Thursday, July 20, 2000

Cicadas sing the music of a long, hot summer

As an entomologist with the Texas A&M Research and Extension Center, Roy Parker often gets bombarded with calls about insects, be it fleas, fire ants or livestock parasites.
   "But in all the 20 something years that I've been here, I've never been asked how to get rid of cicadas," said Parker, musing over how the sound of these winged insects triggers delightful memories of summers past.
   "We'd catch 'em , tie them with a string and let them buzz all around our shirts," Parker said. "They remind us of a time when most folks had no air-conditioning, when they'd sit out on the porch, watch the stars, tell stories at night and hear the cicadas."
   Travel 110 miles north of San Antonio and there at Buchanan Dam you'll find not just another entomologist, but Maxine Shoemaker Heath , known to neighborhood children as the "cicada lady."
   Since 1969, she has been studying the mating habits, ecology and thermal regulation of these insects; her current research involves the different soils that give rise to specific species.
   Making literary appearances
   Roughly 1,500 species of these notorious singers are known to exist. They include the periodical cicadas, which appear every 17 or 13 years in other parts of the country. The cicadas of Texas appear every summer, living underground as nymphs for as long as four or five years before working their way out of the soil for their singing debut.
   Although their adult life span is short, cicadas have been immortalized in folklore, myths and literature. Among Heath's favorite references to cicadas are those grounded in mythology.
   In one version, Eos, the Greek the goddess of dawn fell in love with a mortal named Tithonus. Eos asked Zeus to grant her lover the gift of immortality, "but in her enthusiasm she neglected to ask he also be granted eternal youth," Heath said.
   "The years passed and Tithonus became toothless and infirm and he prayed for death. Since she couldn't give back what the gods had given, she changed her lover to the ever-complaining cicada," she said,
   Cicada references can also be found in Roman mythology and were the subject of storytelling among the Zuni Indians of the American Southwest.
   'Like the Greeks'
   "The Zuni always thought the cicada was cunning," Heath said. "They tell the story of a coyote who asked to learn the song of the cicada by singing from the bows of the piñon pines."
   According to the tale, the coyote had trouble learning it, forgetting it twice on the way home. By the time the coyote asked a third time to learn its song, the cicada, having grown distrustful of the coyote's motive, shed his skin, filled it with pebbles, sealed it up and flew away.
   "When the coyote came asking again and got no response, he seized the shell, splintering his teeth on the hard stone, driving some into his jaw and others left protruding as tusks or fangs. The legend is that that is how the coyotes' descendants came to inherit their broken teeth," Heath said.
   After more than 30 years in this field of research, Heath still finds the song of cicadas magnetic.
   "I'm like the Greeks," said Heath, recalling the mythology of men who became so entranced by the song of cicadas that they neglected to eat and sleep and thus wasted away.
   "Their song is music to my ears."
  
 

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