Ever seen a cicada hatch?

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/17/ever-seen-a-cicada-hatch.html

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Molt. Hatching is from eggs.

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I was coming here to be the same pedant. Thank you for throwing yourself on the pyre first.

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I didn’t see much hatching (or emergence from larval/pupal state). It was all the way out of the old exoskeleton at the start of the video. Did I miss something?

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Entomological tarsomere-bump.

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Really beautiful colors there.

Watching critters with exoskeletons molt is usually pretty darn wild. (e.g. crabs and lobsters) These flaccid bodies emerge from these rigid shells and they flop off, flabbily. Though this is more like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, albeit slightly less spectacular in the unfurling of its wings.

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The big 17-year brood should be coming back to the Northeast/East Coast in another couple years I believe. When it came around last time, I think I saw thousands of cicadas emerge from their larval stage.

Feeding cicadas to my (late, great) pet box turtle was an awful lot of fun. Oh MAN he liked chomping on them!

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That is one beautiful bug.

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In Prairie Village, KS, those Cicada shells were everywhere. We spent all summer catching those things and playing with them.

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Reminds me of the mothman Persona.

image

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I see insect molting most days, but somehow I’ve never seen a cicada molt. The color is striking.

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You missed Trump’s morning makeup routine in reverse. Under a tire, on a running car,___________squish.

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I had exactly the same experience as you. Why do people insist on using imgur to host content that can’t even be experienced properly…

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The 17-year brood where I lived in Illinois was scheduled to emerge in 1973, but around a million of them turned up early, in 1969. Then the rest showed up on time, like when an aftershock is stronger than the earthquake. While I’m sure I saw them at pretty much every stage of their of their above-ground existence, my main memory of them is slipping on them and removing their loathsome dead carcasses with a rake and shovel.

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Mine was driving down the road one day and having a pair fly in an open window and land on my steering wheel in coitus. No shame. No shame at all.

Also, towards the end of their life cycle, watching hundreds of spent cicadas fly out over open water only to be snatched up by many hungry catfish.

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Technically, this process is eclosure, as the cicada sheds the exoskeleton of its final nymph instar stage and becomes a teneral imago.

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I nice gif from wikipedia:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Cicada_molting_animated-2.gif(image larger than 4096KB)

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I was fascinated with them as a child in the late 1970’s in Georgia. Much to my mother’s dismay, I had a collection of differing sized shells. They inevitably crumbled and were crushed to powder in my room. The final straw came when I picked up and brought home a moribund cicada that I captured from a slow flying cicada wasp. It wasn’t actually dead as I assumed and when Mom opened my sock drawer a couple of weeks later whatever the paralytic was that the wasp injected had apparently worn off. It came flying out of the drawer at her and she ran down the hall yelling words that I had never heard come out of her God-fearing church-going mouth…

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That’s what I’m talkin’ about! That’s an emergence!

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