© Chris Simon, University of Connecticut
Two cicadas mate.
It's a bit tricky, getting a tiny drop of Super Glue in exactly the right place on a cicada's thorax. Martin Wikelski must affix his microtransmitter far enough forward so that it doesn't interfere with her wings, because her wings, and how far she flies with them, are why Wikelski, a physiological ecologist at Princeton University, is spending a cloudy May morning watching ungainly red-eyed insects struggle out of their exoskeletons and creep up the trunks of trees whose roots they've been feeding on since 1987. Occasionally he plucks a cicada, glues on the 300 mg electronic burden, and gently places her (or him) back on the tree trunk to continue lumbering upward.
Being a cicada researcher is like being an astronomer on a NASA mission: It's a commitment to years and sometimes decades of waiting, followed by a brief frantic ...
