OT: THEY are here...

[Thermodyne]

Hmm…it was 91f here around DC yesterday. I wonder how soon the little buggers will be popping up? It could be worse; we could be overrun with caterpillars like we were in the 80’s. They ate some of the trees bare!

[sachmo]

A childhood pal of mine used to put lady fingers in their cavities, light them, and let them go. It was pretty gross.

[dogscoff]

"these weird little bug-eyed bugs ... actually stirred up some buried panic about mortality, and they pushed buttons within us that made us flee in horror, or stare in wonder, or duck and hide. Was our existence to be equally brief and puny?"

Pretty much. Deal with it.

[Baron Munchausen]

Argh! I HATE cicadas! Insecticide is a waste because it kills everything indiscriminately, but there's got to be some way to kill them efficiently. Why do nasty diseases always attack harmless things like trees? Why can't there be one for cicadas? Maybe this is a good genetic engineering project.

This offers a good opportunity for a computer game, come to think of it. Lots of people could work out their frustrations by killing hordes of them in a game. Call it "Bug stomper' or something like that.

[dogscoff]

I like Cicadas. They remind me that I'm somewhere hot and exotic (because we don't get them at home).

As far as using genetic engineering to kill bugs, it can be done. I heard somewhere that it's being used to reduce mosquito populations in malarial areas: They tweak the genes or something to produce male mozzies that are firing blanks and release them into the local mozzie population.

These males then go and make the twelve-legged beast with female mozzies in the area. The females are then happy, thinking they've got a load of fertilised eggs ready to lay, so they refuse any further mating and then lay their eggs. Then (such is the life-cycle of a mosquito) they fall over dead.

Of course the eggs they laid are sterile and so the year's mating season was a complete waste for those females that mated with the GE mozzies, and the number of new bugs hatched that year is greatly reduced.

[Arkcon]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
Argh! I HATE cicadas! Insecticide is a waste because it kills everything indiscriminately, but there's got to be some way to kill them efficiently. Why do nasty diseases always attack harmless things like trees? Why can't there be one for cicadas? Maybe this is a good genetic engineering project.

Well, there's always the cicada wasp {click}. There's a lot more of these guys around, 'cause there's more cicadas, 'cause people are doing less pesticide broadcasting over the past 10-20 years.

Wish I still had a cat, she'd be pouncing all over them on the lawn as soon as they emerged. That was one happy cat -- full belly and she got to kill something.

[Kamog]

What I find interesting is, why do ALL the cicadas of the same species happen to follow the exact same 17-year life cycle? Why aren't the life cycles staggered so that each year, some of them emerge from the ground, finishing their 17-year periods? Why are they so syncronized? So at any given time, all the cicadas alive are exactly the same age!

I wonder how it all got started in the beginning.