Those placemats in your local Chinese restaurant will tell you 1999 is the year of the hare, or rabbit. For many West Virginians, however, 1999 probably seems more like the year of a certain noisy insect-the periodical cicada.

After spending nearly two decades living in underground tunnels sucking sap from the roots of trees and shrubs, millions of cicadas emerged from the ground in May and June.

According to the WVU Extension Service, the irksome insects responded to their internal 17-year alarm clocks in 40 counties in the Mountain State this year, as well as in parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland.

In their few weeks above ground, periodical cicadas mate, lay their eggs, and then die.

Although they have a unique appearance-adult cicadas are one and one-half to two inches long and black with orange or orange-brown body stripes and red eyes and legs-the periodical cicada is best known for its incessant high-pitched droning, a sound many find annoying or even unbearable.

The males of the species are the culprits. Females are voiceless. Morning to night, the males produce five different mating sounds, the most common one sounding like "farro." Another common noise produced by the insects is a whirring sound.

West Virginians don't have to be told what sounds these insects make. They are very familiar with the insects' cacophony.

"The noise is the worst," said Wayne Bennett, a WVU Extension agent and Extension associate professor in Putnam County. "From daybreak to dark, it's a continual roar. If you have a heavy infestation, the louder the roar is."

Bennett said people don't have much choice but to en to the insects. "There's not much you can really do," he said. "Just go inside and shut the windows and doors. Turn up the music or TV."

Although the females don't make any noise, they make their mark with the damage they inflict on twigs and small branches. The female cicadas make egg-laying slits or punctures on branches and twigs. Twigs with a multitude of slits are often broken or partially broken from the branches.

More than 250 species of trees and shrubs are subject to attack by the egg-laying female. However, she seems to prefer oak, maple, apple, dogwood, and nut trees. Lone fruit trees or seedlings less than a foot tall are most vulnerable. Mature forest trees usually can withstand this temporary harm because the cicada finds many twigs in forests in which to deposit eggs.

"If you have heavy populations, they can completely destroy the limbs on a tree," said Bennett. "They can kill small trees and shrubs."

If cicadas have damaged your trees, prune them. Cut out, as far as is practical, the badly-damaged twigs and branches. With fertilization, you can stimulate these trees to a rapid, vigorous growth so that the wounded places will heal more rapidly.

• Everybody who's ever heard the sound of a male periodical cicada on a warm spring day knows there is a certain, uh, musicality about it.
  
• Does all that music from the male cicada really attract the female's attention? French entomologist and nature writer Jean-Henri Fabre fired a cannon blast at a tree full of singing cicadas and noted that not a beat was missed and the insects seemed undisturbed. His conclusion, that cicadas are deaf, has been partly disproven by recent research. The female cicada's ears are attuned to hear only the frequencies in the song of the male—cannon blasts would not be heard.
  
• Bob Dylan, receiving an honorary degree from Princeton University in the spring of 1970, apparently was inspired by their serenade during the ceremony and wrote about them afterward in "Day of the Locusts."
  
• Nashville roots-rocker Rodney Crowell and company named their band and their 1997 album The Cicadas.
  
  
  
  

• The North American periodical cicada is not a locust. The Pilgrims dubbed the cicada a "locust" when it first appeared to them at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1634. The insect undoubtedly reminded them of the migratory locust, a species of grasshopper that ruined crops in Egypt in Biblical times and still is a threat to crops in many parts of the world.
  
• Stories about the sting of the cicada are false-the insect has no stinger. People sometimes mistake the vibrations of the wings or the sharpness of the feet as a sting. Likewise, it is a myth that fruit is poisoned if "stung" by a cicada.
  
• The dark bars on the cicada's filmy wings resemble a "W." To the superstitious, their appearance suggests that war is imminent.