Re: OT: "Locusts"

Hi Bill,
Let me see if I can clarify this. Didn't mean to be so confusing. We have 17 year Cicada's every year. I really missed their song when I was overseas. They are quite thick here and when growing up children wore their cast off shells as broaches. Sometimes painting them in pretty colors their claws will stick to any rough surface until bumped. The 7 year locust we have found here is the same one that was such a scourge here around the time of the dust bowl. Usually they are in small numbers now but my dad has seen them in full force and related to me how devastating they can be. They will not only eat the laundry, but will eat shovel handles and the hair off of horses and cattle, and the feathers off the chickens too. When they swarmed they killed every living thing that couldn't get into a hole. I do not know what their larva looks like and suspect everything I find unknown, as I expect them to show themselves sooner or later. The grasshopper looking insect that ate the head of lettuce was identified as one of these. I watch for them and occasionally find a few. I thought that since grasshoppers lay eggs in the ground that the 7 year locusts would do the same. I know what cicada and junebug larva look like. Plenty of those around here. But the larva I have found lately is neither one. Horse flies are a possibility. Talk about leaving a welt. Nothing bites like a horsefly. We get some real whoppers around here. We also have katydids. Lke on the cartoon. Their song goes Katydid katydidn't. VBG
Wendy
  Lots of confusion here, Wendy.  Earlier you mentioned "17-year locusts", and
  in this message you are referring to the locust plagues in the midwest.
  These are two different phenomena and two different insects.  The 17-year
  cicada (the better name) is a large insect with a big head and clear wings.
  They make a high-pitched buzzing that characterizes summer days in many
  parts of the country.  The adults are generally harmless to vegetation,
  feeding little or not at all.  They use sword-like organs at the rear of the
  body to cut slits in twigs of trees, where they lay their eggs.  The twigs
  sometimes break but hang on the trees, so if there is heavy outbreak of
  cicadas, you see a lot of dead dry twigs hanging about.  The young hatch
  from the twigs and drop to the ground, where they burrow in and feed by
  sucking juices from plant roots.  While many species have an annual life
  cycle, one North American one spends 17 years underground.  After this
  extended stay, the larvae emerge and climb tree trunks before molting into
  adults.  The cast larval skins are commonly seen objects in summer during a
  breakout.  Various parts of the country have different "broods" that emerge
  in different years, so there is an outbreak somewhere nearly every year.
  The insects become so numerous that their shrilling drives people crazy, but
  they do little harm otherwise.  There's also a species with a 13 year cycle.
  We think these long cycles deter specialist predators, since the predators
  woulld also have to develop a 17 year cycle to catch the adults.

  Now the locusts that devastated areas of the west and midwest in the early
  days of settlement and up into the 20th century are quite different.  They
  are large grasshoppers that aggregate into huge flocks and migrate long
  distances, the flock growing larger through recruitment, and eating almost
  everything that can be eaten--even laundry left hanging out to dry!  The
  young look like the adults--like small grasshoppers--but don't have wings.

  SO--the bottom line is that if you found a larva underground that ate a head
  of lettuce, it was not likely to be either kind of locust, since the 17-year
  cicada larvae feed by sucking, and the grasshoppers don't live underground.

  In fact I'm baffled by what you had--perhaps some kind of very large
  caterpillar.....anyway, none of the insects mentioned above is likely to be
  dangerous to irises, unless another locust (grasshopper) plague comes your
  way.

  Bill Shear


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