01NymphGrass
The Nymphs emerge from the ground at night and start wandering. These photos were taken in the dark using a flash.
The Nymphs emerge from the ground at night and start wandering. These photos were taken in the dark using a flash.
Next morning, the shells the cicadas emerged from the ground in are empty. (This and the following photos taken in the morning with natural light.)
The shells seem to be glued wherever they were left. This one is on the bottom of a leaf.
And there's five on this one. I like how they line themselves up on the middle of each face, like the lamp was designed this way.
It looks like they were on the march but they just sat around until their shells hardened. You can see how they're such easy pickings for predators. Meaty, too.
A nice view of this one's bottom. According to Wikipedia, Cicadas belong to the same order as honeybees and wasps: Hymenoptera. You can see the resemblance here, although I'm glad our honeybees aren't this big!
And by the time I got home this morning's batch would have all flown away. Not far, though--we can hear the chorus going strong just down the street.
Aha! We caught an adult emerging from the nymph shell!
This is what confuses me, though. This cicada, like most we have photographed this far, is very darkly colored...
Yet this one, emerging from a group of nymph and nymph shells in a tree, seems remarkably pale. Is this a different species of Cicada, perhaps the ones that hatch every year? Or will this one eventually darken to match the others?
In any case, a dramatic photo in that it shows a few broken open shells.
I tried taking a photo of the same group in the fading evening light and adjusting the levels later in Photoshop.
Another one of these "Albino" cicadas, spreading its wings. The vein pattern on the wings seems different from the rest of the Brood XIV, too.
