Dispensary Corner

THERE’S a noisy crisis in the Chinese city of Hangzhou where an outbreak of cicadas is causing havoc with the local greenery.

There aren’t many natural predators to the summer insects, so local officials have decided to encourage locals to snack on the high protein creatures.

Local official Sun Xiaoping said “every summer we ask our staff to help catch the cicadas.

“But we can’t keep up - so foodies, come and help us.”

We’re looking forward to the local tasting notes comparing the flavours of a Yellow Monday, a Greengrocer or a Black Prince.

AND in a similar vein, while AC/DC insists that Rock ‘n’

Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution, new groundbreaking research published in the Evolution and Ecology journal begs to differ.

Wildlife experts have found that headbanging rock actually does disrupt the environment.

To test the so-called “AC/ DC Hypothesis”, researchers compared the impact of rock, country and folk music on the behaviour of ladybugs as they ate aphids in a soybean field.

Country and folk had little impact, but loud rock music saw significantly less of the pests destroyed by the ladybugs.

And intriguingly, plants exposed to the headbanging entertainment were 25% smaller than those raised in blissful peace.