PLAGUE of SEX CRAZED MONSTER GRASSHOPPERS to hit East Coast A horny insect horde is set to hit the East Coast of America in search of sex after lying dormant for almost two decades. Billions of cicadas are hatching out of the ground and swarming across the eastern seaboard looking for love. They have been sighted around the East Coast but numbers are expected to swell to biblical …
...and made a fine continuous meal (indeed, it was a veritable Smörgåsbord) for our resident Chipmunk when we were hit by Brood X in 2004.
Wackiest thing was at night though when, at a certain point in time, the entire local population would go silent. It wouldn't be a decreasing volume, just sudden silence.
Bit like they'd all been hit with a BSOD. (Yay, got an IT angle in there!)
I remember seeing the Royal Institution Christmas lectures a few years ago about prime numbers. The cicadas were mentioned due to the fact that their appearance was every 17 years which is a prime and the lecture proceeded to explain why it was every 17 years and not any of the earlier prime years. I can't remember the explanation but as its maths, that's the IT angle right?
Yes, there is an explanation why their cycle is 17 years. It is something like this (cant remember the details):
cicadas had a short cycle of 1 years, and their predators too. Then cicadas switched to 2 years, and the predators who had a cycle of 1 year, adapted. Then cicadas switched to 3 years, and the predators too. The cicadas could not switch to 4 years, because that is 2*2 years which the predators could handle (they knew how to handle 2 year cycles). So the cicadas tried prime number long cycles, because non primes could the predators handle. Finally, when the cicadas switched to 17 years, the predators had to try every combination (2 years, 3 years, 4 years, etc) but the cycle when they meet was far too long so the predators died out.
It has to do with least common divisor. When you try to find a cycle of 2,3,5 years it is doable, but it takes time. But when you go to 17 years, the predators will meet the cicadas once in every 217 year (or so) which the predators could not handle. So they died out of starvation.
It is described in the book "Fermats last theorem" by Simon Singh.
Kebabbert, no, you didn’t misunderstand the article; it is reporting on one brood of the 17-year cicadas. Next year, a different brood of 17ers will emerge in Iowa, and a 13-year brood will emerge in Louisiana and a few other states. Dan is exaggerating somewhat; there are some places that host different broods, and thus have Magicicada appearances more often than once every 13 or 17 years; but no place sees them every single year. (For example, none emerged at all in 2005 and 2006.)
It was most, er, entertaining driving on the freeway, windscreen wipers a whipping just to remove the bugs from the glass. Almost biblical. Certainly worthy of an Irwin Allen disaster movie in the 1970's
Cicadas are meant to find their one true love on a tree, but are so amazingly stupid (or desperate) they'll settle for any vertical port in the storm, walls, sides of cars, humans. Just as long as it's vertical.
It was, how shall we say, an experience. Fortunately being in the Brood X zone, we're free of the buggers now until 2021 (although a few may pop up in 2020 having a terrible head for time).
Ah Taylor 1, you must know the wonder that is cicada rhubarb pie. Overlords they are for all too brief a period. Freeze them while you can kids, they keep marvelously that way; a bit like peas in that respect.
It brings back great memories though. My grandfather kept what must have been one of the first chest freezers that he would stock up with cicadas and as I grew up Grams would make either the aforementioned pie or if they've been frozen a while roasted cicadas drizzled with honey or maple syrup and Gramps and I would go fishing with a few "extra" cicadas in hopes of coming back with some nice trout as a prelude. Good times indeed.
Beer because it can work well but depending on the cicada dish I generally go with a Chianti if it's savory, a sauvignon blanc with the pie and for roasted a ruby Port is hard to beat but a Madeira or Marsala is a very close second.
Back in the early 80's I did hardware and software design for AMPS
cellular mobile and base station stuff, and remember ilstening to a lot of that data (it was particularly useful to listen to the unmuted data bursts on the voice channels). It did sound a lot like cicadas. :)
IIRC, it was manchester encoded with a 5KHz clock....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Mobile_Phone_System
I worked on the firmware for a competitor (almost a clone) of the Motorola DynaTAC 8000 shown on that page...
Even more interestingly, there's another species which runs on a 13-year cycle, so they'll only meet the 17-year bugs every 221 years.
Insects are cool.
FartingHippo, there are several species of Magicicada; if I remember right, half of the species are on 13-year cycles, and half are on 17-year cycles. The 221-year intersection happened with two of the broods in the late 1990s, and another intersection with two other broods will happen in the 2020s. Since the 13-year broods tend to be southern, and the 17-year broods tend to be northern, the intersections happen in the middle tier of states (roughly around the latitude of the Ohio River).
As an entomologist I have to strongly object to the title of this article... cicadas aren't even in the same order as grasshoppers, and aside from relative size they don't look much alike. This is kind of like comparing humans to rabbits. Cicadas don't do the kind of massive crop damage that swarms of grasshoppers can, either, so though they're inconvenient and loud they aren't really a problem otherwise. Bad science, people!
"aside from relative size they don't look much alike"
So, you're telling me there's a chance?
(Sadly, cicadas don't make quite so good a headline.)
C.
Indeed. Here in Australia we suffer from plagues of grasshoppers that happily devour our crops. We have also at various times have had plagues of mice, rabbits and dingoes, floods, droughts, cyclones, bush fires and an assortment of wildlife that wants us dead. On the other hand, we have plenty of sunshine (and the highest skin cancer incidence in the world).
Having said that, I love the place and wouldn't live anywhere else.
So you're saying that there's room in Oz for another invasive species without impacting the quality of life? Remind me to dig up some Cicadas after Brood 2 gets done with their spring break, and transplant them outside of Sydney.
Hey, it can't be worse than the cane toads.....
Not quite accurate, they can and have impacted mast crops. That largely impacted the squirrel population, which is fine by me.
Bloody tree rats ravage my garden!
As for them not being grasshoppers, you're spot on. Something one expects of an entomologist. :)
The closest other "harm" that they're known to inflict is stupidly flying into people and objects, frequently to lethal effect on the insect.
Though, they're not all that noisy to my ears. At least not since that damned IED went off. :/
this grasshopper vs cicada thing is the only reason why i've logged in to post a comment or, as i have done, upvote an existing comment about the two NOT being the same...
i've seen and played with some really huge grasshoppers when i was a kid in south georgia usa... they were at least 1.5 inches in diameter across their body and would eat half an apple in 30 minutes or so... they were at least 6 inches long, too... after we moved our school location from where we saw these (in the city) to a more rural area, i've never seen them again... no clue where they came from but they sure could jump some pretty large distances without opening their wings...
there's no way that any cicada can be mistaken for a grasshopper...
anonymous because i can ;)
I've seen two waves of these buggers already. Loud yes, motorbike loud, no.
They actually sound like a lawn sprinkler system, admittedly a big lawn sprinkler system, and that's when they all get going together.
They look more like cockroaches than grasshoppers, mostly black and about the size of a man's thumb, with iridescent wings.
The worst part is in early September when their corpses litter the sidewalks and fall from the trees. Disgusting.
Nature. Ban this filth.
Some lawn sprinkler system you have!
They are loud, but since they're well away from the ground, where we happen to hang out, they don't SEEM so loud. Inverse square law and all.
Had one confused cicada cut loose close to me and close to the ground, startled is an understatement. Just glad that I had voided recently...
Allan, perhaps an idiomatic 17th century AD English translation isn’t the best guide to judging the wording of a 4th century BC Hebrew text? I’m no Hebrew scholar, but it looks as though הַהֹלֵךְ עַל-אַרְבַּע in verse 21 has a literal English translation of “goes on four”; that is, no “all” in the original. (Any students of Torah here who can confirm or deny?) Thus, taken literally, the failure would be on the biological side, since locusts and friends use all six legs to go walkabout. But it seems to me that the point of this text was to distinguish the acceptable edible insects from the unacceptable edible insects, and despite the inaccurate behavioral description, it sufficed to allow Joe Shepherd to differentiate between the two varieties — sort of a “do what I meant, not what I said” situation.
PLAGUE OF SEX CRAZED MONSTER GRASSHOPPERS TO HIT EAST COAST
Someone in England dose not understand American English or they are deliberately misusing it. The locus plague that is about to hit the east cost of US are not "grasshoppers". Locus is a local term for cicadas and not for the grasshoppers as stated in the headline.
My wife and I have stumbled into periodic cicada emergences about five times since 2003 (American South) usually while mountain biking. A large group can indeed be deafening. Half the people we show our pix to insist they're locusts, argh! The only actual damage they do is when laying eggs. The females slice into twigs to insert their eggs, weakening the twig which may break and fall off.
If you don't live where the noisy buggers emerge, the excellent Planet Earth series takes a great look at them in one episode (I forget which). If you have a chance to see then in the wild, DO IT! Wear a hat, they will blunder into anything.
Came back across Salisbury Plain late one night on the bike, must have been some sort of Moth orgy going on could hardly see through the visor from bug splatters and my bike jacket was more yellow than black.
Was like riding through the windows star field screen saver - pitch black to either side and all these moths light up by the headlight streaking towards me.
Dread to think what riding through a plague of these buggers would be like...
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