Imagine for a moment that you’re having a boring Tuesday evening at work watching the radar in Southern California for the National Weather Service.
Then something strange catches your eye. There’s a slow-moving mass coming in from the north and bearing down on Southern California. It’s not a rain cloud, you soon realize, or a weather system but it is massive like one: An 80 by 80-mile blob chugging along toward San Diego. With all this UFO talk lately, you take a second to wonder if this finally the extraterrestrial invasion television has taught us to expect.
The giant mass observed this week was actually an 80 by 80-mile group of ladybugs flying from 5,000 to 10,000 feet in the air. The “bloom” of ladybugs was densest in a 10-mile mass in the middle and could be seen by people as flying “specks” from the ground.
Thanks to radar images shared by the National Weather Service and published by the Los Angeles Times, we can see that the adorable apocalypse looked like this:
The @NWSSanDiego reports that the large echo showing up on radar in Southern California last night was actually a cloud of ladybugs about 80 miles by 80 miles in size flying at between 5,000 and 9,000 feet: https://t.co/0tZQryBR1v pic.twitter.com/qiMKcDd3Pe
— Shah Selbe (@shahselbe) June 5, 2019
Ladybugs, one of the few insects that don’t cause us to automatically wretch in disgust, will make good overlords once they land and choose their capital city.
A Los Angeles Times report details how in spring, ladybugs annually pick up and migrate from the Sierra Nevada mountains to mate, eat, and lay eggs.
May God, who is clearly a vengeful and horny ladybug, have mercy on our souls.
