Jasper County Democrat, Volume 22, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 May 1919 — LOCUSTS NOT SO DESTRUCTIVE [ARTICLE]

LOCUSTS NOT SO DESTRUCTIVE

Some evening in the latter part of this month, when the sun has gone down and the dusk is settling, the ground about the trees in a score of places east of the Mississippi river will begin to stir, and from holes that will appear in the surface will come crawlings millions, perhaps billions, of insects not unlike beetles. Almost without pause they will make for the nearest tree and begin to ascend the trunk. They will climb until they find a place where they can get a good grip on the bark with their forefeet. Each one then will take hold, brace himself and hump his shoulders until the skin splits from the neck uown the back. Each ,will then struggle like a main who is trying to gel out of a tight and sweaty shirt. When the struggle is over there will be clinging to the bark a creature dressed in snowy white, with two black patches on his back, eyes of coral red, and & pair of rudimentary wings. The wings grow rapidly. By the next day they will be full size, hard and glistening, veined with red, and folded like a roof over the creature’s back. The body will have changed from white through reddish brown to nearly black. The woods will then begin to thrill and vibrate with a sound that penetrates the ear like a knife —- a sound that a Massachusetts his-

torian of early days described as “Such a constant yelling noise as made all the woods ring... and ready to deaf the hearers.” It is the culmination of one of the marvels of the insect world: the arrival at maturity of the periodic cicada, more commonly known as the 17-year locust The shrill note, which only the males can make, is not a song, but an infinitely rapid vibration of a <membrane, or typmpanum, moved by powerful muscles. Take a tin pail that has a slightly buckled bottom and push the bottom in and out. You get the same kind of note. If you could move it more than 17 times a second, the note would be continuous.

To the female, that shrill note| is a love song. She chooses some Caruso whose voice pleases her, and they mate. In a little while she proceeds to lay the eggs that are to become her offspring of the next generation—children that she' never see, whose voices will sound upon a world of unpredictable change. To perform that last great function of her life she crawls out upon a slender twig of last year’s growth, in which the sap is quick. There, with an implement that may well] have given to man the idea of the steam or compressed-air drill—a| horny cylinder in which two chisel blades play up and down in grooves—she digs a trench, or slit, in the bark and in it lays the eggs. Her life work is now done, and in, a few r days nhe dies. When, in a few weeks, the young hatch, they are like ants with strong front claws. They drop from the twig to thy crawl into the nearest Assure, burrow to a depth of from six inches to two

Feet, and there live for 17 years on the nutriment that seeps into 1 their bodies from the soil or that 1 they suck from roots. So the round of life is completed. The brood that is due this month has appeared on time ever since the middle of the seventeenth century and probably from a date far earlier. Among tne places where it may be expected are the District of Columbia, northern Virginia, northern West Virginia, southeastern Pennsylvania, most of New Jersey, regions negr New York city, western Long island, near Niagara Falls, Rutland, Vermont, western North Carolina, northern Georgia, many places in Ohio, all of Indiana, northern Kentucky, southern Michigan, eastern Illinois, and Sauk City, Wisconsin. Contrary to the usual belief, the insects do little damage. They eat no vegetation of consequence. The only harm they do is injuring young trees, especially orchard trees, by puncturing the new twigs for a place to lay their eggs.