June 6 - My mother noticed a cicada laying eggs this evening! See the picture at the left? There is a tube -- called the ovipositor -- that extends from the cicada's abdomen into the stem of the plant. The abdomen pulsates as the cicada pumps the eggs into it.

My niece, Kira, held the stem at an angle so that I could get a good picture. If you click here, you can see it in more detail.

The choice of location was a little unfortunate because this particular plant, a trumpet vine, grows out over a concrete patio. When it comes time for the nymphs to drop from the plant to the ground and burrow underneath it for 17 years -- well, they would need to be equipped with miniature jack-hammers to get to it.

As advertised, once she was done laying her eggs, the female crawled away and then dropped off of the plant a few minutes later, dead.

May 31 - I should probably change the title of this page from 'Cicada Love' to 'Cicada Tolerance.' :) I still find them fascinating when I'm at home -- in Northside, where I live, the emergence hasn't reached the biblical plague-like levels that it has in Roselawn, where I work. The maintenance staff of the building I work in blows off the sidewalks with a leaf blower several times a day...

May 22 - One cicada alone is not very noisy; there are so many of them now that I can hear them from inside my car going 65 m.p.h. with the radio on.

I think the picture on the right is just kind of cool... it seems a lot more difficult to climb a very skinny copper rod than to just hang off of the plant below it. if you'd like to see more detail, click on the picture -- a bigger version will open in a new window.

May 21 - Clearly, I'm going to have to revise my idea of what "crazy numbers" are... :) It just keeps getting crazier. You can see my current idea of crazy (besides spending absurd amounts of time taking pictures of cicadas and putting them on the web) by clicking here or on the picture to the left -- that was about 7:00 this morning.

I went out at lunch to buy a broom to keep at work -- I'm not a very tidy person, but the dead ones (half-eaten by birds, mostly) and the empty shells were making the sidewalk a very crackle-y place to walk.

May 20 - There were crazy numbers of cicadas out there last night. I found quite a few sets of cicadas that looked kind of like synchronized swimmers, doing the same things at the same times. So Two Cicada now has 2 set of pictures, each with 2 cicadas emerging. :)

I am NOT going out there tonight... I think I must have gotten 100 mosquito bites on my left ankle alone...

May 19 - Managed to restrain myself from going outside last night...

May 18 - Last night at about 10 o'clock, I went on an expedition in my back yard. I wanted to see a cicada transform itself from the wingless things I kept finding while digging in my garden into the flying little beasties that everyone has been talking about for the past month.

Happily, I found one slowly crawling up a fence. I set up a chair, got out my camera, and settled in to watch him. You can click here to watch him go through the transformation process. If you have a slow Internet connection, you might have to wait a while for the page to load -- although not three hours, which is the time period of the pictures.

There's not a lot of action involved -- the changes happen pretty slowly -- but it's really fascinating to watch.

You can see the 'before' picture of the cicada on this page here.