(n.) Any species of the genus Cicada. They are large hemipterous insects, with nearly transparent wings. The male makes a shrill sound by peculiar organs in the under side of the abdomen, consisting of a pair of stretched membranes, acted upon by powerful muscles. A noted American species (C. septendecim) is called the seventeen year locust. Another common species is the dogday cicada.
Example Sentences:
(1) The culprit is a mini cicada called a cicadelle which French lavender producers believe has proliferated because of hotter, drier summers, blamed on global warming.
(2) I believed my presence would prevent something,” he says softly, his voice almost drowned by the hum of cicadas.
(3) The water-extract of whole Periostracum Cicadae (PCws) had anticonvulsive, sedative and hypothermic effects in rats.
(4) Peaks corresponding to syn 9-cis and 13-cis 3-hydroxyretinal oximes were observed on the chromatogram of extracts from fly heads and compound eyes of cicadas.
(5) The sound of absence is deafening: like white noise, a droning, gentle at first, then louder like the song of the cicadas as dusk turns into darkness.
(6) The only sound is the chirping of late-summer cicadas and the occasional beep of a Geiger counter.
(7) It will not make itself known until spring and summer, when the cicadas – another symbol of this picturesque region of southern France – are ready to emerge from the sun-warmed earth.
(8) Balanced solutions, in which comparable emergences occur each year, are found for insects having sufficiently short life-spans, such as 3-, 4-, and 7-year cicadas.
(9) A curious cicada in north America turns out to have been the first species to embark on an exploration of these numbers.
(10) In each was a cicada, chirruping loudly and uselessly to another, destined to spend its short time in an apartment as a rural soundtrack to an urban life.
(11) The insect group which includes cicadas harbours intracellular bacterial symbionts which are passed on from generation to generation in the form of a 'symbiont ball' inserted between the egg membrane and the rear pole of the egg cell.
(12) Larger amounts of the alcohols than the aldehydes were found in the compound eyes of butterflies, hornets, cicadas and grasshoppers, which are diurnal insects.
(13) Biological activities of two galactomannans (CI-P and CI-A) isolated from the insectbody portion of Chán hua (fungus: Cordyceps cicadae) were studied.
(14) Yellow jacket wasp larvae are big in Japan, cicadas are treasured in Malawi, and weaver ants are popular in Thailand Laura D’Asaro’s first brush with entomophagy came in Tanzania.
(15) Mitochondria from the flight muscle of the periodical cicada oxidize pyruvate and d-glycerol 1-phosphate at rates comparable with those obtained with flight-muscle mitochondria from other insects.
(16) Hundreds of thousands of cicada larvae will not only have devastated the plants' roots, but the adult insects will also transmit a fatal micro-bacterium that will make the plants slowly wither and die.
(17) In the laboratory, weight (water) loss is faster at higher (46 degrees C) than at lower (43 degrees C) temperatures; the cicadas were able to survive mass losses of 25% in the laboratory.
(18) The two main species intermingled in a brood of the 17-year cicada (Magicicada) have distinctive sound-making patterns and correspondingly different hearing abilities.
(19) They are modest but spacious, with gardens front and back, plenty of squirrels and a constant buzz from cicadas.
(20) Drosophila fasciculisetae's song resembles a cicada's more than a fly's song.