Stuff to See!

Insect Politics

Everyone in the Mid-Atlantic region seems to be chattering about the coming of the 17-year cicadas. They've arrived in my neighborhood on time, and as expected. The streets already run red with crushed cicadas. Their unwholesome shrill trilling can be heard soft, but clear, in the background where Zen lives.
Appearances of cyclical beings such as the 17-year cicada used to presage (presumably) death and destruction in ancient times. References to plagues of locusts can be found throughout the Bible, among other places. I find the whole idea of bugs who creep from the earth, only to bury their eggs so deep that they only appear every 17 years, or 13 in other areas, or 7, or some other cyclical number of years, to be rather pointless, but fascinating all the same. The cicadas come, clutter the streets, munch on trees, on grass, on other plants, and generally just tear stuff up, bury their eggs, and go away. What's the point?
Sure, I don't know what it's like to be a cyclical insect of such bizarre duration, so maybe I'm missing out on the great thing that is cicada life. It's not like there aren't other, much more common cicadas. Entire branches of the insect family subsist primarily on cicadas, as, apparently, do ants, people (cicada recipes are zipping back and forth around the net), and who knows what else. I even saw a squirrel eating one today, munching in the tiny-jawed way only squirrels can munch. Blew my mind to the extent that I dropped a four-leaf clover for a chance at a picture, but the rodent was too fast for me. This other rodent was more cooperative.
I really DID need to share that with the world.
So, being of the historical bent, my mind went back 17 years to the only other appearance of the locusts that I could remember. How things have changed...
For one thing, the advent of the Internet has really changed the world. Whereas in 1987 I would have been hard pressed to find cicada recipes, today I'm just a click away (and so are you with this 132 KB PDF file). Apparently, from at least two sources, they taste like asparagus, and when they're microwaved, the meat is white like chicken. We'll see about that.
I recall going to a high school graduation (my cousin Alec's) in the midst of a cicada-infested outdoor locale of some kind. Having a little boy's love for big bugs I must have brought a dozen of the suckers home with me in '87. Killed 'em, pinned 'em, looked at their various parts under a microscope, and generally just left tons of dead bugs around the house, to my father's chagrin.
"Where's The Beef" was a phrase charged with political significance.
Oddly enough, my friend Jacquie was still in Baltimore.
The USSR was becoming less of a threat to American civilization.
Many other things were different. An entire series of books can and has been written about the changed which have come to the world in just the 21st century, let alone the last 17 years.
At any rate, back to my question: why? Looking for reason in Nature is sometimes like trying attack an insane asylum with a banana (not my phrase, but a prize to whoever names the originator). My view of the universe insists that there is a reason for everything...absolutely everything, even if my feeble brain can't perceive it. The idea of bugs which sleep for 17 years, then come out and die in huge numbers, eat almost anything, it seems, knock each other up, die in the process of burying their eggs, and then just die...what's the sense of it? Did the aboriginal cicada find some sort of advantage in this? Perhaps at one time they were more common, but maybe there was just this incredibly successful insectivore which wiped them out to the point of extinction, so that the few remaining bugs just...buried their eggs. The burying of eggs makes sense from a survival of the species angle, I guess.
On the other hand, judging from the way I see them all over the place (trees, grass, crushed on the pavement, eaten by squirrels), maybe they were TOO successful. A species that dominates like that never really lasts forever (for the record, man's only a couple million years old at most...the dinosaurs alone lasted 100 times as long, although in myriad forms). Kind of in the same sense that over intensive hunting will deprive the land of game, the cicadas ate everything in their wake and then mostly starved. Assigning purpose to an insect's actions is hopelessly anthropomorphic and useless, although fun.
As a whole, though, insects rule the world more thoroughly than men do, through sheer strength of numbers. Ants alone must outnumber man by about 400 million to 1...making up in communal action for their puny size. The ant never needed great size so never achieved it. From the look of things, man hasn't really changed much, technological advancement aside, aside from losing some hair and gaining some height. It's not strictly right to downplay technology so readily, although a good deal of it has been developed by groups of men trying to kill or at least marginalize each other. Adversity and challenge is essential to the theory of evolution, even adversity within the species, it seems.
Of course I broke out the Cybershot to take some pics of these buggers. I'll probably take more, but here are the first ones.

• Multiple Cicadas on a tree
• Typical Cicada
• Young Cicada
• Two More Cicadas
• Another Young Cicada, coming to eat you!!

So here I lay, fallen into the trap I usually avoid, which is to ascribe rational purpose to phenomena which, though certainly rational, don't operate under the same assumptions and conditions that I do. Foolish, maybe...
But lots of fun!!!!