Cicadas-seen it all now...

[perhapsadingo8yerbaby]

Area I live in just finished dealing with the 17 year cicadas. We had millions of these giant bugs emerge from the ground end of May and last about a month. They only come up once every 17 years, take to the trees where their mating call gets almost deafening and they pretty much exist for that one month for the sole purpose of finding a mate and copulating before they die. (Like most of us I guess )

http://www.chat11.com/Picture_Gallery/insects/cicada.htm

So I run out for groceries in my 90 MX-6 the other day, first time that car's been driven in 2 weeks. Not too hot of a day so I'm running the fan/ventilation to circulate outside air thru the cabin. When parking at the store, I get a whiff of an odd never-smelled-before-odor but figure it must be coming from the car parking next to me. When I get home the smell is much worse... like nothing I can really accurately describe.

I open the hood, and discover the source - a couple hundred "roasting" cicada carcasses laying all over the engine bay including around the hot spark plug sockets on that 2.2 SOHC motor. They were everywhere. Musta been 50 bodies piled in the battery tray alone. I ended up vacuuming the entire engine. They must have crawled up there to die and the car sat sat long enough for a fair number to accumulate. Weird.