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Comment by tomcam | Hacker News Reader

First time we traveled to Texas when I was a young lad, and we heard cicadas, they were very close to us and I thought it was a vacuum cleaner.

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We used to call them locusts in Texas. I still miss it. Yes, I know they aren’t locusts. We’re all suburban tv babies sharing the same accent these days.

They were called locusts in my area as well. Wasn't until college zoology that I learned we were calling them the wrong thing.

Anyways, I had a dog that would watch from the back porch and when he saw one flying low across the back yard would run out and catch it out of mid air. The things would be flapping and croaking about until they were crushed mid-swallow. It was a gross but impressive feat to behold.

I grew up calling them zeezer-bugs. Or cicadas if you wanted to be fancy.

My grandmother in N TX called them that too. They're cicadas and they're damn loud. Since 1980, all grasshopper species remaining in N America are too rare now to enter a gregarious phase.

Cicadas make different sounds, in my area hard to confuse with anything else. Here’s a video(1) with various samples of cicadas. Was any of these sounding like a vacuum cleaner?

(1)-https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=thbgObpfoNs

When you have no concept of insects being able to make that much noise, the brian just maps it to something else. When you're familiar with them, you can pick out the patterns in the frequencies and the ebb and flow, when you're first exposed to it it's just generic _loud_.

That was exactly it.

I was staying just outside Toronto (/suburban GTA) this summer; it was a few days before I stopped assuming the sound was construction (sawing). Extraordinary, nothing like it (as far as I've ever known anyway) in the UK. Crickets can be 'loud' (more so in France IME) but these cicadas were in a different league.

It was that sound but it was right next to my head, camouflaged by the tree it was occupying. I had no idea what it was and didn’t detect its visible presence. I assumed it was many feet away. Wasn’t for days that I understood it was an insect.

When I first heard them, I thought some power lines were damaged.

New Zealander checking in - our February (summer) is insane if you're close to certain types of bush. Deafening. Not sure if it was in the article (paywalled) but the little mofos can get up to 100db. There's a good couple of weeks I avoid the bush for sure.

We had a big year for them in 2021 in Australia. I was testing an Apple Watch at the time and since exercise was one of the reasons at that time to be allowed out I went for bush walks in my local area.

In quite a few areas the noise was so loud the watch informed me I was going to damage my hearing if I remained in the area.

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