By now, you may have heard about the Brood X cicadas. They're a type of periodical cicada, insects that hunker down underground for long periods then emerge en masse. Brood X-ers are on a 17 year cycle, so they're emerging this spring for the first time since 2004. And trillions of them are expected.
Okay, while cicadas are in the same family as locusts, they don't cause much by way of devastation. If you're a farmer, they won't chow down your crops. If you're a gardener, they'll leave your fruits and veggies alone. Ditto your flowers. Nor will they destroy your meticulously kept lawn. That is, other than the 3-inch high "chimneys" they may build as they emerge from their 17 years underground. And they are sap suckers, so if you have trees and bushes, you may want to throw a cheesecloth shroud over them to keep them from sucking your sap.
Fortunately, they're not coming to (much or any of) New England. (We don't avoid all plagues. Think gypsy moth.)
But if you live in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan, Illinois, Georgia, Virginia, West Virginia, New York, Indiana, Ohio, Maryland, North Carolina, Delaware, Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, or Washington, D.C., you're either a) experiencing them already, or b) are in for a treat.
Well, not a treat exactly. Unless you're interested in eating them. Which actually I would be, if one presented itself to me. A chocolatier in Maryland is making chocolate covered cicadas. And a chef who specializes in Lao food has whipped up a recipe for what he calls "shrimp of the land."
Seriously, I wouldn't mind trying them.
I say this although, when I did have an opportunity to eat fried bugs, I took a pass.
This was way back in the way back, when I was waitressing at a Boston restaurant that will remain nameless. It's still in business, and I'm guessing they've cleaned up their act in the 50 years since it was a rathole in which the cooks regularly fried up a mess of cockroaches and served them, alongside clams, scallops, and shrimp, in the fisherman's platter.
Cockroaches, of course, are nasty, dirty, slum-lordy little things. Although we will see that, at times, they have some pretty peculiar moments, cicadas are, in comparison to cockroaches, well, not nasty, dirty or slum-lordy. Even their name is sort of pleasant sounding.
The big thing the big broody cicadas are known for is the noise they make:
The sound of such a massive swarm is said to reach up to 100 decibels. That's bad news for people who value their sleep. (Source: CBS News)
I'm not 100% sure, but I think that this noise is mostly rustling, not the high-pitched, dog days of summer piercing whine you hear on a hot August day from whatever cicadas do make it into New England. Not sure what that noise is about. Are the alpha cicadas signaling their cohort to burrow down? Or signal kids that it's time to start assembling your pencil box to go back to school.
The rustling night noise - cicada, grasshoppers - is kind of pleasant, in my recall. On the same level as the wonderful spring sound of peepers. Not that I get much of it here, living in a city. But growing up, there were lawns and woods and a pond down the street, so, yep, there was nature.
Cicadas don't actually do all that much during their brief time on earth. The shed their skins, which - easy-peasy - turns a nymph into an adult. Grown up cicadas then buzz around, mate, lay eggs, and die. All within a few weeks. A life that can certainly be characterized as short, but not nasty and brutish at all.
Virginia photographer Oxana Ware is taking advantage of this every 17 year occurrence to create cicada portraits.
Awwww...
But a cicada's brief time on earth (at least the above ground time) is not all innocence, sweetness, light and par-tay.
As Live Science informs us: "some Brood X cicadas will be sex-crazed zombies with disintegrating butts."
All Brood X cicadas want to do is mate and die in peace — is that so much to ask? Unfortunately, a number of the now-emerging cicadas may instead find themselves the victims of a zombifying fungus that transforms their butts into spore-shedding "fungal gardens."...The fungus eats away at cicada butts, leaving behind a yellowish, abdomen-shaped clump of spores. The fungus also hijacks the cicadas' brains and kicks their sexual behavior into overdrive, Live Science previously reported. (Source: Live Science)
Don't know whether to say TMI or just plane 'Oh.' Make that 'Oh, no.'
Just as happy that this particular plague of insects isn't heading my way. There's enough to brood about without adding sex-crazed zombie cicadas to the mix.
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