Have you noticed small, U-shaped mounds of sand appearing in lawns, fields, and parks recently?

They are made by large, scary-looking wasps called digger wasps, hunter wasps, or cicada-killers. The mounds are formed by females who dig angled tunnels through the upper soil down into the sandy subsoil before flying hither-and-yon in search of their sole prey --- big, green, buzzing, bug-eyed, even scarier cicadas who are often incorrectly called locusts.

Cicada-killers feed on flower nectar. However, they prey (very efficiently) on cicadas,- which they capture in mid-air and fall to the ground engaged in noisy, vigorous, tussling, successful combat --- but they don't eat them. Instead, they sting and paralyze the cicadas before straddling and dragging them over to the prepared slanted tunnel. The helpless cicada is stuffed down the hole, where the wasp deposits an egg on it.After three or four days, the egg hatches, and the larva consumes the still-living cicada.Had mama wasp's sting been too strong, it would have killed the cicada, and its corpse could have decomposed --- leaving the hungry larva to starve.On the other hand, had the sting's poison been too weak, the cicada could have moved and resisted being served up as the main course for the hungry larva.

Isn't it amazing how Nature created cicada killers with just the right amount of sting-poison to completely paralyze (but not kill) their hapless prey --- so that their lifeline could continue! Isn't there an Intelligent-Designer God's pre-destined plan at work here? No, there is not. This is nothing more than another of the trillions of illustrations of the random ways that Darwinian evolution works. Chance mutations that produced offspring with either too strong or too weak sting-poisons resulted in extinction of those generation lifelines. Whereas the random mutations that produced wasp offspring with just the right amount of sting-poison enabled that lifeline to survive as the fittest of the cicada-killer wasps.

Interestingly, cicadas, which are also incorrectly called locusts, come in many subspecies that hibernate for different periods of time before coming out of the ground in enormous numbers to feed, chirp-sing cacophonously, and to attract an obviously tone-deaf mate with whom they copulate before they die or are consumed by digger-wasp larvae. Some broods, known as 17-year locusts, appear every 17 years. Others, called 13-year locusts, appear every 13 years, and there are other forms with shorter life spans. But whatever the periodic cycle is, their major cicada-killer predator has been evolutionarily tuned to show up and dig tunnels and sand mounds that blot and blemish our lawns and gardens.

Cicadas are among the insects considered delicacies in the Far East, and they are important sources of protein for millions of people around our over-populated Earth. (Hey, don't we eat their distantly related crustaceans --- lobsters, shrimp, and crabs?)

Finally, cicada-singing inspired a famous old World War-I song, K-K-K-Katy by Geoffrey O'Hara:

"K-K-K-Katy, beautiful Katy-

You're the only g-g-g-girl that I adore;

When the m-m-m-moon shines over the cow-shed,

I'll be waiting by the k-k-k-kitchen door!"