Now that the dog-day cicadas have started to emerge from their years underground, their enemy, the cicada wasps, emerge as well. And since our street trees have roots, which is what the cicadas live on while during their nymph stage, so too do our streets have these wasps.
Yesterday, walking in Brooklyn Heights, I found a strip of untended, weedy earth swarming with Sphecius speciosus. I stood among them. They are solitary nesters, but will congregate in favored habitat, particularly when the city limits such habitat. There were at least twenty of these enormous wasps patrolling the area. Their nest holes pocketed the bare patches of ground.
Since our annual cicadas are about two inches long, these predatory wasps are big. Most of these looked to be just under an inch and half; they are the largest wasp species in our area. Now, they’re relatively harmless to us, but quite intimidating to the unknowing (I’ve seen people run), so I hope the panic-stricken and/or ignorant don’t notice these and call the exterminator. 
These wasps are probably the males, who don’t sting anything, staking out nest holes for the females. Check out The Flatbush Gardener for more details (and similar analogies).
The females use their stingers to paralyze cicadas, which are evidently hunted by sight. (I’ve seen a fair number of cicada exuviae on trees on this particular block.) The wasp then drags, no easy task, the live prey down into her burrow, which can reach four feet underground. She deposits an egg on the cicada. The resulting larva eats the cicada and winters underground in a cocoon. The adult wasps eat nectar.
The lives of the predatory and parasitic wasps, of which the cicada killer is just one of the most obvious, may be pretty horrifying to some of you. Charles Darwin thought these animals put another nail in the coffin of the idea of a benevolent God ordering a moral universe. After all, the cicada is eaten alive. The hornworms in the Back 40 last year were eaten inside out, then became a host for a bloom of cocoons. Who needs Alien? (Vegetarians and vegans all too often don’t realize that their diet is predicated on the destruction of untold billions of invertebrates, and lesser numbers of vertebrates, in sometimes slow and agonizing ways.)
Nature is amoral, a state we often confuse with immorality, something we humans, of the myriad of life forms we know, alone can lay claim to.
Backyard and Beyond 
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