When I first moved to Kentucky from Washington State, I was totally unfamiliar with cicadas, insects which emerge from the ground at various intervals (years depend on the specific type), during the summer, and make a godawful racket.
When they first emerge, without wings, they truly are the stuff of nightmares.
Climbing up into trees, they latch on and undergo a metomorphosis not unlike a caterpillar.
Eventually, they emerge from their old exoskeleton, now with wings.
They congregate en mass in the trees, adding their rattle to the cricket chorus.
As odd, occasionally unnerving as these strange insects can be, I have begun to look forward to their arrival. Like the lightning bugs, cicadas serve as a herald of summer.
lmao. Love the title, they are very interesting, i just found my first one a couple weeks ago coming out of its shell.
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They are fugly, and quite alarming when they swarm your porchlight. Lol
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They're harmless, they're noisy -- and they are amazingly ugly. Both the larvae and the adults. And I've never known a dog that didn't love to eat them.
My grandmother (in Texas) lived next door to another elderly couple that had a little rat terrier that would spot one on a backyard tree and bark until someone came out of the house and caught it for her. (I know. YUK!) Scares me to think how they might multiply otherwise.
They must be tasty though. I read somewhere that the multi-year cycle in between swarms is thought to be an adaptation to keep any one particular species from becoming predators specifically to them. In other words, nothing can come to depend on them exclusively for a food source -- because they'd starve waiting for the next harvest.
Whatever the reason, I'm truly glad they're an occasional treat rather than a regular yearly occurrence.
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