XIAM007

Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Sunday 12 May 2013

Seeking sex after 17 years, Billions of Cicadas about to emerge from underground -


Seeking sex after 17 years, Billions of Cicadas about to emerge from underground - 


The bugs have been waiting a metre underground. This year, when the temperature is right, they will surface in search of sex.

Any day now, billions of cicadas with bulging red eyes will crawl out of the earth after 17 years underground and overrun the East Coast of the U.S.
They will arrive in such numbers that people from the southern state of North Carolina to Connecticut in the northeast will be outnumbered roughly 600-to-1. Maybe more.
But ominous as that sounds — scientists’ horror-movie name for the infestation is Brood II — they’re harmless. These insects won’t hurt you or other animals. At worst, they might damage a few saplings or young shrubs. Mostly they will blanket certain pockets of the region, though lots of people won’t ever see them.
“It’s not like these hordes of cicadas suck blood or zombify people,” says May Berenbaum, a University of Illinois entomologist.
They’re looking for just one thing: sex. And they’ve been waiting quite a long time.
Since 1996, these 25-mm bugs, in wingless nymph form, have been one-metre underground, sucking on tree roots and biding their time. They will emerge only when the ground temperature reaches precisely 18 C. After a few weeks up in the trees, they will die and their offspring will go underground, not to return until 2030.
“It’s just an amazing accomplishment,” Berenbaum says. “How can anyone not be impressed?”
And they will make a big racket, too. The noise all the male cicadas make when they sing for sex can drown out your own thoughts, and maybe even rival a rock concert. In 2004, Gene Kritsky, an entomologist at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, measured cicadas at 94 decibels, saying it was so loud “you don’t hear planes flying overhead.”
There are ordinary cicadas that come out every year around the world, but these are different. They’re called magicicadas — as in magic — and are red-eyed. And these magicicadas are seen only in the eastern half of the United States, nowhere else in the world.
There are 15 U.S. broods that emerge every 13 or 17 years, so that nearly every year, some place is overrun. Last year it was a small area, mostly around the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, West Virginia and Tennessee. Next year, two places get hit: Iowa into Illinois and Missouri; and Louisiana and Mississippi. And it’s possible to live in these locations and actually never see them.
This year’s invasion, Brood II, is one of the bigger ones. Several experts say they don’t have a handle on how many cicadas are lurking underground but that 30 billion seems like a good estimate. At the Smithsonian Institution, researcher Gary Hevel thinks it may be more like one trillion.
Even if it’s merely 30 billion, if they were lined up head to tail, they would reach the moon and back.
“There will be some places where it’s wall-to-wall cicadas,” says University of Maryland entomologist Mike Raupp.
Strength in numbers is the key to cicada survival. There are so many of them the birds can’t possibly eat them all, and those that are left over are free to multiply, Raupp says.
But why only every 13 or 17 years? Some scientists think they come out in these odd cycles so that predators can’t match the timing and be waiting for them in huge numbers. Another theory is that the unusual cycles ensure that different broods don’t compete with each other much.
And there’s the mystery of just how these bugs know it has been 17 years and time to come out, not 15 or 16 years.
“These guys have evolved several mathematically clever tricks,” Raupp says. “These guys are geniuses with little tiny brains.”
Past cicada invasions have seen as many as 1.5 million bugs per acre. Of course, most places along the East Coast won’t be so swamped, and some places, especially in cities, may see zero, says Chris Simon of the University of Connecticut. For example, Staten Island gets this brood of cicadas, but the rest of New York City and Long Island don’t, she says. The cicadas also live beneath the metro areas of Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington.
While they stay underground, the bugs aren’t asleep. They go through different growth stages and moult four times before ever getting to the surface. They are some of the world’s longest-lived insects. They drink up a low-protein tree fluid called xylum, which isn’t essential to the tree. Then they go above ground, where they moult, leaving behind a crusty brown shell, and grow a half-inch bigger.
The timing of when they first come out depends purely on ground temperature. That means early May for southern areas and late May or even June for northern areas.
The males come out first — think of it as getting to the singles bar early, Raupp says. They come out first as nymphs, which are essentially wingless and silent juveniles, climb on to tree branches and moult one last time, becoming adult winged cicadas. They perch on tree branches and sing, individually or in a chorus. Then when a female comes close, the males change their song, they do a dance and mate, he said.
The males keep mating (“That’s what puts the ‘cad’ in ‘cicada,’ ” Raupp says jokingly) and eventually the female lays 600 or so eggs on the tip of a branch. The offspring then dive-bomb out of the trees, bounce off the ground and eventually burrow into the earth, he says.
“It’s a treacherous, precarious life,” Raupp says. “But somehow they make it work.”

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U.S. Currently Fighting 74 Different Wars … That It Will Publicly Admit -


U.S. Currently Fighting 74 Different Wars … That It Will Publicly Admit - 


And Many More Covert Wars Without Congressional Oversight … Let Alone Public Knowledge
Fire Dog Lake’s Kevin Gosztola notes:
Linda J. Bilmes and Michael D. Intriligator, ask in a recent paper, “How many wars is the US fighting today?”
Today US military operations are involved in scores of countries across all the five continents. The US military is the world’s largest landlord, with significant military facilities in nations around the world, and with a significant presence in Bahrain, Djibouti,Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Kyrgyzstan, in addition to long-established bases in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and the UK. Some of these are vast, such as the Al Udeid Air Force Base in Qatar, the forward headquarters of the United States Central Command, which has recently been expanded to accommodate up to 10,000 troops and 120 aircraft.
Citing a page at US Central Command’s (CENTCOM) website, they highlight the “areas of responsibility” publicly listed:
The US Central Command (CENTCOM) is active in 20 countries across the Middle Eastern region, and is actively ramping-up military training, counterterrorism programs, logistical support, and funding to the military in various nations. At this point, the US has some kind of military presence in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, U.A.E., Uzbekistan, and Yemen.
US Africa Command (AFRICOM), according to the paper, “supports military-to-military relationships with 54 African nations.”
[Gosztola points out that the U.S. military is also conducting operations of one kind or another in Syrian, Jordan, South Sudan, Kosovo, Libya, Yemen, the Congo, Uganda, Mali, Niger and other countries.]
Altogether, that makes 74 nations where the US is fighting or “helping” some force in some proxy struggle that has been deemed beneficial by the nation’s masters of war.
***
A Congressional Research Service (CRS) provides an accounting of all the publicly acknowledged deployments of US military forces
But those are just the public operations.
Gosztola notes that the covert operations are uncountable:
Beyond that, there are Special Operations forces in countries. Jeremy Scahill in Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, writes, “By mid-2010, the Obama administration had increased the presence of Special Operations forces from sixty countries to seventy-five countries.
***
Scahill also reports, based on his own “well-placed special operations sources”:
…[A]mong the countries where [Joint Special Operations Command] teams had been deployed under the Obama administration were: Iran, Georgia, Ukraine, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru, Yemen, Pakistan (including in Baluchistan) and the Philippines. These teams also at times deployed in Turkey, Belgium, France and Spain. JSOC was also supporting US Drug Enforcement Agency operations in Colombia and Mexico…
Since President Barack Obama has been willing to give the go ahead to operations that President George W. Bush would not have approved, operations have been much more aggressive and, presumably, JSOC has been able to fan out and work in way more countries than ever expected.
Global assassinations have been embraced by the current administration, opening the door to night raids, drone strikes, missile attacks where cluster bombs are used, etc. Each of these operations, as witnessed or experienced by the civilian populations of countries, potentially inflame and increase the number of areas in the world where there are conflict zones.
***
The world is literally a battlefield with conflicts being waged by the US (or with the “help” of the US). And, no country is off-limits to US military forces.
Of course, JSOC is not accountable to Congress … let alone the public:
JSOC operates outside the confines of the traditional military and even beyond what the CIA is able to do.
***
But it goes well beyond the war zones. In concert with the Executive’s new claims on extra-judicial assassinations via drone strikes, even if the target is an American citizen, JSOC goes around the world murdering suspects without the oversight of a judge or, god forbid, granting those unfortunate souls the right to defend themselves in court against secret, evidence-less government decrees about their guilt. As Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh said at a speaking event in 2009:
Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on.
***
There are legal restrictions on what the CIA can do in terms of covert operations. There has to be a finding, the president has to notify at least the “Gang of Eight” [leaders of the intelligence oversight committees] in Congress. JSOC doesn’t have to do any of that. There is very little accountability for their actions. What’s weird is that many in congress who’d be very sensitive to CIA operations almost treat JSOC as an entity that doesn’t have to submit to oversight. It’s almost like this is the president’s private army, we’ll let the president do what he needs to do.

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Canada simply gives up competing for the American tourist -


Canada simply gives up competing for the American tourist - 



The Canadian Tourism Commission says trying to lure American tourists is a waste. Its campaigns are not getting value for money.

Ottawa no longer wants to waste time and money trying to lure American tourists to the land of moose, mountains and Mounties.
According to a new report, the U.S. has become one of Canada’s poorest performing tourism markets, and this country isn’t getting full value from expensive marketing campaigns aimed south of the border.
U.S. visitors spent, on average, only $518 per trip to Canada last year, the lowest amount spent by an international visitor group. It was the third straight year of declines. By contrast, tourists from Brazil spent an average of $1,874 per trip.
The Canadian Tourism Commission, in its 2012 annual report, released last week, describes its strategic plan to stop promoting Canada in poorly performing markets such as the U.S.
The CTC — the Crown corporation that acts as a national tourism marketing board — has halted direct-to-consumer advertising and marketing through travel agents and tour operators in the U.S. It has also discontinued all media relations, public relations and social media work in the U.S., including an interactive Twitter wall in Chicago.
The commission has decided to “cede leadership in the U.S. leisure market to provincial and territorial partners,” Paul Nursey, vice-president of strategy and corporate communications for the CTC, told the Star.
The U.S. market has bottomed out, and Canada needs to reallocate resources to higher-yielding countries to compete in the trillion-dollar global tourism market.
“Dollar for dollar, advertising in overseas markets was proven to generate a higher return on investment than the United States,” Nursey wrote in an email.
“While U.S. leisure has traditionally been — and remains — important to Canada’s tourism industry, it is also ferociously competitive,” the CTC report says, and the commission’s “limited resources prevented us from having an adequately strong impact in the U.S. leisure market.”
David Goldstein, president and CEO of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada, told the Star the CTC’s decision was “a difficult one based on steep federal funding cuts.”
“Canada competes in an extremely competitive marketplace, but other destinations are outspending us drastically to attract international visitors,” he wrote in an email. For instance, just this past week New York state announced it will triple its tourism marketing budget to $60 million.

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http://www.thestar.com/business/2013/05/11/canada_simply_gives_up_competing_for_the_american_tourist.html