Posted on 06/04/2010 2:56:00 PM PDT by blam
Gross: Mayfly Cloud So Huge It's Caught On Radar
Gregory White
Jun. 4, 2010, 5:48 PM
Right now, a massive cloud of hatching mayflies are hanging over the La Crosse region of Wisconsin. You can see it in bright pink, purple, and white on the map.
From NOAA:
And here's what they look like, from Wikipedia:
[snip]
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Those critters in pic #38 are too small. Maybe midges.
I hope they don’t come here.
Wow. The four horsemen are saddling up.
They are indeed midges. I know this is a mayfly thread, but it reminded me of this story:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/06/sports/main3339048.shtml?source=RSSattr=HOME_3339048
I always got a kick out of the fact that even insects hate the Yankees....
Here at the University of Chicago, the Midway is lined with a particular kind of tree that has very plain little 1/4” blossoms. They smell a little like Juicy Fruit gum. One late afternoon/early evening, when the air was very still, I looked back over the Midway and saw that each tree had hovering above it a shifting tornado shape of minute swarming insects. They must have been attracted to the odor from those blossoms and concentrated over the trees where the odor was strongest in a sort of chemotaxis. It was almost science-fictiony weird in appearance.
Ewwwwwwwwww~
Check this out girl!
or
Noseeum (Ceratopogonidae)?
Go Yankee-hating midges!
Sometimes they get in huge swarms over one spot (sometimes trees as someone mentioned) and their buzzing wings all together are really loud. Probably getting ready to go to a ball game.
It’s Bush’s fault.
As far as I know....they don’t.
Yeppers. A while back I was the third wheel with my buddy and his girl-friend. We’d go out cruisin’ and boozin’ and all the good stuff when you’re 18 to 20. One day I made mention of the event to my buddy.
So off we go to St. Claire Shores and the Jefferson Nautical Mile ‘just to check it out’ he says, with Cindy sitting between us in his 72 Gutless Cutless.
When we got back both of us had bruised shoulders from her punching us because it was SO yucky. We ran out of windshield washer fluid and those bugs where a smeared all over like peanut butter.
THey made a nice crunchy squishy sound when you drove, and stopping at the intersection was akin to stopping in freezing rain.
Yep, them bruises hurt for awhile. We both still smile about that day though.
Being near the Mississippi we get them in spades. Our local park’s exit is a short but steep incline. The park gets alot of cruisers because it’s set up with a loop and has a bar at one end of it.
One nite a I saw a biker, who thought he was cool, trying to gun it out of the park, forgetting about the mayflies. Laid the bike right over. I laughed for a long time on that one.
The BNSF has double and single lines running thru that park before they cross the nearby swing span bridge. The mayflies have been so think they’ve had a hard time stopping trains some years - damn scary I’m sure when the bridge is open for a barge.
I have been in Maryland twice for the 17 year cicadas that hatch along a corridor of the Baltimore-Washington Pkwy. It is like driving through a volcano..
Free chicken feed.
Biting midges. Sound nasty. I’m glad most of the ones we have don’t bite.
It quite literally blotted out the sun. I was cleaning them out of my gear for weeks afterwards.
I saw a documentary a couple years back about an African tribe that catches a type of fly during the spring by swinging these small nets in the air. The flies looked like a May Fly, but when they caught thousands of them in the net, they would patty them like a hamburger, cook and eat them. Good source of protein I guess.
“Noseeum (Ceratopogonidae)”
I hate those bastards!
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