If you are in Japan and you are using fiber-optic internet, your days of super fast torrenting may be over.  Rip over at Asia-watch has posted a couple interesting articles about how crows and cicadas are damaging Japan’s fiber-optic infrastructure:

NTT West Corp. handles cable maintenance from Shizuoka Prefecture westward, which overlaps with Kumazemi habitats.

The firm discovered about 1,000 cases in which the cicadas damaged fiber-optic cables last year in its business territory, not including the Hokuriku and Sanin regions.

According to K-Opticom Corp., the Kansai Electric Power Co. telecommunications subsidiary that maintains fiber-optic networks in the Kinki region, it has found about 200 instances of damage to its cables from the cicadas.

Telecommunications firms have therefore begun taking precautionary measures, such as introducing new groove designs to help make cables damage-resistant, before the cicada season begins.

and

In the past six weeks, hundreds of homes and offices have been left without high-speed internet services after the crows discovered that broadband cable can be pecked into usable strips more easily than power cables or telephone copper wire.

Crows have discovered that the broadband cables, which are strung from telegraph poles across Tokyo, are the perfect consistency for building nests.

Although the birds’ appetite for fibre-optic cable was spotted last year, broadband service providers have begun reporting a sharp surge in instances of cable-pecking, in line with the rising population of crows.

Come on, Japan.  Let’s hurry up and kill all those crows.  If you are afraid to do it yourself, give some foreigners guns and have them wipe out those pests, geez.