Chapter 120 new cicada's first sound

"On the third night of the first lunar month, the new cicada sings for the first time." These are two sentences in the poem of the great poet Bai Juyi who heard about the new cicada.He probably wrote this poem somewhere in the north, because the title of the poem is "Smell cicadas at night on the third day of June", so the climate in that place must be relatively cold, so new cicadas start to be heard in June.But in Hong Kong, you can hear the cicadas from the beginning of April. The weather was relatively warm a few days ago, and I had already heard the first cicadas on the tree outside the window. The sound was intermittent, and it stopped after a few calls, as if very timid.The weather has turned cold again these days, so I no longer hear it calling.I thought it must be trying its best to suppress its excitement on the branch, waiting for the end of the cold current to pass, and then it can sing happily.

The sound of cicadas means that summer is here. The earliest cicadas in Hong Kong are not the big cicadas we usually see called "cicadas", but small black cicadas with two spots on their wings. Yellow spots.Its cry is not like that of ordinary cicadas, but "Zi-Zi".The voice screamed very loudly.This kind of small cicada was called scorpion in old China, also known as scorpion silk.There are cyan cicadas, and there is a red one in Hong Kong. Their songs are different from those of the brown-black cicada. Female cicadas cannot sing, and all cicadas that sing are males.Therefore, the ancient Greek poet Salajus once wrote two very humorous poems "Once the Cicada":

How happy the life of cicadas is, because they have wives who can't speak. According to Fabre, a famous entomologist, not only can female cicadas not sing, they seem to have no sense of hearing.For he had fired a shot under a tree with cicadas, and they seemed undisturbed. Human beings have always had a fondness for cicadas, and they pay special attention to its humming sound. Therefore, many ancient Greek poets sang about cicadas, and more old Chinese poems use cicadas as themes, and there are many interesting legends and stories about cicadas.But the life of cicadas has always been unclear, and there are some ridiculous misunderstandings.This is almost the case both at home and abroad.It wasn't until Fabre and others patiently made years of on-the-spot observations in recent years that they could figure out the truth of their lives.

It takes at least seven or eight years for a cicada to grow from a larva to the time it climbs a tree to sing, and some even have an interval of more than ten years.The eggs of female cicadas are laid on the tree trunk. After hatching, they will fall from the tree to the root of the tree, and then dig up and down to the ground, sometimes going deep into the soil more than ten feet, and encounter a suitable place with tree roots. It is convenient to stop and nourishes with the sap of the roots.In this way, it has to live in the soil for seven or eight years (the young pupa of a cicada has to live in seclusion in the soil for 16 years), before the larvae grow to maturity, and then they instinctively dig up the soil on a rainy night and climb up to the tree trunk. After a short rest, the shell begins to shed, and a whole new cicada crawls out from the back of the cracked shell.That empty shell is the cicada slough sold in Chinese medicine shops.The new cicada continued to climb the treetops, and soon began to test the new sound it had accumulated for seven or eight years.