Cicada Killer witk Cicada 



Suddenly, with a whir of wings past my head, a yellow and 

 black wasp has pounced upon a cicada. Both fall to the ground. 

 The musician's kettle drums are stilled as the marauder thrusts 

 her terrible stinger again and again into the cicada's body. The 

 poison begins its paralyzing work. The numbed, helpless cicada 

 ceases its struggle. 



Now I see an incredible performance. The wasp has not 

 captured this cicada in order to eat it herself. Instead she will 

 carry it to an underground burrow where she will deposit an 

 egg on top of it; then, when the egg hatches, "living" cicada 

 meat will be available to the hungry infant wasp. But how to get 

 this cargo to the burrow in a road-bank where the egg will be 

 laid? A cicada is larger and heavier than a wasp, and a wasp's 

 burrow is ofteri a quarter of a mile away from her hunting 

 grounds. Slowly, patiently the wasp drags her victim, head-first 

 and on its back, to the top of a broken branch lying on the 

 ground. Then she climbs even higher, to the tip of a projecting 

 twig. And from there she makes a smooth, gliding take-off into 

 the air! She is aloft something she could never have achieved 

 from the ground. 



Cicadas and cicada killers are a part of the community around 

 my apple tree. The killer measures over an inch and a half, and 

 her needle-pointed stinger, about a third of an inch long, injects 

 a powerful shot of poison. According to the writer Pliny, people 

 once believed that seventeen poison shots from the cicada killer 

 would kill a human being. Whether or not that is true, it takes 

 but a few javelin thrusts to cripple a cicada. 



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