Oneida Lake’s annual mayfly hatch once looked like scenes from a 1950s B-movie.
Each June billions of the bugs would emerge from the muck on the bottom of the lake, shed their skins, and fly inland in swarms big enough to show up on weather radar.
The blizzard of bugs plastered lakeshore homes and businesses, accumulating in drifts more than a foot deep in many places. Vast, undulating windrows of dead mayflies stretched across the lake’s surface.
Sometimes the mayfly maelstrom was so intense you wouldn’t know Oneida Lake existed. In 1957, Cornell University scientists had to postpone electrofishing operations on the lake because it was impossible to see the water through the dense mat of mayflies.
“When I was a kid back in the sixties they were so thick that South Bay Road would get covered with them and cars would literally slide off the road if they ran …