Cicadas and Cicada Killers

[Jamie123]

I was reading Bill Bryson last night, and he was talking about his experiences with cicada killers as a kid growing up in Des Moines, Iowa. I was intrigued enough to look them up online:

According to Bill Bryson:

• Cicada killers are not cicadas
• Cicada killers are about the size of humming birds
• Cicada killers are armed with stings "front and aft"
• Cicada killers appear only every 17 years. When they do come, they swarm out of their underground nests and attack anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby.
• Their favourite mode of attack is to fly right up your trouser legs and attack your genitals, for which the only cure is castration.

According to every other source I have consulted (which admittedly isn't many):

• Cicada killers are not cicadas. (Bryson is at least right about this.) They are in fact a species of wasp, while cicadas are more like locusts. Cicada killers catch cicadas to feed to their young, which eat them alive, in a venom-induced coma, saving the vital organs till last to keep the cicadas alive (and fresh) as long as possible. [Delightful I know. Charles Darwin had something interesting to say about these kinds of insects, and whether the God who supposedly created them has a sick mind.] Adult cicada killers themselves only eat nectar.
• Cicada killers are large by wasp-standards, but nothing like the size of hummingbirds. They are actually smaller than cicadas, and sometimes have difficulty dragging captured cicadas back to their nests.
• Cicada killers are armed with regular stings, same as any other wasp.
• Cicada killers come every year. It is cicadas that only emerge every 17 years, but they don't all emerge at on once, so every year there is a supply of emerging cicadas for the wasps.
• Cicada killers do not attack humans unless severely provoked.

I love to read Bill Bryson, but I wouldn't recommend him as a source of accurate information. For example he said that there were only 20 episodes of Sky King, which the networks repeated ad nausium, whereas a bit of Googling will tell you there were actually over 70.

Here's a picture of a chicada killer and a captured cicada.

Edited February 27, 2020 by Jamie123

[Vort]

I read something or other by Bryson a couple of years ago, a very popular general-knowledge type of book. As I recall, I enjoyed it, though apparently not enough to remember its title.

A Short History of Nearly Everything. Thanks, Google.

[Jamie123]

9 minutes ago, Vort said:

A Short History of Nearly Everything. Thanks, Google.

That's a good book - I read it quite a few years ago. There was a lot in it about the biological sciences I hadn't previously known - like about non-coding DNA, and about the differences between eukaryotic life (basically everything I had previously considered "life" and some) and other sorts of life (which I'd had no idea existed). Totally fascinating stuff - especially about slime molds. And he must have made some attempt at accuracy, otherwise the Royal Society would hardly have made him an Honorary Fellow.  

This one I'm reading now is The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, which I think is intentionally based on the "knowledge" he had when he was about 9 or 10. (Which I think is actually quite a clever idea - juvenile mindset framed in adult language.) I had it on my shelf for about 5 years, after having been given it by a friend; I'd somehow got the notion it was all going to be about baseball, which is why I put off reading it until now. Brilliant - though I warn you its quite disgusting in parts! (If you think of the gross stuff that fascinates kids, you'll get an idea of the sort of thing I'm referring to!)

[JohnsonJones]

The individual holding the wasp is a very brave individual.

I was once on a job site doing where I had to climb up some old towers.  As I put my hand over the ledge of one of them I got bit several times from wasps.  It hurt.  However, it was not as bad as a sting.  They don't have stingers on both ends, but they can hurt you from either the stinger or from a bite.

I had accidentally put my hand right next to a massive nest they had built up on the tower, but luckily not right on it.  They were just giving me nice warning bites rather than stings.  Quite a few bites though.  It was strange as normally they sting rather than bite.  Perhaps they didn't feel imminently threatened and thus didn't sting, but somehow saw the tips of my fingers as food.