An interesting article on the possibly extinct locust of the American west.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/23/science/23LOCU.html?ex=1020620080&ei=1&en=5b3cbd0dcb3f5662Among other interesting facts there, this:
"In 1875 the species formed the largest recorded locust swarm in the history of humankind, 1,800 miles long and 110 miles wide, equaling the combined area of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont."
That is, I believe, the entire Northeastern United States. And then some.
Locusts? This is a picture of what I've always heard called a grasshopper. Locusts are those big, fat bugs that buzz in the trees all summer, and leave behind their empty, light-brown shell. Terror.
Going off on a tangent--we are looking for a car for our daughter, and she knows that one of our primary concerns is safety. We saw a VW beetle, or "bug", the other day, and she said she wouldn't mind having one, as it would give her a protective shell. I said, "Your carapace?" Ah well--guess you had to be there...
Jackie, i think what you're call locust is a cicada (sp?)-- and they make clicking noises, and the faster they click, the hotter it is --(and they are commonly called locust here, too)
the times article pointed out that when grasshoppers swarm, they become locust.. (as in a plague of locust)
there was a NOVA (PBS science show) about them one year.
in times of drought or famine, grasshoppers, (usually pretty solitary insects) keep meeting each other.. this interaction actualy causes hormomal changes, and the insect that is in normal times a loner, now begins to swarm.. and as it begins to swarm, each insect gives of a pheramone (a scent hormone) that increases the chances of other grasshoppers joining the swarm. at the same time, the hormone actually changes the the insect.. (How?--i dunno. i remember seeing side by side ilustrations.. but i don't remember the details... but they did look different.)
one change was, digestive.. instead of just eating their normal food, a swarm will eat anything.. the times article said that house wife's would put heavy woolen blankets on there vegetable gardens to protect them.. and the swarm would first eat the blanket, and then, finish off the garden for dessert! not normal eating habits for grasshoppers.
Spot on Helen - on both counts - grasshoppers/locusts and cicadas.
I've gotta stop these me too posts - I'm boring myself.
stales
Do you say sih-CAY-dah or sih-CAH-dah?
Dear Jackie and of troy: I am deeply disturbed that neither of you have recognized an environmental tragedy that demands correction. It is abundantly clear to me that the locust is an endangered species, and immediate steps must be taken to provide about two billion dollars to take at least ten thousand acres of low lying farm land in every state by eminent domain, to re-establish breeding grounds for locusts, and laboratories to rear them and re-establish them in the wild, so that our great-grandchildren may know the wonder of seeing the sun blotted out by huge locust flights.
Good q wordwind. When very young (in Seeedkneee) I pronounced the middle syllable -cay-. This changed a few years later to -cah- (coz that's what everybody else said). My Mum's from Melbourne and I think the initial "-cay-" pronunciation may have come from her.
Wadjoo say?
stales
Do you say sih-CAY-dah or sih-CAH-dah?
when i am not saying Yuck! i guess i say sih-CAY-dah.
but Gypsy moth catapillars are yuckier.. in fact, any catapiller is yuckier.
Lady bugs are ok, and fire flys.. (oh caradea, you must come east, late spring/early summer, and bring your kids.. fire flys are wonderful!-- i still have spare peanut butter jars down in the basement, for you kiddies to collect them in!) my yards is usually home to some praying mantisis too.
Once upon a time, while living in Mexico, I thought it would be neat for my kids to watch a butterfly emerge from it's cocoon. I found one in the peach tree in the back yard and brought it in. A couple of weeks later, my kitchen was overrun with teeny tiny praying mantis! They are so cute!
A couple of weeks later, my kitchen was overrun with teeny tiny praying mantis! They are so cute!
OH1 Consuelo, I hope you put them in your garden ... they are very beneficial, keeping plants and flowers bug free!
Do you say sih-CAY-dah or sih-CAH-dah?
Music, maestro!
You like potato and I like po-tah-to,
You like tomato and I like to-mah-to;
Potato, po-tah-to, sih-CAY-dah, sih-CAH-dah -
Let's call the whole thing off !
When I was in the Philippines, we all kept a couple praying mantises inside our sleeping net to catch any mosquitoes that might get in during the day.
The seventeen year locusts (cicadas) in New England never were any problem except that the female buried her eggs about a foot from tip of branches, which would die and droop, a minor cosmetic blemish. I rembember them very well because my tinnitus causes illusion quite reminscent of them.
Wow [every meaning intended], have you ever tried to catch a gajillion teeny tiny praying mantis without killing or maiming them? Luckily, we lived in an old adobe house with plenty of cracks and such for them to make good their escapes. No praying mantis were intentionally killed or injured during this learning experience.
we lived in an old adobe house
Connie, what's an adobe house? (Do you do acrobatics in there? I imagine you were, chasing all of those teeny tiny locusts...)
I think it's a Merkinism fer mud hut, hev!
adobe
1. A sun-dried, unburned brick of clay and straw.
a. The clay or soil from which this brick is made.
2, A structure built with this type of brick.
[Spanish, from Arabic aṭ-ṭūba, the brick : al-, the + ṭūba, a brick, singulative of ṭūb, bricks (from Coptic tōbe, tōōbefrom Egyptian dbt, brick).]
These bricks are very thick, a foot or more is common. The completed structure is usually given a mud or thin cement stucco coating and then painted with a [lime]whitewash. They are very good insulators, making this a wonderful building material for the desert.
Merkinism fer mud hut
The mud is of a rather special sort as I remember and it's dried with parbly some straw or suchlike in it. The walls tend to be very thick and it generally stays nicely cool in the heat, but you don't want to build one where it rains a lot. It's quite popular in the American Southwest. I lived in one for a summer in Santa Fe, New Mexico and it was just fine.
They are very good insulators, making this a wonderful building material for the desert.
As I recall, they are even better than that: they are a heat sink, that will will warm with and thus "store up" the heat of the day. Thus a good portion of the heat of the desert will go into heating the bricks -- rather than heating the interior of the home -- and a part of stored heat, the warmth of the adobe brick, will then go to radiating and warming the home during the cool desert night.
Much the same effect is felt in a well-built fireplace in an older home. Even after the fire is out, the heat of the brick or stone lining the firebed will radiate out and greatly warm the room for over an hour.
I wonder if the typical thickness of an adobe brick is not random, but rather is the thickness such that it takes 12 hours for heat, at the exterior side, to pass through and warm the interior side.
Perhaps stales, or jazzo, might have some information on this?
what's an adobe house?You could google "adobe house".
I got this (inter alia) site with a nice interior shot of one of these mud huts.
http://www.adobebuilder.com/Click on the Cont. arrow in the bottom right hand corner of the page.
Perhaps stales, or jazzo, might have some information on this?
I don't know too much about adobe construction as it's not used much around here in sporadically rainy Ohio. The buildings traditionally associated with them were pueblos, named after the Pueblo "Indians" of the Southwest US. I've always liked that maze-like construction of interconnected houses. It's similar to the building type used in ancient cultures elsewhere in the world, like Catal Huyuk, in present-day Turkey. The only entrances to the rooms were near the ceilings and accessed with ladders. Having the doors up there helped with ventilation, but it was mainly because stacking the buildings among each other made the whole more structurally sound and had some defensive advantages. A town could easily corner an invader, but the residents of the invaded room were pretty much stuck as well.
One interesting word related thing I remember was a Final Jeopardy question a few years ago, a name for a dwelling that is an anagram of a material that it might be made of: abode, adobe.
My most frequent encounter with adobe, though, is the company by that name, which Hev alluded to. They produce such illustrious software as Photoshop, Illustrator, In Design and Acrobat.
Yeah, of Troy, we used to catch gazillions of fireflies when we were kids. One night I got the bright idea to release them in my bedroom. Cool! But the resulting odor of dead fireflies was acrid and disgusting. Shure cured me of ever wanting to illuminate my bedroom with buggy lights.
Bug regards,
Wordwild
I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten-- the great locust and the young locust, the other locusts and the locust swarm-- my great army that I sent among you (Joel 2:25).
I used to live in Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico. Our house was the last one on the dirt road leading to the ruins known as Casas Grandes [Big Houses]. From my kitchen window I could look over the empty field and see the ruins and a crow that landed on the fence post every morning as I drank my post-getting-the-kids-off-to school coffee. I once had a guided tour by the resident archeologist. These ruins were first sighted by a European when Cabeza de Vaca gave them a wide berth in his walk from Florida to Mexico City. He had recently been treated badly by the last group of natives he had fallen in with and managed to escape. The large adobe structures convinced him that a large population must live there. Little did he know that the residents had departed some years before. One of the interesting features of these buildings was the doorways. They were very narrow at the bottom. You had to enter by putting one foot in front of the other. They were also very short doors, so you had to hunch down, bending from the waist to enter as well. I imagine that the purpose was to put anyone entering in a vulnerable position. If they were unknown, or hostile, they could be dealt with while in this vulnerable position. And now, to bring this thread back full circle, my son joyfully caught horny toads and locusts in the surrounding fields. He even found someone to pay him money for them. Shades of his snake-selling gramps!
We had an unfortunate incident where a young boy'smother and father were overwhelmed and devoured by these terrible carnivores. They were eventually appointed in locust parentis.
Adobe Acrobat was invented by Gillis Thorpe, and the program was originally going to be called Adobe Gillis, but the copyright people had a conniption fit.