Illustration by Bjorn Lie
Cicadas were in our pages a few times a decade ago but now is the real time for celebrating them. This story by Rivka Galchen is as good as any:
The Peculiar Delights of the Enormous Cicada Emergence
As loud as leaf blowers, as miraculous as math, the insects are set to overtake the landscape.
Their parents passed away thirteen, or maybe seventeen, years ago. They grow up alone, hidden in tunnels of their own making, nursing from the rootlets of trees. Continue reading
Cicada exuviae (i.e., molted exoskeleton)
After finding the molted exoskeleton of the cicada above while wandering Xandari’s forest paths, I decided to do a little digging on the bug. The cicada is a common, but amazing, species of insect. A “true bug” (Hemipteran), the cicada is easily recognized by its Continue reading
After our post yesterday on the 17-year emergence of periodical cicadas, here is a fantastic body of work on one of nature’s most intriguing creatures 
by Samuel Orr. A natural history filmmaker and time-lapse photographer he has been following and filming the various broods of periodical cicadas since 2007 (multiple broods that come out in different years across the eastern part of the United States). After filming some 200 hours of footage, and he is now working towards an hour documentary that focuses on the 17-year periodical cicadas for which he just started a Kickstarter campaign. Continue reading
Organikos 