cicada Larvae Pictures
So, what do cicada larvae look like???
First, here’s what their eggs look like. The mother cicada scratches a hole into a tree branch, and places in eggs in like a row of bananas.
When the eggs hatch, the cicadas don’t look like a grub or maggot as you might expect; instead they look like tiny termites or ants, with 6 legs and antennae.
Here’s photos of Ist Instar cicadas.
Better yet, here’s a video from Roy Troutman: