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| Photo Credit: Dale Dykema |
| With their bright red eyes and reddish markings on their bodies, periodical cicadas look different than other cicadas. |
It’s a song that fills the summer air. To a female cicada, it may sound sweet. To the rest of us, the noise can be deafening. By far the loudest noise produced by any insect, the mating song of the male cicada can be heard over the roar of a lawn mower. But for all their noise and rather large size (many species are more than an inch long), cicadas are actually harmless.
There are many different kinds of cicadas out there in the world – at least 2,500 species are known – and they vary in size and color. But one thing they all have in common is their long life cycle. | Add Photo to Journal |  | | Photo Credit: Dale Dykema | | When periodical cicadas show up, they bring the whole family. Luckily with these particular cicadas, it only happens every 17 years. |
All cicadas have a life cycle longer than a year, and that cycle’s pretty simple: After mating, the females use a special blade-like appendage to create pockets in the newly grown limbs of many tree and shrub species, and then they lay several eggs in each hole. After four to seven weeks, the eggs hatch, and the tiny nymphs drop to the ground. They burrow underground in search of tree roots, and once a suitable root is found, the nymphs insert their piercing/sucking mouthparts and suck the juices right out of the plant.
Depending on the type of cicada, this feeding frenzy continues for two to five years. One group in particular – the periodic cicadas – stays underground and feeds for 13 or 17 years. When the nymphs mature, they crawl near the soil surface as it warms up in the spring. After leaving the soil, they crawl up the tree trunk, and adults crawl out of their nymphal skin, leaving it behind on the tree.
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