No doubt you all have heard of the seventeen-year locusts. They, too, are cicadas, and they look very much like this one, only it takes the young ones seventeen years to complete their growth.
Think of living in the ground and sucking the juices out of the earth and of tree roots for seventeen years!
How would you like to do it?
But no doubt the cicada is quite happy living in this way.
At the end of seventeen years the cicadas come up out of the earth in great swarms.
They cast their skins for the last time. The queer little shells are seen everywhere, and the air resounds with the songs of the freed prisoners.
In the South it takes only thirteen years for these cicadas to develop.
I once went up the side of a beautiful mountain in North Carolina, where was such a mighty host of cicadas in the trees that I could not hear my companion speak, and a little way off the noise sounded like a torrent of rushing water.