The Life of the Grasshopper

by Jean-Henri Fabre

After the details which I have already given concerning the Common Cicada, it seems hardly necessary to say how the insupportable chatterbox of the Ash is rendered dumb. The cymbals are clearly visible on the outside. You prick them with the point of a needle. Complete silence follows instantly. Why are there not in my plane-trees, among the dagger-wearing insects, auxiliaries who, like myself, love quiet and who would devote themselves to that task! A mad wish! A note would then be lacking in the majestic harvest symphony. [[71]]

The Red Cicada (C. hematodes) is a little smaller than the Common Cicada. He owes his name to the blood-red colour that takes the place of the other’s brown on the veins of the wings and some other lineaments of the body. He is rare. I come upon him occasionally in the hawthorn-bushes. As regards his musical apparatus, he stands half-way between the Common Cicada and the Ash Cicada. He has the former’s oscillation of the belly, which increases or reduces the strength of the sound by opening or closing the church; he possesses the latter’s exposed cymbals, unaccompanied by any sound-chamber or window.

The cymbals therefore are bare, immediately after the attachment of the hind-wings. They are white, fairly regular in their convexity and boast eight long, parallel nervures of a ruddy brown and seven others which are much shorter and which are inserted singly in the intervals between the first. The lids are small and scolloped at their inner edge so as to cover only half of the corresponding chapel. The opening left by the hollow in the lid has as a shutter a little pallet fixed to the base of the hind-leg, which, by folding itself against the body or lifting slightly, [[72]]keeps the aperture either shut or open. The other Cicadæ have each a similar appendage, but in their case it is narrower and more pointed.

Moreover, as with the Common Cicada, the belly moves freely up and down. This heaving movement, combined with the play of the femoral pallets, opens and closes the chapels to varying extents.

The mirrors, though not so large as the Common Cicada’s, have the same appearance. The membrane that faces them on the thorax side is white, oval and very delicate and is tight-stretched when the abdomen is raised and flabby and wrinkled when the abdomen is lowered. In its tense state it seems capable of vibration and of increasing the sound.

The song, modulated and subdivided into strophes, suggests that of the Common Cicada, but is much less objectionable. Its lack of shrillness may well be due to the absence of any sound-chambers. Other things being equal, cymbals vibrating uncovered cannot possess the same intensity of sound as those vibrating at the far end of an echoing vestibule. The noisy Ash Cicada also, it is true, lacks that vestibule; but he [[73]]amply makes up for its absence by the enormous resonator of his belly.

I have never seen the third Cicada, sketched by Réaumur and described by Olivier[1] under the name of C. tomentosa. The species is known in Provence, so this and that one tells me, by the name of the Cigalon, or rather Cigaloun, the Little Cigale or Cicada. This designation is unknown in my neighbourhood.

I possess two other specimens which Réaumur probably confused with the one of which he gives us a drawing. One is the Black Cicada (C. atra, Oliv.), whom I came across only once; the other is the Pigmy Cicada (C. pygmæa, Oliv.), whom I have picked up pretty often. I will say a few words about this last one.

He is the smallest member of the genus in my district, the size of an average Gad-fly, and measures about three-quarters of an inch in length. His cymbals are transparent, with three opaque veins, are scarcely sheltered by [[74]]a fold in the skin and are in full view, without any sort of entrance-lobby or sound-chamber. I may remark, in terminating our survey, that the entrance-lobby exists only in the Common Cicada; all the others are without it.

The dampers are separated by a wide interval and allow the chapels to open wide. The mirrors are comparatively large. Their shape suggests the outline of a kidney-bean. The abdomen does not heave when the insect sings; it remains stationary, like the Ash Cicada’s. Hence a lack of variety in the melody of both.