Life in the Age of Corona

A Daily Diary

Monday, April 12th, 2021

Cicadas

Inspecting my lawn today to see if the new lawn seed has taken (it only partially has). To my dismay though I discovered hole upon hole.

Each one is about the size of a quarter, some are smaller. Having no inkling which critter makes such holes and worried I might have voles or moles digging up the place I turned to the fabulous Listserv for guidance.

I received an amazing number of responses. About five people thought it was moles. One person suggested a skunk was digging for food in my yard, but the overwhelming majority suggested Cicadas or rather the avantgard thereof. Who would have thought?

I am aware that we are expecting millions of Cicadas to make a racket from mid-May through July and I had also heard and read that after seventeen years of underground hibernation they would come out in force, but I never made the connection to my garden.

Turns out that the Cicadas are beginning to wake up and are preparing tunnels to leave their seventeen-year underground hibernation now that the weather turns warmer and the 27C we had yesterday seems to have spurred this activity. This is an interesting phenomena. Billions of Cicadas are expected to emerge. For about four to six weeks after the cicadas surface, our neighborhood will ring with their buzzing mating calls as these creatures try to find a partner to procreate. Imagine how horny they must be after seventeen years! They reach up to 90 decibel - and here we are complaining about gas leaf blowers - well they will be no match for the Cicadas.

When they emerge from that hole in my lawn they apparently climb up some vegetation and undergo their final transformation to the adult form, and that molting process takes about an hour and the newly emerged adult will be very pale when it comes out."And over the next couple of hours, it'll finish very quickly finish expanding its body and then dark enough to have the adult colors. After that, the cicadas spend about a week maturing.

Once fully grown, their primary objective is -- mating. Their quest to procreate is precipitated by a loud signature "song." Male cicadas generate sounds with tymbals, an organ that generates sound when it contracts, the hollow body amplifies the sound. Female cicadas respond with a click. After the Cicadas mate, each female will lay hundreds of eggs in thin tree branches. Then the adult cicadas will die presumably littering my garden with corpses. When the eggs hatch, new cicada nymphs (cicadas before they’re fully grown) will fall from the trees and burrow back underground, starting the 17-year cycle again.

Something to maybe look forward too or maybe not as I do not want to be sitting in my garden surrounded by flying objects. The birds will have a feast for sure though! If memory of the Cicadas in Hanoi serves right, they are the loudest at dawn and dusk and largely quiet at night. One way or another there is nothing we can do about it so we just need to sit this one out. Maybe the Cicadas will enforce social distancing as people hide from them in their homes!

The past twenty-four hours saw an increase in reported 57k new cases bringing the US total to 31.97 million. At the same time inoculations speed up, with 4.6 million people receiving a shot every single day. This will slow down for a week courtesy of the JNJ debacle at the Baltimore manufacturing site which manage to spoil 15 million doses.

For weeks now there has been a public debate about blood clots related to the Oxford vaccine. I have come across a great article putting the risk in perspective.  One in 100.000 people might experience blood clotting. This is the same risk as dying sky diving or developing a blood clot four weeks into the cycle of taking the pill, and there is no public discussion around either of these.

Maybe it is time to stop the hype.