Ah, summer. That glorious time of year when the cicadas are buzzing so loudly that you can hardly hear yourself think. Amid the din, two thoughts come to mind: Why are the cicadas carrying on so loudly? And how on earth are they able to achieve such an ear-shattering volume?
In North America, most of the various species of cicadas that you hear are known as dog-day cicadas. (Other species torment people in other parts of the world.) The sound is produced only by males, mostly for the reasons you might imagine. There are congregational songs, in which males synchronize their calls. The choruses establish territory and attract females. In addition, there is a courting call that is usually produced prior to copulation. The songs of the cicada are affected by weather fluctuations. Generally speaking, cicadas like sunlight and warmth, but too much heat or too much coolness will quiet them down a bit. Different species prefer different times of day, and each of the 3,000 or so species has a distinct sound. One theory for why the songs are so loud is that the songs may deter predators. The loudest group of cicadas are the periodical ones—those that emerge every 13 years and those that appear every 17 years—probably because there are so many more of them than the annual ones.
Cicadas are able to produce these sounds because they possess an organ that is almost unique among insects, the tymbal organ. Each male cicada has a pair of these circular ridged membranes on the back and side surface of the first abdominal segment. Contraction of a tymbal muscle attached to the membrane causes it to bend, producing a clicking sound. The tymbal springs back when the muscle is relaxed. The frequency of the contractions of the tymbal muscle range from 120 to 480 times a second, which is fast enough to make it sound continuous to the human ear. Cicadas also have air sacs that have resonant frequencies comparable to tymbal vibration frequencies, thus amplifying the sound and producing that crescendo of high-pitched buzzing that is the characteristic sound of late summer.