Cicada killers and the Fall

The flower bed between our driveway and our home appears to be an attractive place for cicada-killers to make their burrows and this summer is no exception. For those people unfamiliar with cicada-killers, these are really large wasps which find a cicada in a tree, paralyze it by stinging, then carry it back to their underground burrows, where they lay an egg on it, which feeds upon the cicada as it grows and develops. If you’re interested in learning more about these wasps, check out this page.

These wasps have attracted my attention for several reasons. Firstly, they’re quite big and scary, even though they’re relatively harmless to humans. I’m told that we’re more likely to die from any chemicals we would use to try to control them than from the wasps themselves. These insects are interested in cicadas, not people. Still, any guests coming up our driveway will find it somewhat disconcerting to get out of the car amongst a dozen or so of these creatures flying around (and mating). I’m somewhat torn in deciding what to do with them. Ecologically, they do a good thing, which is to control the numbers of those noisy cicadas, but I just wish they would do their thing somewhere else besides along my driveway.

Secondly, I find their biology gruesome but fascinating. They know just where to sting the cicadas, so as not to kill them, but merely paralyze them. Dead cicadas would decay and grow mold, which is not good for the larvae. In addition, these insects are just barely strong enough to carry the cicadas back to their burrow, and it’s actually a funny sight to see them struggling with their enormous load, twice as big as they are. Female larvae grow bigger than males, so the mother needs to bury two cicadas for every female larva but just one for a male (The mother controls the sex of the offspring by deciding whether or not to fertilize the egg. Unfertilized eggs are male, just as in bees).

Thirdly, I’ve wondered about the theology of these wasps and their life cycle. If animal death is a result of the Fall, how did these creatures live beforehand? The developing larvae need a source of food, where would it have come from, if not from cicadas? Did the present system immediately evolve once Adam and Eve ate of the fruit? These are rhetorical questions of course because I believe these creatures behaved this way long before Adam and Eve ever roamed the earth.

What is the Creation Science response to the death of insects? It is generally claimed that insects are not nephesh i.e. having the breath of life, because insects lack lungs, so they could have died before the Fall (for example see the note at the bottom of this page). The fact that insects still use air, but through spiracles along the sides of their bodies, apparently doesn’t count as breathing. I find this distinction between creatures that have the breath of life and those that don’t somewhat arbitrary and have a hard time believing that someone as educated as Moses wouldn’t think that insects are alive.

Here again we see an example of Creation Science distorting the meaning of the Biblical text to suit their misconception that the Bible teaches science. On the contrary, I see cicada-killers as yet another animal that seeks its food from God (Psalm 104:21), in this case through cicadas.