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Linda Buie, Editor
LA Judge, Graphics
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The Great Cicada Plague

I am a city chick. I live in apartments and my idea of wildlife is anything with four paws that you can take to the vet. And bug things I can deal with just as long as they stay in their part of the planet (meaning outdoors) and never invade mine. So when the news stations all started warning of the coming seventeen year cicada plague, I just rolled my eyes and figured it was a slow news week or maybe it was just the spring rating's sweeps.

It started as a barely audible low drone. You could tell something was there - but not really. A bug here, a bug there. Yea, I could handle this. Within a day or two the drone was louder. You could hear it 24 hours above all else. It even drowns out the sound of traffic during rush hour. It seems the big ugly bug invasion was on. This batch of cicadas' known to entomologists as Brood X, is the largest of the regularly recurring plague of cicada groups. They emerge from their 17-year development, still in their larval shells which they then shed and begin their three weeks of fun, sex, and cicada frivolity just before they lay eggs and die.

Two weeks into this plague (with several more to go), my tolerance limit has now been breached. It seems that at the height of this plague you can have as many as 1.5 million per acre! That is a hell of a lot of bugs. And they are all in the back yard of my apartment. No exaggeration. They cover my windshield, the front steps go crunch. I am living with a cicada jar on the front porch where my son keeps a few he has named. Take the trash to the ally and I am swarmed by about a thousand fat slow flying bugs. They are everywhere. I keep having them fly into me and have had to learn to touch the gross ugly things JUST TO GET THEM OUT OF MY HAIR!!

Enough!! I was here 17 years ago. Brood X was not that bad then. But it seems then, like now, we had a very warm early summer and it caused their number to increase. Seventeen years from now, we can again expect a major plague.

So what to you do with all these bugs? Well various pubs and radio stations around the region are all holding their versions of cicada festivals. The grossest suggestions though come from the cicada maniacs at the University of Maryland's bug department. They have come up with a cookbook called "Cicada-licious". It includes recipes for Cicada Stir-Fry and Cicada Dumplings. It also comes with a disclaimer urging people to consult a doctor before eating cicadas - well duh!

All these ugly bugs just make my skin crawl! I know that I will have nightmares to go with the buzzing I hear all night. And now that I have learned that, they used to have teeth - ahhhhhhhh!!!!


LA. Judge / nodecaf

Cicada-licious: Cooking and Enjoying Periodical Cicadas: www.urhome.umd.edu/newsdesk/pdf/cicada%20recipes.PDF

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