The Plague Of Locusts

Washington has come under a plague of locusts as May breaks into June. To be more precise, Brood X of the 17 year cicada. The cicadas burrow underground and suck sap from tree roots for seventeen years, waiting for their big moment when they all pop up out of the ground, climb the nearest tree, molt, and then go climb up in the branches, singing their song to find a female. They have got to get it done fast, because they only have a week or two to live. So it's just one big cicada disco.

You can spot their tiny holes in bare ground around some trees. It looks like somebody punched a nail in the ground. Their empty skins are hard to find. I've only seen a couple. You certainly can hear them buzzing in the branches above. I like the sound.

The idea of the cicadas appearing all at once is to flood the environment with more bugs than the bellies of predators can hold. It's also interesting that they have fallen into a 17 year cycle, a prime number. If they had a cycle that was a non-prime number, like twelve years, they would synchronize with cicadas with two and three and four and six year cycles. That would make the supply of cicadas too predictable for predators. A prime number cycle throws the predator population off.

Cicadas are not the only ones to synchronize their reproductive strategy. Some chestnut trees drop their nuts all at once every few years to overwhelm the animals that eat them. Human women synchronize their menstrual cycles via the pheremones emitted from their armpits in order to ensure that the same man is not romancing them one at a time. If they become fertile at the same time, it's more likely that the man who impregnates them is going to support their offspring as opposed to the man who hops from woman to woman, siring children willy nilly.

Cicadas are the dumbest bugs I have ever seen, dumber than June bugs. They are everywhere, flying around into everything, including me. I walk inside and I've got a cicada hanging on my shirtfront. Ick! If they are turned on their back, they can't get up. They just wiggle their legs and waggle their wings until they run out of gas. They are like horny freshman drunk on their first pitcher of beer their first weekend at college, all enthusiasm, no brains.

They have little sense of predators, which is why they are so easily caught and eaten by birds, squirrels, and house pets. Some dogs make themselves sick eating cicadas, which are hard for them to digest. Some people are eating them, too, sauteed in butter. Some Maryland state officials swallowed some batter-fried to prove they are not harmful. No thanks.

The cicadas are not completely harmless. One woman backed out of her driveway, rolled the window down to let the hot air out as the air conditioner came on, to have a cicada fly in right in her face. She went careening off the road over a fire hydrant which launched a gusher. The police officer let her off easy with no ticket. "In My Face!" she cried.

A Southwest Airlines pilot claims he saw a cicada land on his windshield wiper as he taxied out to take off. As he began his takeoff roll, the cicada turned around to face into the wind. It hung on until the jet hit 110 knots.

A columnist in the Washington Post asked for cicada poems, so I dashed one off and sent it in, though though some hideous oversight it has yet to be published. It's the finest cicada poetry I've ever read, if I do say so myself.