Cicadas in the Background

The last week or two has been highlighted by the sound of cicadas in the background more often than not. A particularly loud spot is the hill along the south side of Wat Umong where I recorded this clip as I rode to work.

Click on the yellow button with the black arrow to hear the cicadas. Cicadas by AKRaven


I'm not sure how this will come out on your computer, but use speakers or ear phones and put the volume up to get a good sense of this. J estimates that they are at least 70 decibels when they are loud. At the moment, they are silent.



Here's a picture from ChangThai.com (Chang means elephant in Thai)







Cicada Central adds this information (plus a lot more on their site)

Cicadas are probably best known for their conspicuous acoustic signals or "songs", which the males make using specialized structures called tymbals, found on the abdomen. Female cicadas do not have tymbals, but in some species the females produce clicking or snapping sounds with their wings. Some males augment their tymbal sounds by making winc clicks as well. After mating, females lay eggs in grass, bark or twigs; the eggs hatch later in the season and the new nymphs burrow underground. As juveniles and adults, cicadas use piercing and sucking mouthparts to feed on the xylem fluid of plants. All but a few cicada species have multiple-year life cycles, most commonly 2-8 years. In many species, adults can be found every year because the population is not developmentally synchronized; these are often called "annual" cicada species. By contrast, the cicadas in a periodical cicada population are synchronized, so that almost all of them mature into adults in the same year.

Lee Chang-kook, in an informative, but also very human, article in the Korea Times, writes:

We know what cicadas look like. They are large bugs with two transparent wings. The male cicadas make a loud, shrill and droning noise by vibrating two membranes on their abdomens.

It is generally believed that they spend many years as larvae underground (some say 15 years, some 12, and some seven) and live a sadly short life (some say only 15 days, some a month, and some three months) and die, but most of the important knowledge we have about cicadas is no more than just inaccurate and commonplace hearsay. Nothing is fixed, verified or proven.

And, do you know that they eat nothing during their entire life? Indeed, through my long experience in watching them I have not found any of them trying to catch anything to eat or eating something.

I wonder if they have a mouth at all. I wonder how can they sing so energetically all the time without eating anything at all. No doubt they are the greatest singers in the world. They sing to death. It is said that dew is the only food for them.

You can get the whole fascinating article at the Korea Times link above.



If you want to learn and hear more about Thai Cicadas you can buy a copy of

Cicadas of Thailand Vol. 1 by Michel Boulard

With Audio CD

The first of two volumes on Thai cicadas, the most fascinating and also least known representatives of a family of sonorous insects. Cicadas neither sing, nor stridulate, but tymbalize. The volume reveals the existence and the double life, larval and imaginal, of cicadas encountered during six years of research in Thailand's sub-mountainous forests. The body of the text includes two chapters discussing general characteristics, acoustic and procreative ethology, and exceptional or enigmatic aspects and behaviour. The text is enriched by drawings and photographs, mostly of living insects. It is accompanied by a CD comprising forty cicada sound productions (or tymbalizations), the acoustics made visual in ID and ethological cards, which form an original feature of this pioneering study.

And finally, Club ALC offers some cicada haiku. I liked this one by Robert Leechford:

a cicada emerges
from years of silence
singing and singing