By the look of him, this could be the original mud bug. It seems reasonable to assume that a layer of drying mud could cause mobility problems for your typical insect and this guy is certainly well coated. He seems to be doing fairly well considering this is his first time above ground since hatching.
This is an Annual Cicada nymph and I found him stumbling across the trail yesterday evening. He’s been below ground for the last several years living on sap from tree roots. He won’t be wearing this mud coat for very long. By morning, he’ll have shed his exoskeleton and joined the ranks of adult cicadas buzzily calling from the treetops. The muddy skin will be left drying on a tree trunk.
That long tube is the tool with which the cicada nymph extracts sap from the roots. It may take three or more years before the nymph has reached the stage where it will leave the ground and transform into an adult.
Annual cicadas emerge from the gound over a period of several weeks during the early summer. They are never very abundant and it’s unusual to find an emerging nymph.
The nymphs are not highly mobile below ground. In order to move, they must tunnel. Those strong front legs are the burrowing mechanism. Different stages of the nymphs life find it at different depths in the soil, but it always stays near its food source. I’ve occassionally unearthed nymphs and have never found signs of any type of tunnel system. It’s as though the nymph closes the tunnel behind itself as it moves on and only maintains a small chamber in which to exist. When I was young, I always associated the finding of a cicada nymph with good luck. At least at the moment I found the nymph, I seemed to be pretty lucky.
By the look of him, this could be the original mud bug. It seems reasonable to assume that a layer of drying mud could cause mobility problems for your typical insect and this guy is certainly well coated. He seems to be doing fairly well considering this is his first time above ground since hatching.
This is an Annual Cicada nymph and I found him stumbling across the trail yesterday evening. He’s been below ground for the last several years living on sap from tree roots. He won’t be wearing this mud coat for very long. By morning, he’ll have shed his exoskeleton and joined the ranks of adult cicadas buzzily calling from the treetops. The muddy skin will be left drying on a tree trunk.
That long tube is the tool with which the cicada nymph extracts sap from the roots. It may take three or more years before the nymph has reached the stage where it will leave the ground and transform into an adult.
Annual cicadas emerge from the gound over a period of several weeks during the early summer. They are never very abundant and it’s unusual to find an emerging nymph.
The nymphs are not highly mobile below ground. In order to move, they must tunnel. Those strong front legs are the burrowing mechanism. Different stages of the nymphs life find it at different depths in the soil, but it always stays near its food source. I’ve occassionally unearthed nymphs and have never found signs of any type of tunnel system. It’s as though the nymph closes the tunnel behind itself as it moves on and only maintains a small chamber in which to exist. When I was young, I always associated the finding of a cicada nymph with good luck. At least at the moment I found the nymph, I seemed to be pretty lucky. 
