The lack of obvious chewing mouthparts may have made casual observers think that adult cicadas don’t need to feed. But that’s not the case.
There are at least three certainties in life: death, taxes and the periodic emergence of millions of cicadas. But one big cicada uncertainty has finally been put to rest — the question of whether the adult insects eat.spp.) live in various broods across the eastern United States. Every 13 or 17 years, depending on the brood, adult cicadas emerge from the ground en masse and embark on a four-to-six-week saga of mating and laying eggs on young trees before dying.
That perception might stem from cicadas’ lack of obvious chewing mouthparts, like those possessed by very hungry caterpillars, says James Hepler, a research entomologist at the U.S. Arid Land Agricultural Research Center, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in Maricopa, Ariz. The idea has even been perpetuated in some scientific papers, including one published by a USDA scientist in the 1970s, Hepler says. That’s despite the fact that other scientists had reported seeing cicadas sticking their tubular mouthparts into plant stems, possibly to access sap. “We decided to kind of settle it once and for all,” he says.
By analyzing the guts of cicadas , researchers have finally confirmed that the insects do in fact feed as adults.While working at the USDA’s Appalachian Fruit Research Station in West Virginia, Hepler and colleagues analyzed the gut contents of 75 periodical cicadas collected from).
Hepler is now interested in the timescale of adult feeding. “Do the cicadas move around from plant to plant on a daily basis, on a weekly basis?” he asks. There’s also the question of what effect this mass sap-sucking has on plants. “An individual cicada seems to have a relatively low impact,” Hepler says. But when hundreds of thousands of them descend on greenery almost at once, the plants face “the potential for pretty significant water loss.
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