[VIDEO] Biblical Plague Set to Hit the East Coast By May

cicada-swarm

In the story of Exodus, when the Jews escaped from Egypt, God sent ten plagues in order to convince the Pharaoh to let the Jewish people leave.  One of those plagues were swarms of insects that many scholars believe to be locust or grasshoppers, who ate all the wheat in the storage areas and left the country with a sever food shortage.  Soon, the East Coast will face a similar plague as the cicadas return after their seventeen year cycle concludes with the insects emerging from under the ground in enormous numbers.

I lived through a locust swarm in Ohio when I was a young boy.  The two things I remember most vividly  has to be the sound.  You come out of your house and you hear this tedious buzzing and it never stops.  It drives you right out of your skull and you never get used to it.  The second thing is having them swarm around your face, landing on every part of your body.  They don’t bite or sting but they annoy the hell out of you.  There are millions of them and although as children, we thought we could kill them all it was like trying to empty the Atlantic Ocean with a teaspoon.

The current swarm is expected to run from North Carolina up through the New England states.

From The Washington Post:

“After the male and female cicada have mated, the female will lay fertilized eggs in slits cut with her ovipositor on small live twigs,” entomologist Russ Horton told The Post in 2013. “It takes roughly six weeks for the eggs to hatch and the nymphs to emerge.”

When they do, according to Ohio State University professor of entomologyDavid Shetlar the nymphs then fall from the trees and burrow anywhere from six to 18 inches in the ground, where they feed on juices from plant roots for 13 or 17 years, depending on what species they are.

Females can lay up to 400 eggs each, across 4o to 50 sites.