12 Mar 2004 | Steven Garrity said...

Wouldn't it be more like:

(Cicada reporting back): So check this out. They have a ROBOT on MARS.
(Crowd of Cicada masters): Did they already do that the last time we were here?

12 Mar 2004 | RS said...

Yeah, but the cicadas have very little time for history.

12 Mar 2004 | JF said...

Are 17-year cicadas one of the only species with siblings and parents that aren't alive at the same time (for even a moment)?

13 Mar 2004 | kev said...

As far as I can tell, it's just another copy of Apple... Brood X.. sheesh. What, next you're going to tell me that Panther and Jaguar are some kinds of large cats or something and not in any way related to the OSX releases...

christ, i'm a nerd.

13 Mar 2004 | Brad Hurley said...

Are 17-year cicadas one of the only species with siblings and parents that aren't alive at the same time (for even a moment)?

Do you mean offspring, not siblings?

And not to pull a Bill Clinton, but it depends on what you mean by "alive." If you think of embryos as being alive, then there aren't any species whose offspring and parents aren't both alive at the same time. But if you think of "alive" as being the moment when an egg hatches, then there are lots of species, mostly insects, where parents and offspring are never alive at the same times. For example, many insects in cold climates die after they lay their eggs, and the eggs don't hatch til the following spring.

Mayflies are a cool example: the nymphs live underwater for a couple of years, then one spring day they come to the surface, molt into adults, and live for roughly one day while they mate, lay eggs, and die. The adults don't even have functioning mouthparts.

14 Mar 2004 | Corey Miller said...

These little guys might be a mess, but I have nothing but fond memories of my last enounters with them. Seventeen years ago I was a high-school aged summer camp counselor in the Chicago suburbs. It's really great to have, when working with young kids, readily available bugs that are large and colorful (easy to examine and check out their cool parts) with no mouths or stingers (no fear of biting or stinging) and are easy to catch. Plus they make neat noises when the kids would catch and shake them.

Seventeen years before that I was just a little kid falling asleep at night with the window open and the cicada song growing and fading as I fell asleep.

Now that I'm old and crusty I'll probably just gripe about having to wipe them off my windshield, but I hope not. I now live in St. Louis and I forwarded a CNN article about this to my wife, a native, asking expectantly, "do we get these here? Do we? Do we?"

You can take the bug dork away from the bugs, but you can't . . .

Y'all know what I mean.

16 Mar 2004 | pek said...

Did you know they are also called "Satan's Parakeet"? I always liked that...