dog day cicada. Sometimes called “jar flies” or confused with locusts, there are about 2,500 different species of these buggers. Forget the scientific jargon, what is relevant here is that during hot weather in the northern hemisphere—during the dog days of summer—they, the cicadas, tend to be noisy. It seems as if, the hotter it is, the noisier they are. So it is not surprising that some of these cicadae became associated with the dog days and the name stuck, as names can.

And here is the nitty gritty:

About the illustration: Figure 1 is a Tibicen dog day cicada flapping its wings and making a racket. Photograph by Jennifer Jones Novara; licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0

Figure 2: And let's be honest, even those of us intimately familiar with the sound of cicadas have rarely if ever seen one. The true “illustration” of a cicada is the sound, such as the one playing in the background on this page. That is the Tibicen linnei cicada of Michigan.