Cicada damage

I'm pretty sure the 13-year cicada emergence in St. Louis has pretty much ended -- at least the emergence part. The incessant calling, flying around, and mating is still going strong. (Read my previous posts about the cicadas here, here, and here with videos.) Mating cicadas means egg-laying cicadas, which means plant damage.

The cicadas aren't dangerous for plants, until the females start laying eggs that is. Then things can get touchy for almost every tree and shrub in the area.

***

So how many cicadas are there right now? Well, here are some of their emergence holes:

Not so bad...

Ok, now it looks like a lot of holes. Thanks for aerating my beds for me cicadas!

And for mulching for me too!  (That's a lot of shells.)

There are still plenty in the trees too:

This is just around a single tree. There are a lot of trees in my yard and in my neighborhood. Add it up (or multiply) and that's a lot of cicadas.

A single female cicada can't do much damage. Her eggs are laid in tiny slits in the bark of young but woody branches, and those slits are small wounds.

I'm not sure how many slits a female makes, but it looks like a dozen or so at a time. Multiply that by the number of laying females that use this same branch... Hundreds or thousands of small wounds can be just as bad as one or two larger ones.

It's not only trees -- the plant just needs a bit of woody structure to it, like this rose:

Not even the bamboo is safe. They appear to only use the branches, not the culms themselves as far as I can tell:

So how exactly do they make these slits?

I'm glad you asked...

...because I found a female who was in the middle of laying on a bamboo branch. You can see her ovipositor is just starting to dig into the culm in the above photo. (click each image for a larger version)

The amount of pressure they are able to exert must be enormous!

I swear I can see her eyes bulging with the effort:

I'm not sure if they lay a single egg in each slit, but I'm thinking they probably do.

I'm quite glad that cicadas are good at identifying appropriately woody branches, as I'd hate to have them mistake my leg for a twig -- I'm pretty sure they could drill with ease into any part of my body they wanted, skull included.

Great, now I'll be thinking about that whenever one lands on me -- and that occurs a lot.

Although, that would make a pretty unique (and grisly) blog post if it did happen...

.