baleen  - 2011-06-09
The guy on NPR said a few weeks ago that "revelatory" end times projections were curiously timed to the return of broods. Funny how that works.
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Toenails - 2011-06-09
Kansas doesn't get Brood X, but we got some particularly noisy motherfuckers last year. They're so cute and fun to play with, but damn if they don't ruin a nice dinner on the patio.
Oh, and we call them locusts. For the life of me I have no idea why. Maybe it has something to do with baleen's comment, who knows?
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Toenails - 2011-06-09 oh crap. I didn't even know Brood XIX is out and about. I just thought video was talking Brood X because they made a mistake and called them a 17 year brood.
And we just get the annual brown dudes, so I don't know a lot about these black and red weirdos.
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baleen - 2011-06-10 Locusts are nothing more than grasshoppers that transform into locusts. They are pretty amazing animals, grasshoppers. Their brains become bigger as they adopt to swarm behavior, this is because if they don't space themselves apart evenly, their instincts force them to eat each other. This is why locusts jump in organized, perfectly timed waves. Grasshoppers turn to locusts after the vegetative boom cycle, after a flood, so you can get locust swarms every year if you're getting a lot of rain. So a locust swarm is just a cloud of internecine devouring. Unlike the cicada, who chorus in order to mate, the sounds you hear from locusts are screams of pain.
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Chalkdust - 2011-06-09
cicadas are deserving of both the "better animals" and "worse animals" tags
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Jet Bin Fever - 2011-06-09
I walked from my car to my house in the dark and found two of these assholes stuck on my shirt when I looked in the mirror about 10 minutes later. It gave me quite a start.
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SteamPoweredKleenex - 2011-06-09
My brother's house is just covered in these things right now. I only live two hours away, and while we have a few cicadas, we have these really huge wasp-like critters that (according to the internet) are called "Cicada Killers." From what we read, they're pretty much like the Alien Xenomorph, dragging cicadas into lairs where they impregnate them with offspring that'll eat the locust alive.
So we don't have as many.
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Old_Zircon - 2011-06-09
Cicadas are great, haters gonna hate.
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memedumpster - 2011-06-10
We usually get these, I'm surprised they haven't invaded here.
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glasseye - 2011-06-10
Gross. I'm glad they don't live out here in glorious California.
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chumbucket - 2011-06-10
noisy fucks
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TeenerTot - 2011-06-10
Big swarms of these around my parent's house. They were producing a horribly loud background white noise. We got out the badminton rackets and knocked them out of the air at each other.
Great story, I know.
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baleen - 2011-06-10 Cicada air hockey was all the rage when I was growing up in Virginia! It comes in stages. First, kids like to preserve them and name them, and keep them as pets, but a week later we're figuring out how to get them to fight and seeing how long they walk around when they are just a head with two legs (it's a long time). Eventually, you get out the canoe oars and try to knock them out of the air toward one another, preferably in a way that spreads cicada guts all over their shirts.
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