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stillness—
sinking into the rocks,
cicadas’ cry

Haiku by Matsuo Bashō (1644 – 1694), translated by David Landis Barnhill in 

Basho’s Haiku: Selected Poems of Matsuo Basho, 2004.

The illustration, titled Cicada, is by Omoda Seiju (1891 – 1933), from the collections of the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi, Shimane Prefecture, Japan. The image file is in the public domain. 

I found a cicada nymph crawling across my patio after a recent storm. The moisture in the soil from the monsoon rain was a signal for the insect to emerge from the ground and begin its brief time in the treetops.

This sequence shows the final ecdysis or molt, as the nymph reached its adult stage. Cicadas are members of order Hemiptera—the true bugs—and are hemimetabolist. Hemimetabolism is sometimes called incomplete metamorphosis. The life cycles of hemimetabolist insects omit a pupal stage, and at each instar—the stages of growth between molts—the developing insect resembles the adult form more fully, but smaller, and without functional wings. At the final adult stage the insect, called an imago, is sexually mature.

There are about fifty cicada species in Arizona. I have not attempted to identify this one. I let the nymph crawl on a wooden spoon to be photographed, and moved the teneral imago outside to let its wings harden and strike up it’s song. Ecdysis took about an hour to complete.

Yes, I have seen the Alien movies. And yes, the similarity is striking.