Posted on 06/03/2021 12:31:30 PM PDT by central_va
A few weeks ago, Michelle Watson woke up to a deafening, steadily oscillating screech. “What the heck is that noise?” she wondered.
She went outside to her yard and saw hundreds of beady-eyed insects enrobed in a thick shell of gold emerging out of the ground and crawling up the trees. What Watson was seeing was the emergence of thousands of Brood X cicadas, part of a billions-strong insect swarm that has lain dormant for 17 years before arising to “scream,” mate— all over about three thunderous weeks.
Watson had spent the past 20 years in Las Vegas, but moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Georgia last year. She’d seen social media posts about the cicadas, which emerge once in a generation across a huge swath of the eastern United States, but figured they were just the usual summer bugs that she’d heard her entire life. “I thought, ‘What’s the big deal?’” she says.
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
Don’t eat them.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/evy794/hallucinogenic-fungi-turn-cicadas-into-sex-crazed-zombies
I remember years ago, when I was a child, hearing people call them 17 year locusts. I guess cicada is the correct term for these insects.
Mmmmm shrimpy..
When we first moved to MO, it was a cicada year and also a heat wave year with temps over 105 and high humidity. We lived on a piece of land we were buying that had no utilities, just a hunk of woods. No air conditioning, hot, humid and LOUD. Lucky we didn’t go insane. Some people would have.
Anyone who lives in the south deals with cicadas every year. The periodic cicadas don’t offer up anything new except their uniqueness. Neem oil doesn’t do jack to keep these buggers out of my crops.
They’re annoying but not “deafening”. People are stupid.
Can we just make it a ring tone?
Now everyone is going to want some.
Um you are confused. Th 17 yr cicada doesn’t eat after it emerges. It has no mouth. There are trillion of them all at once. It is VERY load. A unique spectacle.
What a life. They lay dormant for 17 years, emerge to eat and make noise mate, and die off quickly.
They don’t eat as adults. They have no digestive system or even a mouth.
Wow. Then all they do is make noise and mate? What a life.......
You aren’t near my house south of Dulles. After a couple hours outside, I feel as if I’ve been to a rock concert. It is that loud and much more so than the planes. It only stopped when it rained last weekend and I thought they were gone. Nope, not until July apparently.
—”to eat and make noise mate, and die off quickly.”
And that is exactly why the tour boats to Italy are full of elderly women.
Old men, not so many.
They're my favorite bug because they are so ugly and I love to hear them buzz in the evenings......
Kinda like a signal that summer is coming to and end and fall is approaching......
That would make eating them slightly less disgusting in my opinion.
This is different. Literally you walk on them there are so many. I remember working in DC last time and having to brush their empty shell casings off my car in the morning like leaves in the fall.
Infected male cicadas, no longer in control of their bodies, attempt to mate with anything they can find,
Laz, hope you're reading this post.........
Sorry bro, just couldn't resist it......Hope you're well...LOL!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.