{"id":5472,"date":"2015-06-27T21:24:34","date_gmt":"2015-06-28T04:24:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cicadamania.com\/cicadas\/?p=5472"},"modified":"2018-09-05T20:50:26","modified_gmt":"2018-09-06T03:50:26","slug":"what-is-predator-satiation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cicadamania.com\/cicadas\/what-is-predator-satiation\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Predator Satiation?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Why are there so many Magicicada periodical cicadas, and what does it have to do with the survival of their species? One of the answers is: <strong>Predator Satiation<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>A <strong>predator<\/strong> is any animal that would eat a periodical cicada, i.e., birds, raccoons, squirrels, dogs, snakes, etc. <strong>Satiation<\/strong>, in the case of cicadas, means to supply predators with enough cicadas to eat until they are wary of eating and thus avoid them completely.<\/p>\n<p>Predator satiation works like this:<br \/>\n1) Periodical cicadas emerge in <em>tremendous numbers<\/em>.<br \/>\n2) Adult cicadas are often timid, even after having sclerotized.<br \/>\n3) The first cicadas that emerge are eagerly consumed by predators.<br \/>\n4) The predators are so overwhelmed by the bounty of easily eaten cicadas, that they fill themselves to the point of disgust and exhaustion.<br \/>\n5) This gives the remaining cicadas a chance to escape the predators.<\/p>\n<p>The first periodical cicadas are literally &#8220;fodder&#8221;, in the battle between predators and periodical cicadas, to use a war\/video game analogy.<\/p>\n<p>Look at this periodical cicada: it is thinking &#8220;hopefully this creature will eat me, so my siblings will live on!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/8755099\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" frameborder=\"0\" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen><\/iframe> <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/8755099\">Magicicada on my finger by Dan<\/a> from <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/cicadamania\">Cicada Mania<\/a> on <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\">Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The research paper <strong>Emergence of 13-Yr Periodical Cicadas (Cicadidae: Magicicada): Phenology, Mortality, and Predator Satiation<\/strong> by Kathy S. Williams, Kimberly G. Smith, and Frederick M. Stephen (Ecology, Volume 74, Issue 4 (Jun., 1993), 1143-1152) is worth reading if you are interested in this topic. They found that predation of cicadas peaks during the first few days of the emergence, and doesn&#8217;t resume in significant numbers until three weeks later (see figure 6, if you read the paper). <\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, this strategy could be detrimental to periodical cicadas in areas with dwindling populations, where there isn&#8217;t enough of them to satiate the predators completely. <\/p>\n<p>This strategy <em>might<\/em> also be used by other types of periodical cicadas like the Chremistica ribhoi of India, or cicadas that emerge in large numbers like Callogaeana festiva of south-east Asia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why are there so many Magicicada periodical cicadas, and what does it have to do with the survival of their species? One of the answers is: Predator Satiation. A predator is any animal that would eat a periodical cicada, i.e., birds, raccoons, squirrels, dogs, snakes, etc. Satiation, in the case of cicadas, means to supply [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[281,2,155],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faqs","category-magicicada","category-periodical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cicadamania.com\/cicadas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cicadamania.com\/cicadas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cicadamania.com\/cicadas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cicadamania.com\/cicadas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cicadamania.com\/cicadas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cicadamania.com\/cicadas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5472\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cicadamania.com\/cicadas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cicadamania.com\/cicadas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cicadamania.com\/cicadas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}