Well, I just saw something I had never seen before, though I've been here in
Houston all my life.
It’s Labor Day 2014, a holiday, but I was on a brief conference call, trying
to keep the ball rolling business-wise, to get a project completed by the end
of this week. I was home, at my “kitchen-table-office”, and glanced over
toward the rear windows.
The sun was at a nice angle, about 10:00am, and I saw something smaller than
a bird, but bigger than most bugs flay past.
Thinking it might be a humming bird, I stepped over to look.
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Photo by Mark W. Laughlin
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We have a rather unusual bug here that we call a Cicada (not sure if that’s
correct…). I do know that they live
underground from the time they hatch, for fourteen years. They dig around, and then in their 14th
summer, they dig their way up to the surface, and out.
They are large, with a heavy body, fully one half inch wide and about an
inch and a half long (about 13 x 38mm).
Once up into the air, they find a tree or other vertical surface, climb
up a few feet, and then go through their metamorphosis. They split the skin of their heavy
exoskeleton, and make their way out of this “ugly” “digging suit”, crawl out and
spread their 2 inch (50mm) nearly transparent wings, to let them dry.
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Photo by Mark W. Laughlin
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When ready, they fly up into the trees and start their next phase, which is
mostly singing and mating. But, all is
not harmony and light, you see the cicada has at least one enemy. It is a wasp, a large heavy bodied wasp, that,
on the wing mind you, will intercept a flying cicada, stinging it to death, in
mid-air, dropping it instantly to the ground.
In all my years, I have seen this only once, a few years ago, just by
chance, because I was looking in just the right direction at just the right
time.
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Photo by Mark W. Laughlin
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Well today, the object I saw flying past the window was one of those wasps,
carrying a dead cicada. He was losing
altitude, as the cicada was heavy. They
landed near the base of a large pine tree, just a few feet outside the window,
very nicely lit by the sun. I grabbed my
camera from my briefcase and quickly shot two photos before the wasp hustled up
the tree and out of site. It just took a
few seconds, and I was back on the call before they missed me.
Take a look at a couple of links:
http://www.stonybrook.edu/ehs/pest/cicada-killers.shtml
Y’all have a nice Labor Day !
-Mark
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