Sitting under a tree at Galvins Gorge on an epic Gibb River Road journey through Western Australia's Kimberley region, Broome resident Gus Levitzke and his friends felt water droplets start to fall on them.
There's a good reason the Kimberley's dry season is named as such, as there's virtually no rain from April to September, so the group suspected it might be spray from the nearby waterfall.
"We thought, 'How's the waterfall getting all the way over here," Mr Levitzke said.
"Then we looked up and we couldn't see any water coming out of the rocks, but it was coming from the trees and then we noticed it was coming from bugs, a lot of cicadas actually, each squirting out one at a time."
Mr Levitzke said his initial reaction was "a lot of disgust and a bit of confusion" as the group started throwing out theories.
"You don't really know about these things do you?"
It was days before they reached reception and were able to research exactly what the cicadas were spraying down on them.
"We had our suspicions and we kind of just joked about it for a few days and then when we got back to Derby we figured it out and yeah, [there was] a bit more disgust," Mr Levitzke said.
Mr Levitzke said he's told the story at parties for a laugh, and most people hadn't heard of the phenomenon known as "cicada rain".
Cicada 'rain' a common occurrence
But the curator of entomology at the Western Australian Museum, Nikolai Tatarnic, said with 348 species found all over Australia, more people would have been peed on by cicadas than they would likely care to admit.
Cicadas are from the Hemiptera order, otherwise known as "true bugs", comprised of 80,000 species which all have sucking mouth parts and mostly feed on tree sap.
According to Dr Tatarnic, while other true bugs urinate what is referred to as honeydew, named for its sweetness, cicadas were the only bug which create a rain-like experience for those caught below them.
He said cicadas were particularly partial to the water excreted from tree leaves which they have to drink a lot of to derive a little bit of nutrients, with the excess water excreted as urine.
Dr Tatarnic said cicadas thrive in hot weather, using the tree sap to stay cool.
"Cicadas are tiny little animals; they don't sweat like we do, they can't cool off, they don't have air conditioning, so instead they have to pass a lot of fluid through their body," he said.
"They're constantly passing a stream of liquid through them so they can stay up in the tree and keep singing for a mate."
Urine benefits other bugs
Dr Tatarnic said cicada wee was basically an odourless sugary water and while humans might think it's a bit gross, ants and wasps absolutely love it.
"Ants will guard the bug from predators and parasitoids that are trying to land on them and in return the bugs just keep feeding and excreting this honeydew that the ants can feed off," he said.
"They're like a good farmer looking after their herd; they'll attack things that come nearby, they'll keep the area clear, they'll patrol around the plant, they're full-on protecting these animals."
Cicadas aren't just unique for the "rain" they produce; they also have unusual life cycles.
A life underground
They spend most of their life underground as larvae, feeding on plant roots then emerging en masse only to survive for a matter of weeks above ground.
For periodic cicadas, this weirdly always happens on a prime number.
He said the evolutionary explanation for the strange gestational periods was that it made it hard for predators to predict when they could have their next cicada feast.
"It's not a prey source you can predict and it's not worth learning what that cicada sounds like or where to be for them," Dr Tatarnic said.
As for cicada rain, Mr Levitzke's advice for those who get caught in a downpour is to embrace it.
