18 ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY BULLETIN 
THE 
SEVENTEEN-YEAR LOCUST 
Py Raymonp L, Drrmars, Curator of Reptiles. 
(Illustrated by enlargements from motion pictures prepared by the author.) 
Y THE time 
this article 
pears, a great 
event will have 
passed, and billions 
of the — shrivelled 
bodies of a marvel- 
lous insect, the 
seventeen-year — ci- 
cada, will have re- 
turned as debris to 
the soil. 
that 
ap- 
Despite the scep- 
ticism of scientific 
writers, certain 
much to amateur ob- 
popular 
servers and the species figuring in this article 
will ever be known as the periodical locust— 
names mean 
though locust he is not. That popular term 
should apply only to the members of a family 
known technically as the Locustidae, but more 
commonly termed the grasshoppers. The prin- 
cipal of this resumé is a member of the great 
race of suctorial insects, embraced within the 
orders scientifically designated as Hemipter and 
Homoptera. The generic name of the marvel to 
be described is Cicada—and having gone thus 
far, the writer feels that this is sufficient tech- 
nical detail. 
The interest of the Cicada centers about its 
life history and the right domination of it by 
a natural law or force apparently as inflexible 
as that governing the movement in their orbits 
of the celestial bodies. 
Like the prediction of astronomers, announc- 
ing the expected appearance of some heavenly 
body, the government officials in the Bureau of 
Entomology, at Washington issued a warning 
early the past spring. It was to the effect that 
a great swarm of the seventeen-year cicada (ofhf- 
cially designated as brood x) was due to appear 
over a considerable portion of eastern and cen-~ 
tral United States, extending in a belt from New 
York and Pennsylvania, inclining southwest- 
ward through Maryland, Virginia and West 
Virginia and embracing the western portion of 
North and South Carolina and northern 
Georgia; curving sharply northwestward, 
through Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, 
Illinois and Michigan. Bordering all the 
margin of this area of superabundance were 
localities where the locusts were to appear in 
fair numbers. 
The government chart indicated that they 
were to appear in twenty states. Over this area, 
and exactly on time, after a lapse of seventeen 
years, the swarms appeared at a moment as 
mathematically correct as an eclipse of the sun 
or the moon. And one of the strangest things 
about these legions of newcomers, with their 
alert red eyes, glistening wings and joy in the 
air and sunshine, after years of toil in total 
darkness, underground, and as lowly, grub-like 
forms is, that their emancipation and freedom 
is limited to a few weeks and assailed from all 
sides by numerous enemies. 
To review the life history of the seventeen- 
year locust or—more properly—cicada, we must 
go to the beginning and note that the egg is 
strangely deposited. The female possesses an 
auger-like appendage beneath the body and with 
this drills holes in tender stems. With each bor~ 
ing she deposits one to two eggs. Skillfully 
concealed from harm, the eggs hatch within a 
few weeks and the young cicadas, pure white 
and in form like microscopic crustaceans, crawl 
from the boring and without hesitation launch 
themselves with utter abandon into space. Fall- 
ing into a jungle of grass-blades and weeds, 
their one thought is to reach the soil and after. a 
hasty scurrying for spots where their enlarged 
forelimbs may push aside the particles, they be- 
gin working their way downward. Progress at 
first is slow, but frost is a long way off. With 
their sharp proboscis they begin sucking the 
juices from thread-like roots and their growth 
is rapid. Before many weeks have passed they 
are strong enough to push aside the soil with 
the shovel-like limbs and move ahead, down- 
ward. Thus they mine and toil from root to 
root, imbedding the sharp beak to obtain nour- 
ishment, existing for a period of seventeen years 
in the utter darkness of underground. 
In travels underground, in search of root 
juices, the progress is always ahead as the use 
of the forelimbs seems to be zealously restricted 
to forcing the earth particles backward and 
restricted in opposite motion for a supreme 
engineering feat that may be necessary in years 
to come——during the construction of an under- 
water caisson. 
