Nine days in, and Flicky has spent almost every day laying eggs. In captivity! I only hoped to give her somewhere safe to rest, and now there are eggs to look after as well. Go Flicky! 🥰

It’s been rather warm again, with temperatures expected to reach about 33 degrees today. Flicky has been staying on the branches I’ve provided, and I’ve even been able to leave the container open without her trying to wander off. That makes things a little easier, although I still spend an extraordinary amount of time checking that everything is all right.

I’ve been offering a very dilute honey-and-water mixture as a temporary source of nourishment, although I’m still trying to work out how suitable it actually is. Ideally Flicky would be feeding naturally from the xylem of a living tree. A cut branch in a container isn’t quite the same thing, but I’m doing what I can with the resources available.

One thing I had to watch was the water containers themselves. I’d found Flicky sitting right above one of them, and I didn’t particularly want her falling into a cup of honey water. I’ve been using bits of cardboard to cover the dangerous gaps, although she’s managed to get past my little barriers before. Not the most elegant arrangement, but it does the job.

I brought Flicky along to work again to avoid the worst of the heat at home. Rather than carting the entire enclosure back and forth, I came up with a smaller transport arrangement using an empty box from a five-pack of rapid antigen tests. A little cicada bus!

That reminded me of another cicada bus we’d made many years earlier using a strawberry container. We’d collect cicadas from around the footpath near a building, where they were emerging from a little island of habitat surrounded by concrete. Not exactly an ideal place for a cicada, but they seemed remarkably well adapted to city life. Good memories.

Back home, Flicky hadn’t done a great deal of feeding during the day, apart from a little around 7:30 pm while I was still at work. I refreshed some of the water and started thinking about replacing the older branches. Ideally I’d love to change them every half-day, but she sometimes seemed perfectly happy feeding from a branch that was already a few days old.

One of those older branches already contained egg-laying sites, so I wanted to keep it safe while giving Flicky somewhere fresher to feed. I was starting to wonder how much the internal structure of the wood changed once a branch had been cut from the tree. Taking cross-sections under a microscope at different ages might have been interesting, although I had quite enough to do without turning every branch into another experiment.

As the evening went on, Flicky spent quite a while moving between potential feeding spots. I noticed some twitching of the legs and abdomen, although I couldn’t be certain what was causing it. Sometimes similar movements seemed to happen before egg laying, while at other times they might have been a response to something irritating or uncomfortable.

I also spent a surprising amount of time trying to convince her to feed from a fresh branch. She’d probe one spot, stop, turn around and try somewhere else. I kept encouraging her to find a decent place to drink, but apparently we had different ideas about what constituted a good branch.

“It’s a tough decision being a cicada parent. What do you do?”

I didn’t really want to disturb her while she was feeding, but I was also worried that the older branch was running out of whatever nutrients it had left. I tried moving her to the new one and waited to see whether she’d settle. Sometimes she’d go so still that I wondered whether she’d gone into a state of rest, only to start moving again when there was a little breeze.

I’d been calling her Flappy McBuggo, although Felicity Flick also crossed my mind. At this point she probably had more names than she needed. Whatever I called her, she still wasn’t interested in following instructions!

Eventually Flicky began probing a branch in a way that looked rather like her previous egg-laying behaviour. The ovipositor appeared to be going into the wood, although I couldn’t see any individual eggs and didn’t want to cut the branch open to check. I’d read that there could be quite a few eggs in each slit and started wondering whether she’d already laid something approaching 200, but that was only a rough guess.

I was hoping Flicky would spend a little longer feeding first, because all this activity must take some energy. Still, it’s rather difficult to explain your preferred schedule to a cicada! By the end of the session she appeared to finish at that spot and return to feeding, which was encouraging.

The next challenge is keeping the branches and any developing eggs in suitable conditions. I’ve been thinking about moisture, the way cut wood gradually dries and how the nymphs will eventually need access to soil if they hatch successfully. I’ve even been considering collecting a little soil with a trowel, although knowing my luck I’d probably find something buried that I really shouldn’t.

For now, Flicky is still active, still investigating the branches and apparently determined to keep me busy. I can’t confirm exactly how many eggs have been deposited, or even whether every apparent laying attempt was successful. But we’re nine days into this unexpected little adventure, and I’m going to keep trying to give them the best chance I can.

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