Cicadas 2: only for brave people

Hi everybody,

I wrote last time about the curious life of the cicadas but still I want to tell you something about them. They have long life cycles in order to avoid predators, in addition they use the called "predator satiation" method, i.e. many cicadas emerge at once, then the number of cicadas exceeds the amount that predators can eat being all available predators satiated, and the remaining ones can breed in peace. I have just discovered a web page where you can find many other information about them in several languages!(I am not the only freak one!). One of the predator of such bugs is... the men. It is a succulent dish in several countries and continents. In some places they eat the adult cicadas whereas in others, like the north of China they prefer the nymphs. And here we arrive to the subject of our post today. One of our colleagues at work is from that part of China and taking the advantage that his mother (or mother in law, I do not remember) was visiting him, we were delighted with such a delicacy.

Chinese people eat things that we consider strange such as scorpions, starfish, sea horses and, of course cicadas. When we were in China, some of my colleagues tried these foods but I missed it ;-). So finally I could eat such small animals in Tsukuba. The mother (-in law) of Guo (our colleague's name) was catching cicada nymphs from the trees at night, just before they convert into adult ones. She put them into the fridge, and when she had enough for cooking, she fried them with a soy sauce. Afterwards, Guo brought them to the work, and we met in our office to eat them. So they looked like...



and so we ate them









I have to recognize that they were a bit repellent but the taste was not that bad. I ate a lot, but we were not able to finish all of them. I brought some of them to my Mexican friend and... well, she found them a bit difficult to eat.



But actually, they are not but muscles, the nymphs are just prepared to break their cover to go singing, flirting, f*** and leaving descendants.



It is not curious that just before this, a Chinese woman appear, remove them from the tree (it is hard for them to get out of the ground), cooked them for our lunch so that we do not allow them to accomplish their life cycle? Life is difficult sometimes...