OVER the next few weeks billions of cicada grubs will awake from 17 years of subterranean slumber and emerge into the bright sunshine of America's mid-Atlantic states.
Shane Stone, the Northern Territory's former chief minister, who introduced the law, says it was designed to deter "grubs who break into homes, steal cars and anything else that is not nailed down".
UNDER the woodlands and back yards of northern Illinois, more than a trillion grubs have woken from 17 years of underground slumber.
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Many of the top ones combine the same game show/reality TV elements, in increasingly baroque combinations: participants who jostle for viewers' affection by singing, cooking, having sex, eating grubs, etc; presenters and pantomime judges to oversee their humiliation; and premium-rate voting by the audience to determine the winners.
The result is a wood that retains its shape in the presence of water, and is no longer recognised as wood by grubs that would otherwise attack it.
One has even worked out how to use cactus spines to extract insect grubs from rotten wood.Darwin's finches are an example of adaptive radiation, in which a single species splits into several that are able to occupy different ecological niches.
Their basic food was the wild yam, a root vegetable, flavoured with grubs and small fish, with wild bananas for pudding.
They fished in the rivers with bows and arrows, dams, and nets and harvested wild fruits and other plants, as well as grubs.
Adaptable opportunists, gulls feed on insects, mollusks, and crustaceans on beaches; worms and grubs in plowed fields; fish along shores; and garbage from ships.
All have a massive scimitar-like beak for cracking nuts, digging up roots, or prying grubs from wood; feeding is aided by a strong tongue.
