Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, May 12, 1995 TAG: 9505120046
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: HARDY LENGTH: Medium
What lives underground, emerges to feed only once every 17 years, sings for love, flies around at night and scares Kathy Lucado to death?
Why, Magicicada septendecim, of course. Translated: the periodical cicada, "locusts" or "dog day cicadas." Translated: big, ugly, noisy bugs.
Lucado, who lives in west Bedford County, started seeing holes the size of dimes all over her yard last week. Then the bugs came, hundreds of them, clinging to her flowers and trees.
"I've never seen this many of them before, and it's sort of scary," Lucado said. "It's weird. As far as you can look, there's locusts."
The bugs are actually a species of cicadas. Some cicadas come out every year. Those annual species don't damage vegetation, but they make that penetrating, whining shrill we associate with the hot, muggy days of late summer.
Other species only appear every 13 or 17 years, but in such great numbers that they often kill trees and plants.
What's appearing now in parts of the Roanoke Valley is the 17-year variety, a brood that last hit here in 1978.
The cicada is 1 inch to 11/2 inches long, black, with bright red eyes and reddish-orange wings.
The offspring, or larvae, of the 1978 brood have been living in the soil all this time, generally about two feet underground, feeding on the liquids in roots.
Triggered by some remarkable alarm clock, they know when it's time to come out. They dig burrows or exit holes to the surface, sometimes leaving a "chimney" of dirt four or five inches high, depending on the type of soil.
They come out at night, and by the following day, they have shed their first shell, and their wings have grown and hardened.
Lucado said she has been sweeping the bugs and shells, which crunch under her feet, off her daughter's porch. And she won't go outside in the evening because there are so many flying around.
Luckily for Lucado, the adults will die in about 30 days.
Only the male cicadas sing, if it can be called that. Unlike locusts and grasshoppers, which rub their wings together to make noise, cicadas vibrate air over the thin membrane over an opening in their body.
They sing in groups during the day to attract females to mate. It's the pregnant females that damage orchards, trees and shrubs, slicing into the bark and branches to lay hundreds of eggs at a time.
Here in the Roanoke Valley, there's still time to thwart the blasted bugs. If you think they're hanging around your house or orchard, wait 10 to 14 days after the males start singing and spray with Sevin, says Barbara Leach, a horticulturist with Roanoke County Extension Service.
In the meantime, you can hand-pick them, she suggests, although that may not be practical.
"One guy [in Bedford County] counted 70 on his door and stopped counting," she said. Leach was getting so many calls early this week, "it was like the sky opened and rained bugs."
And scientific literature reports that the larva may be destroyed by letting hogs run on the land - if the bugs haven't emerged from their holes yet.
by CNB