Cicadas aren’t the easiest insects to study in the wild. For a start, they’re so well camouflaged as to be almost impossible to spot – locatable solely via their mating calls, some of which are inaudible to adult humans. The fact that cicada nymphs spend years (17 in one species!) living underground makes things even trickier. Reintroducing the UK’s only native cicada, as conservationists plan to do this summer, will therefore be quite the challenge.
The New Forest cicada, Cicadetta montana, was once found across the New Forest National Park. Thanks to habitat loss, however, there hasn’t been a confirmed sighting since the 1990s.
Which is why this June, scientists from the Species Recovery Trust (SRT) are travelling to Slovenia, home to a healthy population of this particular subspecies of Cicadetta montana. Supported by funding from Natural England, they’re hoping to catch 10 individuals (five females and five males) from which to breed a new UK population.
The insects – if they’re able to find them – will be brought to Paultons Park, a zoo and theme park on the edge of the New Forest, Hampshire. There they will be transferred into a habitat of potted hazel and hawthorn saplings and purple moor grass.
If breeding takes place, the female will each lay several hundred eggs in the twigs of the hazel and hawthorn. Upon hatching in November, the cicada nymphs, each smaller than a grain of rice, will fall to the soil below and burrow down, settling in for a period of six to eight years spent sucking sap from the roots of the hazel and moor grass.
In January, Charlotte Carne, who is leading on the project for the SRT, will plant out several of the saplings at secret locations within the New Forest. The others will be kept at Paultons Park with a view to creating a back-up captive breeding population. Then it’s just a matter of waiting patiently – until at least 2030 – to see if the plan has worked.
“The New Forest cicada has a real intrinsic value as the only cicada species native to the UK,” says Carne. “I want my children to be able to walk through the forest in 10 or 20 years and hear them.”
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