I love cicadas, they are one of the insects that most fascinate me and stir my imagination.  I grew up in Indiana where August equals a cacophony of cicada songs.  Or, if you prefer, the sounds of an orgy.  That’s really what’s going on.  The fellas are singing for their ladies.

One of my favorite cicada myths is about Eos, the goddess of dawn.  She fell in love with a mortal man — and who could blame her, there are some stunners on this Earth — and she gave him the gift of eternal life.  But as all such goddess-in-love-with-a-mortal stories go, she forgot to grant a crucial element: eternal youth.  And so he aged, and shrank, into a cicada and sang out his love for her every day.

This particular cicada is found nowhere near Indiana.  He’s a tropical guy from, I think, Singapore.  The skull on his back is a warning to potential predators that he’s either poison or really icky tasting, or both.  Yet above the skull he has a tiny misshapen heart.  And just below the skull are his tymbal covers.  Tymbals are the cicada’s noise makers – a pair of ribbed membranes located on either side of the first abdominal tergite.  The covers are platelike anterior projections of the second abdominal tergite.  But I digress…to me his tymbal covers resemble the Irish Claddagh, the traditional symbol and love token or wedding ring from Ireland.   The Claddagh has its origins from the town of the same name just outside of Galway, in the area where one of my family surnames originates and was first introduced after the Norman invasion.  If there is one trait we share with insects it’s a proclivity toward violence, and in the interest of sex we most assuredly share this tendency.  Yet the heart, misshapen as it may be, remains…