"And there it was, its beady, blood-red eyes glaring up from the sidewalk, a threat of shrieking hell to come."
That's how Ashley Halsey III reported the re-advent of 17-year cicadas (Magicicada) for The Washington Post ("Those beady-eyed bugs are back: Cicadas spotted in Northern Virginia," May 12, 2013). He went on to call cicadas "ugly bugs."
Do cicadas create a shrieking hell? Are they ugly? Halsey III was describing the periodical cicadas whose "incredible ability to merge by the millions," Richard Alexander and Thomas Moore observed in their 1962 paper, "within a matter of hours after having spent 13 or 17 years underground as silent, burrowing, solitary, sedentary juveniles is without parallel in the animal kingdom."
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