Okinawan Flora and Fauna

Okinawa is near the tropics and has some interesting animals and plants. In daily life there are some interesting bugs. Okinawa has a lot of giant bugs. One thing thats most noticeable is the cicadas. There are tons of them. They are most noticeable in the night and in the early morning when you can here them making a cacophony of noise. It`s pretty obnoxious. Sometimes they land on you. That freaks me out. This bugs are at least and inch long and an inch wide and they land on you. My host mom laughed at me when I started shaking myself frantically to get the cicada off me. There`s also a lot of mosquitos and they seem to particularly like me. They don`t bother my host family, maybe they like foreign blood. Apparently they don`t use bug spray very often here. I looked up the word for spray in Japanese and asked my host mom for bug spray and she gave me Raid. Amusing now but I wasn`t very amused at the time. There`s also these giant winged cockroaches that come out at night, but I haven`t seen very many of those. (Thank God). There also a lot of geckos that come out at night. They are ALL over the place. I walked out my door one night and one fell on me from a tree. I saw one on a vending machine last night and decided to poke it with a stick and then it sprung from the screen and ran up my arm. My reaction would probably make it on America`s Funniest Home videos.