Word: cicadas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Compared with the average bug, which goes from birth to death in less than a year, the 17-year cicada is Methuselah: it has the longest life cycle of any known insect. In all, there are twelve distinct broods of 17-year cicadas, each of which emerges in a different year. This year's group is referred to by scientists as Brood 10. The other large group, Brood 14, is due to make its next appearance...
...long sojourn underground, subsisting on sap in tree rootlets, the cicada nymph passes through five growth stages, or instars, each of which ends with the insect throwing off its carapace. About two months before it is ready to emerge, the nymph tunnels its way upward, lying at the surface and building a protective earthen turret if the ground is too damp. This final rest stop is truly character building: it apparently enables the insect to develop adult claws and flight muscles to help it cope with life aboveground. "Their bodies undergo a major transformation, especially of muscle structure," says Miller...
...final hours of the cicada's three-week life aboveground are played out as the female deposits hundreds of eggs in a series of pockets cut in twigs. Nine weeks later the microscopic nymphs hatch, drop to the ground and burrow down as far as 2 ft., where they grow, eat and await their coming-out 17 years hence. The fact that this brood will not reappear until 2004 is one reason scientists are reluctant to put too much of their time into unlocking the cicada's secrets. As Richard Froeschner, a research entomologist at the Smithsonian Institution, points...
...subjects" are small, mute structures with no minds of their own--not animals or people but seedpods, spores, pollen, sprouts, twigs, pupae, the embryonic scribblings of cellular life learning to write its name. One painting, Insecta, 1985, is full of chrysalises, cockchafers and stag beetles, with a red cicada clinging to a scrubby patch of blue ground. Another, Pitch Lake, 1985, has an array of spore clusters creeping, with phallic intent, across a sticky-looking field of bitumen. Some of the images are quite recognizable (there are clams, for instance, and bean sprouts), while others have the sketchy look...
Back in my woods where I am cutting the winter's firewood, the cicada's song fills my head, seems to reverberate inside it. Cicadas, the sun catching their wings and reflecting rainbows, line every tree trunk, every branch. One lights on my shoulder. His broad face with its big red eyes is inches from mine...