A personal selection of photographs with their stories.
350: Cicada exoskeleton
When the long and dry winter is over in Belo Horizonte, you will hear shrill sounds that welcome the spring. Sounds that can be very loud, but they are caused by insects: the cicadas. The male cicades that had buried themselves in order to survive the winter, will appear again when they receive some signal that spring has come. They then climb the trees and produce the sound by moving their paws to a specific organ that serves as a percussion instrument. The males compete for the females, sometimes they aggregate and call them in chorus. The young cicadas will change their skins, and leave their exoskeleton (a so-called exuvia) on the plant, tree, or fruit, where the skinchange has occurred. The exoskeleton in the picture was left on a jackfruit.
© Adriano Antoine Robbesom 2011, 2017
