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Re: A June Bug???!

Square Foot Gardening List - http://www.flinet.com/~gallus/sqft.html

About June bugs and cicadas: as someone else mentioned, June bugs (like
all beetles) have a full four-stage life cycle, with egg, larva, pupa,
and adult, none of which look anything like any of the others.

Cicadas have nymphs (naiads? Where's that guy who told us rabbits are
lagomorpha, not rodentia?  I think this is "incomplete metamorphosis")
that look very different from adult cicadas, but they don't look
anything like grubs.  They are about an inch long, brown, with big
nasty-looking claws on their front legs, big cute eyes, six legs, and
no wings.  Their brown shells are hard, not like grubs' soft skins.  If
you live in a cicada area, you've seen their shed skins stuck all over
trees in cicada season; they split the back and crawl out as mature
adults.

I know cicadas suck on roots, but I don't know whether they do so to a
harmful extent.  (Not the adults.  The adults don't eat.  Look at their
mouthparts if you catch one.)

There's a decent picture of a cicada shedding its nymph skin at
http://search.corbis.com/default.asp?i=11121074&vID=1&rID=101

The 17-year cicadas, which I've never seen, apparently have longer
abdomens than the yearly ones.  A very nice photo of one moulting is at
http://204.202.137.114/sections/us/Footnotes/cicadas980519.html,
unfortunately on a "news" story that describes cicadas as "hideous,
bizarre, almost grotesque-looking".

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
The Internet stock bubble didn't burst on 1999-11-08.  Hurrah!
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html>
The power didn't go out on 2000-01-01 either.  :)


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