- As if George W Bush did not have enough on his plate,
Brood X started to take over his capital yesterday.
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- With a mixture of fear and fascination, Washingtonians
prepared for an infestation of Biblical proportions as the first of a swarm
of billions of cicadas emerged after 17 years underground.
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- Red-eyed, black-skinned and up to two inches long, the
first cicadas wriggled out of holes in the ground where they have been
waiting since the height of Ronald Reagan's presidency.
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- Within days, large parts of the city and areas across
eastern America will be blanketed in cicadas. For the next six weeks, scientists
predict, the noise will be staggering as billions of males rub their legs
with the vigour of 17 years anticipation in search of the perfect mate.
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- Schoolchildren have been given instructions in how to
cope and told not to panic. Weddings, soccer matches, and many public events
will be rescheduled or moved indoors.
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- In the middle of next month, the females will lay eggs
in trees. The adults will all die. Their offspring will drop down to the
ground and bury under the soil, for their own 17-year vigil.
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- "It's the grandest natural phenomenon of the century,"
said Gary Hevel, an entomologist at the Smithsonian Institution. "This
is the largest brood of periodical cicadas. It is the big one, a matter
of billions and trillions.
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- "People tend to be annoyed and fearful about the
lack of knowledge. We are trying to get the word out that they are not
dangerous. They crawl out of the ground. They mate. They lay eggs and then
they die."
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- There are many species of periodical cicadas, but Brood
X is by far the largest and most numerous, and its visitations are rites
of passage for veteran Washingtonians. The trigger for their emergence
is when the earth temperature reaches 64, which happened sometime on Monday.
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- Yesterday residents roamed the leafier parts of Washington
spotting the husks of the early risers who had already taken to the trees
fully-formed with amber wings after shedding their skins, and the corpses
of those that had failed their one and only test.
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- "I was in school in 1954 and the noise was incredible,"
recalled Barbara Beelar, 62, who was born and raised in Washington. "You
couldn't sleep at night. Everyone was sleep-deprived. It's a wonderful
example of nature grabbing your attention.
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- "They crawl out. Their great hope is to meet someone
from the other sex and then they die. If you look at those things you can
see where a whole genre of horror stories came from."
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- When colonists first witnessed the phenomenon they thought
it was a sign from God, akin to the 10 plagues in Egypt. But in recent
decades reactions have been more relaxed.Two swarms ago, in 1970, Bob Dylan
immortalised the cicadas with a song Day of the Locusts.
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- Others are even more enlightened. Jacques Tiziou, a French-American,
was in his kitchen yesterday freezing his first cicadas. He said: "They
are pure protein. No fat. There are plenty of countries where the only
food is some form of insect.
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- "We in America could do a service to those countries
and tell them how to be more efficient about catching cicadas. "ou
can teach your family to keep them and maybe smoke them."
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- "We have billions of them. Go to Google and ask
for cicada recipes. You are sent to 3,600 sites."
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- One fan set up a website, cicadamania.com. which was
swamped with sightings.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/05/12/
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