When I first moved to Kentucky from Washington State, I was totally unfamiliar with cicadas, insects which emerge from the ground at various intervals (years depend on the specific type), during the summer, and make a godawful racket.
When they first emerge, without wings, they truly are the stuff of nightmares.
Climbing up into trees, they latch on and undergo a metomorphosis not unlike a caterpillar.
Eventually, they emerge from their old exoskeleton, now with wings.
They congregate en mass in the trees, adding their rattle to the cricket chorus.
As odd, occasionally unnerving as these strange insects can be, I have begun to look forward to their arrival. Like the lightning bugs, cicadas serve as a herald of summer.