Loud Bug Loud
UNITED STATES — Edgar Montez and his wife Cheryl reported around 1 am Saturday morning that a cicada outside of their apartment was being loud. “That thing is loud!” Edgar posted alongside an unfocused picture of a window on the popular local social media app Nextdoor, “It’s like, right next to the window above our back door. Damn thing yells at us every time we try to go outside. Watch out for these little jerks!” Cicadas have been a particularly nasty problem in many areas of the US this summer due to a 17-year reproduction cycle for the Brood X species taking bloom. The post was met with a spectrum of responses from people being confused by the blurry photo, to sympathetic towards their situation, to angry at the couple for resisting the “beautiful” thing happening outside. “It’s beautiful, stop complaining,” an anonymous user whose account has since been deleted wrote on the post. The “beautiful” thing to which the user is referring is the loud noise cicadas make similar to running a dead tree branch along a bunch of rusty metal bars as hard as possible, right next to the listener’s head. Cicada experts agree that the bugs are annoying and killing them is “not a big deal.” However, after the couple reported killing the cicada, they were met with a backlash online intense enough to make them also delete their profiles. Nextdoor is currently available for free in the app store.
