Capturing Behaviour: Emergence

Capturing Behaviour: Emergence

Wildlife Photographic Magazine

The ninth instalment of “Capturing Behaviour” explores the emergence behaviour of cicadas in the tropical rainforest of Malaysia.

My article series, “Capturing Behaviour” for Wildlife Photographic Magazine explores the importance of being able to identify and anticipate a variety of common animal behaviour to achieve better and more captivating results with readers’ wildlife photography.

This article series helps readers to understand why wildlife behaviour is important to wildlife photography. My writing is illustrated with my wildlife photographs.

Photographing the transformation behaviour of insects can help us all understand these remarkable animals much better and appreciate their amazing life story.

The sequence of emergence stages I photographed started at 9.55pm and ended at 10.12pm. When we found the cicada the thorax, head, legs and first few abdominal segments had already emerged from the larval skin or exuvia. The portion remaining inside larval cuticle secures the adult from falling to the ground – where it’d be unable to complete emergence and die. It remained in this position with curled and wrinkled wing buds while its legs hardened.