Observations on the habits and natural surroundings of insects made during the 'Skeat expedition' to the Malay peninsula, 1899-1900 / by Nelson Annandale.

Nelson Annandale

Date:: 1900

Credit: Observations on the habits and natural surroundings of insects made during the 'Skeat expedition' to the Malay peninsula, 1899-1900 / by Nelson Annandale. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

26/36 page 860

$out from the undergrowth of the surrounding orchards and jungle, and alighted on the persons of their captors, who had no difficulty in picking off the insects with their fingers and securing them, still alive, in a fold of their draperies. The clapping only con- tinued for about half an hour every evening, and when, with considerable difficulty, I persuaded the men to recommence it again later in the night, not a single Cicada came near them, though the stridulating had now become loud all over the village, like the noise of machine hair-brushes in a barber’s shop. The insects were silent on the wing, and I only heard one stridulate when caught. The voiceless females, as might be expected, were in great preponderance over the males among the specimens taken; probably the one individual which was not dumb when captured was the only male taken that night. In order to be sure that the fire was not the chief attraction for the Cicadae, I stood among a party of natives who were clapping, together with another member of the Expedition, who clapped also ; while I kept my hands still. In the course of a few minutes, the natives captured many specimens, and ten alighted on my friend’s coat; but only one settled on mine. Afterwards I heard from a Patani Malay that the children of Patani town have a game in which they attract Cicadas by clapping their hands, and without the aid of light at all; though they sing, as they clap, a nursery rhyme, calling upon the insects to come down from the trees. The season of the edible Cicada seems to be a very local one in Patalung. At Ban Nah on the 1st of April, and again on the 6th of the same month, the natives secured me as many specimens as I wanted, besides serving a dish of them with our curry on the second occasion. On April 3rd, at Ban Kong Eah, which is only about eight miles further inland than Ban Nah, our guard of native military police were unable to catch a single individual, although they adopted exactly the same method of procedure as the Ban Nah people had done, and clapped at the same time of evening. On none of these three occasions had the moon risen, and in Patalung one night is like another in the dry season. On April 5th, I noticed that the ground in a patch of primaeval jungle near Ban Kong Kah was covered with the cast pupal skins of a Cicada. Whether they were those of the edible species or not, I am unable to say with certainty, but they were of the correct size, and, so far as I could see, such as might be expected to belong to this form. Malay Name, etc.—The Malay-speaking Malays of lower Siam call a Cicada Riang-riang,^’ confusing it with certain large Melolonthid beetles belonging to at least four different species— Lepidiota stigma, another species of the same genus, and two species of LeucopTiolis—w hich buzz round the tops of the cocoanut- palms in the evening, and produce, probably in the same way as the common Cockchafer \ a sound with a considerable resemblance ’ See Lubbock, ‘ The Senses of Animals,’ p. 67. [24]$