Heard Iron Bug, "They're Coming To Town.&quot

Bear vs. Shark.

The photo may not seem like much, but the story BEHIND the plastic wrapped on the tree kind of fascinates me. Actually, it pretty much scares me. After I saw this wrapped tree while driving home from work, I asked my parents why this would be so. Then they told me about the cicada invasion coming this week.

Apparently, in the midwestern (Northern Illinois and Indiana, Wisconsin, and Iowa) United States, every seventeen years there is a huge swarm of cicadas that appear.... these insects tend to eat up trees and stuff like that (which explains the wrapping). They're buried underground and then at the end of seventeen years, they've matured enough to come out of the ground, fly around like crazy, sing, have sex, lay eggs, and then die--within two weeks. This is the seventeenth year.

- Cicadas are often called locusts, but locusts are migratory grasshoppers that often travel in vast swarms. The appearance of cicadas in large numbers apparently caused the early European settlers in North America to equate them with the plague of locusts mentioned in the Bible.

- Periodical cicadas are found only in the United States east of the Great Plains. Seventeen-year cicadas are found mainly in the northern, eastern, and western part of their range. Thirteen-year cicadas predominate in the South. Within the 17-year cicadas there are 12 year-classes or broods.

- Cicadas may give away their pending emergence by building thousands of "chimneys" or "stovepipes" on the ground, especially near trees. They will emerge through these structures when they leave the ground and crawl up trees and shrubs.

Now, the reason this kind of scares me is simply because I've had many strange encounters with abnormally large, unknown insects this year. Being surrounded by billions of them for the next two weeks does not appeal to me. I'm not fond of multitudes of insects, especially loud insects that will make me want to stay inside. I have no idea if they bite or not. Oh well. I guess I could say I'm not scared, but more like... strangely excited/unsure what to expect? Maybe I'll see one of those stovepipe structures and manage to blip the buggers.... :-)

Here's the National Geographic link that I obtained information from, there's more to read here: cicada facts.