A periodical cicada nymph wiggles in the grass in Macon, Ga., on Thursday, March 28, 2024, after being found while digging holes for rosebushes. Trillions of cicadas are about to emerge in numbers not seen in decades and possibly centuries. These insects are the strongest urinators in the animal kingdom with flows that put humans and elephants to shame. They have pumps in their heads that pull moisture from the roots of trees, allowing them to feed for more than a decade underground.
They use their proboscis like a tiny straw — about the width of a hair — with the pump sucking out the liquid, said Georgia Tech biophysics professor Saad Bhamla. They spend nearly their entire lives drinking, year after year.Bhamla in March published a study of the urination flow rates of animals across the world. Cicadas were clearly king, peeing two to three times stronger and faster than elephants and humans.
“You walk around in a forest where they're actively chorusing on a hot sunny day. It feels like it's raining,” said University of Connecticut entomologist John Cooley. That's their honeydew or waste product coming out the back end ... It's called cicada rain."In the years and areas where cicadas come out, caterpillars enjoy a cicada reprieve.
Periodical cicadas are “lazy, fat and slow,” Gruner said. “They're extraordinarily easy to capture for us and for their predators.”There's a deadly sexually transmitted disease, a fungus, that turns cicadas into zombies and causes their private parts to fall off, Cooley said.
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