Ever hear of a bugnado?

[Dumpsterkitty]

Me neither...creepy! 

2011 Flood Bugnado Bugnadoes

Explained at Life's Little Mysteries:

    On the night of July 4, professional storm chaser and photographer Mike Hollingshead caught sight of an enormous bugnado in southwestern Iowa. The air above the cornfields was so thick with bugs "it looked like it was smoking," Hollingshead told Life's Little Mysteries. He captured the strange sight on camera..

    Joe Kieper, an entomologist who is executive director of the Virginia Museum of Natural History, says they are swarms of either mayflies or midges...

    But whichever type of insect they were, they literally had a field day this summer. "If it's a flooded cornfield, that would explain why there are so many critters," Kieper said. "When you get water in a field, vegetation starts to rot and the water fills with bacteria. This is food for the insects. Because there's so much food available, when they emerge as adults, you get this huge swarm."

I can pretty well guarantee that these are midges rather than mayflies, whose emergence swarms can be so big as to be visible on radar, but individually are larger than those seen in the video.


via TYWIKIWDBI

And stills posted here

[MAK]

Pretty wild! 

[Carol P.]

Wow!  Pretty incredible stuff.  Thanks for posting Ei.

[Patti from Kentucky]

    Joe Kieper, an entomologist who is executive director of the Virginia Museum of Natural History, says they are swarms of either mayflies or midges...

Jeane and I got caught in a swarm of mayflies one day on a lunchtime walk along the Ohio River...we kept seeing a few bugs here and there, then suddenly there were hundreds!  We had to shield our faces with our hands because they were smacking into us...eventually we passed through the swarm, but it was pretty disconcerting.