THE MONSTERS OF OUR BACK YARDS 



591 



and not for us, although entomologists 

 are not agreed as to how his partner 

 hears his song, as she seems to have no 

 ears. Although this is not the strangest 

 species of this wonderfully interesting 

 genus of creatures, the story can be told 

 here of that weirdest of all the insects — 

 the Rip Van Winkle of the insect world, 

 as David Sharp has called it, the 17-year 

 cicada. 



From a tiny egg laid by its mother in 

 a twig of your back-yard shrubbery 

 there issues a creature which is as unlike 

 this monster as it can be, with soft white 

 body and mole-like front legs. It hurries 

 to the ground and disappears beneath its 

 surface sometimes to a depth of a hun- 

 dred times its length — 20 feet it is said. 

 For 17 years it digs its way around in the 

 absolute darkness of this underworld, 

 and then, as though by some prearranged 

 agreement, it comes to the surface to 

 join in a marriage revelry of a few brief 

 weeks in summer with its kinsmen of 

 the same generation who disappeared as 

 it did into the darkness 17 years before. 

 But somewhere while beneath the ground 

 the mole-like creature has become trans- 

 formed from the lowly larva to the 

 strangest actively walking pupa imag- 

 inable, and when it issues from its grave, 

 as it were, and climbs to some conspicu- 

 ous branch or tree trunk, it is a full- 

 fledged creature of the air, though en- 

 cased still in grave-clothes of parchment ; 

 but it soon splits these up the back, pulls 

 itself out, dries its powerful wings, and 

 flies away with the whirr of an aero- 

 drome. 



Most insects live for a few months 

 only, and one, indeed, the male at least, 

 for only 15 or 20 minutes; but the 17- 

 year cicada, the oldest of the insect world, 

 lives as long as a cat or a dog. But what 

 a life ! Seventeen years of it in the dark 

 and a few weeks in the sunlight. And 

 yet, compared to the life of an angle- 

 worm, condemned to the darkness for- 

 ever, what an interesting career. 



When the cicada's shrill song disturbs 

 you, then remember how brief is the 

 pleasure of its existence. 



This species in the photograph is more 

 fortunate than the 17-year one, for it is 

 condemned to only two years of dark- 

 ness. 



THE JUNE BEETLE LARVA (Allorhiua 



nitida), page 588 



How is it possible that this fat crea- 

 ture, with eye-like breathing pores along 

 its body, whose legs are worthless, and 

 which is so helpless that it has to turn 

 over on its back to wriggle over the 

 ground, can change into the emerald- 

 green June beetle which wings its way 

 like an aerodrome across the meadow? 

 This is the apparent miracle of meta- 

 morphosis which has well-nigh baffled 

 the intellect of man to explain. 



Though the reasons why are still un- 

 known, modern research has shown us 

 how this incredible change has taken 

 place. 



When this creature, which has grown 

 a hundred times its size since it was born, 

 has reached the age for this great change, 

 it doubtless feels the impending trans- 

 formation coming, and instinct tells it to 

 crawl away into some protected nook or 

 corner and pupate underneath the pro- 

 tection of a silken cover-lid of its own 

 spinning. 



The change begins ; each organ goes to 

 pieces, disintegrates, becomes a mass of 

 disconnected cells, so that the body filled 

 with these becomes, as it were, a bag of 

 mush. This mushy fluid has been likened 

 by entomologists to the disintegrated tis- 

 sues which inflammation causes in our 

 own bodies. If, then, you should slit it 

 open at this stage, you would find no 

 alimentary canal, no salivary glands, no 

 muscles, simply a thick fluid, with here 

 and there a thicker lump, that is attached 

 at certain places to the inside of the sac 

 wall. These lumps are formed of groups 

 of active cells which were not disinte- 

 grated in the general breakdown of the 

 muscle tissue, and these form the nuclei 

 around which the new creature is to be 

 built. These groups of cells grow rap- 

 idly, feeding on the fluid mass of broken- 

 down tissue much as a young chick in- 

 side the egg, feeds on the yolk, and builds 

 up the whole complicated structure of the 

 winged beetle, which seems to have no 

 possible relation to the white grub out of 

 whose body it was made. 



It is as though the insect hatched 

 twice, first from the almost microscopic 



