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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 5 of 5. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by Jai Narayan on May 21, 2004, at 14:21:58
***This is not the article in it's entirety but edited by me.
The Orgy in Your Backyard May 20, 2004 By JEFFREY A. LOCKWOOD LARAMIE, Wyo.
The exuberance of new life in spring. Lots of new life. Twenty-two megatons of new life. Like an entomological Halley's comet, every 17 years an astonishing population of periodical cicadas, Brood X, emerges in the greatest regular outpouring of insect life on the planet. In 15 Eastern states, people are experiencing - or, as in New Jersey, starting to experience - an onslaught of cacophonous beasts. For 17 long, virginal years these creatures burrowed in the soil, waiting for their shot at the biggest swingers' club in the annals of ecology. These cicadas offend puritanical sensibilities - so much coitus, noise and chaos. Their celebration of the flesh reminds us that underneath our tidy gardens and parks lurk vestiges of untamed nature. And they are not something to fear or loathe, but to embrace.
A few weeks after their arrival, the cicadas will die, leaving piles of depleted corpses and more than 500 trillion eggs. In a single square mile of forest with the densest populations, there will be as many eggs as there are stars in the Milky Way. This tsunami of life becomes even more incredible when we realize that these creatures have been waiting for this moment since 1987, the year of Donna Rice and Gary Hart, Jessica Hahn and Jim Bakker. It seems that lust was in the air just as the hatching nymphs headed underground for perhaps the longest stint of celibacy in the animal world. Nestled in the earth, creatures counted out 17 years. These events would honor the ways in which we are connected to the earth, recognizing that we are embedded in a marvelous natural world. I nominate the exuberant arrival of the periodical cicadas as the inaugural national event. Rather than a few million of us visiting Yosemite or Yellowstone this summer, a few trillion cicadas will come to visit us. They will remind us that the world is yet to be tamed and that wonder is our birthright. Even staid scientists are entranced by these creatures - why else would the genus have been named Magicicada?
Jeffrey A. Lockwood, a professor of natural sciences and humanities at the University of Wyoming, is the author of
"Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect That Shaped the American Frontier."
***I am sharing this because I have a deep love of these critters. Also my relationship with my partner started with the same enthusiasm and vigor and we just celebrated out 17th year together.
Posted by karen_kay on May 21, 2004, at 19:49:16
In reply to The Orgy in Your Backyard, posted by Jai Narayan on May 21, 2004, at 14:21:58
good grief! i was very excited for a moment, i dropped my pants as i opened this post, and found a huge disappointment! BUGS! bugs jai, bugs! i can hardely handle watching my dog try to hump the mail carrier, let alone sit on my porch watching those dreadful creatures breed. what kind of a sick joke were you playing, trying to draw a crowd with that heading, only to find BUGS! jai, i can only shake my head.
wait! i figured it out! you are not human, you are a bug! but, that wouldn't explain why you are so fond of birds. so, i haven't figured you out yet. you just have so much respect for all living creatures, whereas a person like me fears a bug that is sooooo loud. but, congrats on 17 years! that's beautiful! perhaps you can join the bugs in the back yard? but, don't crush them with the rolling around, ok?
Posted by Jai Narayan on May 22, 2004, at 8:28:57
In reply to false advertising....., posted by karen_kay on May 21, 2004, at 19:49:16
All of nature talks to me....
Sorry to have dissapointed you....
next time it will be so racy, it will singe your eyebrows.
I promise.
Posted by finelinebob on May 22, 2004, at 10:35:08
In reply to The Orgy in Your Backyard, posted by Jai Narayan on May 21, 2004, at 14:21:58
> The exuberance of new life in spring. Lots of new life. Twenty-two megatons of new life...
Given the subject line and those first few sentences, I thought Mr. Lockwood was getting manic on us....
;^)
flb
Posted by Noa on May 24, 2004, at 18:58:14
In reply to The Orgy in Your Backyard, posted by Jai Narayan on May 21, 2004, at 14:21:58
Can you believe the noise all those orgiastic cicadas are making! Don't they know how inconsiderate it is!!
There are two types of sounds--one is the close by sound of cicadas that is familiar, like other types of cicadas (not the 17 year kind). It's loud and annoying, but familiar. Just that it is much louder than other years. The really creepy sound is the far away sound coming from up there, out there, somewhere. It's a higher pitched white noisy sort of thing but it sounds like a fleet of alien ships about to land. This is the sound I hear when I go to work in the early morning, when my own backyard, neighborhood flock of cicadas still seems to be sleeping. It's an eeerie, twilight zone kind of sound....
The thing that bothers me the most is all the dead bodies! You gotta walk with eyes peeled to the ground to make your way around all the spent ones. I do hope they acheived their life's mission before expiring, and that they weren't taken before their time by some predator. Once in a while you see two interconnected ones lying there--kaput. Did they expire en flagrante, I wonder???
This is the end of the thread.
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