First Cicada Tenerals Found! - Lowell, MA.

First Cicada Tenerals Found! - Lowell, MA.

10:15 am - With my recent success at finding cicada exuvia at St. Patrick Cemetery I decided to conduct a morning survey of the area. I soon noticed on a giant ash tree a cicada in the middle of molting! It had just removed it's head and was hanging up side down. I've seen this plenty of times in pictures but never in person. The Cicada looked like it was stuck and that it might be dead but that surely wasn't the case.

I looked carefully around the tree and discovered another Cicada newly emerged and hanging from it's exuvia hardening in the sunlight. This one was two feet from the ground on the side of the same tree.

I noticed that the second Cicada, one of the wings was not expanding properly. While these two were molting I decided to walk to another ash tree approximately 30 feet away and discovered two exuvia on this tree as well. No Cicadas in the area however.

I went to yet another ash tree and discovered 22 exuvia either on the tree itself or scattered on the ground around it. I also noticed a pile of dark brown smashed up Cicada nymphs. It sort of looked like something had eaten them then decided that they ate too much and regurgitated them. These were darker brown in color so I am assuming that the cicadas were still inside them when eaten.

I went back to the first ash tree and noticed that the first cicada (the one 8 feet off the ground) completely exits it's shell by giving several abdomen thrusts (almost like sit-ups) and is finally free. The wings start to expand.

I get worried that since it is late morning that these two cicadas would get attacked by the birds in the area so I stayed to watch over them while the molt process was complete. Cicadas are very fragile and delicate creatures at this stage. You don't want to touch them if you can help it. The second Cicada (the one two feet from the ground) still has not expanded it's 2nd wing and may be damaged. I noticed that it is walking very funny.

After about two hours I carefully collect the Cicadas, the good one is a female T. lyricen and the deformed one is a male T. lyricen. I also collect their exuvia for further study and definitely notice that the Cicada with it's wing not expanding is actually missing a front fore-leg! How can this be?

Notes: The first 4 thumbnails above are of the female T. lyricen. The remaining are of the deformed male T. lyricen. An in-depth observation and analysis was done on the male Cicada in the Cicadas 101 section.

Let's Try A New Area Lowell Cemetery - Lowell, MA.

1:00 pm - Due to the success of finding two Cicadas at 10:00 am in the morning, I still had plenty of time to look around at other places for signs of Cicadas. I decided to go to Lowell Cemetery which is a very old and well established cemetery located right next to St. Patrick's.

When I got there I noticed that the older trees were actually labeled with the type of tree that they were. Some just had numbers but others were clearly labeled. I could hear tons of Cicadas singing in them. Walked around very briefly. I have been up since 5:00am and decided to head home and check this place out another day.