Nature at its craziest: Trillions of cicadas about to emerge

[DGUtley]

Sifting through a shovel load of dirt in a suburban backyard, Michael Raupp and Paula Shrewsbury find their quarry: a cicada nymph.
And then another. And another. And four more. In maybe a third of a square foot of dirt, the University of Maryland entomologists find at least seven cicadas -- a rate just shy of a million per acre. A nearby yard yielded a rate closer to 1.5 million.

And there’s much more afoot. Trillions of the red-eyed black bugs are coming, scientists say.

Within days, a couple weeks at most, the cicadas of Brood X (the X is the Roman numeral for 10) will emerge after 17 years underground. There are many broods of periodic cicadas that appear on rigid schedules in different years, but this is one of the largest and most noticeable. They’ll be in 15 states from Indiana to Georgia to New York; they’re coming out now in mass numbers in Tennessee and North Carolina.


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https://apnews.com/article/brood-x-c...fb62af48efebf0

[DGUtley]

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[countryboy]

Dang, I hate those things. The last emergence around here was 2016, obviously a different brood. There were so many of them, their rotting carcasses smelled like rotten shrimp.

[RMNIXON]

Not here I am happy to say!

[DGUtley]

Seems like yesterday….

[rickt300]

Well the bright side, they are supposed to be good to eat.

[carolina73]

And they are going to be horny due to their own form of viagra in the form of a fungus.

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/99799...adas-sex-crazy

[US Conservative]

I hear they are already over a constant 100 decibles.