This could be the strangest appeal any city authorities have made to their people.

The city of Hangzhou in east China recently asked its residents to help reduce the number of cicadas on the street by catching and eating the bugs.

Footage on Chinese social media apparently shows people in Hangzhou harvesting the bugs before turning them into a deep-fried dish, with comments reading 'they are so delicious'.

Citizens in east China have been asked to catch cicadas to help control the insects' population

Web user 'Private_Dining' is seen catching one cicada shedding its skin in a bamboo forest

One Hangzhou resident told MailOnline that he went to a bamboo forest to catch the insects on July 8.

'I went there at night, so I brought a torch and pointed it towards the branches. It's very easy to catch them. I just grabbed and put them in a jar,' he said.

A video showed him catching a cicada that was molting.

'There are no wings. It's still growing,' he can be heard in the video.

The resident, known by his internet screen name 'private dining', then deep-fried dozens of cicadas he had caught in a wok.

He filmed the process before uploading the footage onto Weibo.

He also wrote on his account: 'Freshly fried cicadas, every one of them was alive. Too delicious!'

Video shows one Hangzhou resident frying cicadas. The city's landscape department recently asked those 'who like eating cicadas' to help catch the bugs in a bid to reduce its population

Last week, the Landscape Department of Hangzhou asked the city's nine million residents to help control the population of cicadas, according to China Central Television.

However, some local residents told the press that they are not in favour of eating cicadas in Hangzhou.

The department therefore encouraged members of public and web users: 'There are too many cicadas. Those who love eating them, please come and catch them.'

Sun Xiaoping, who is in charge of the city's urban greenery planning, said cicadas have 'very few natural predators'. Therefore, it's easy to see an overpopulation of the insects.

'Cicadas can be killed by birds and mantises, but there aren't a lot of mantises in this concrete city, so its biggest enemy would be us, humans,' Ms Sun told China Central Television.

The resident told MailOnline that he went to a bamboo forest to catch the insects on July 8. Then he turned the insects into a 'yummy' meal by having them deep-fried in the kitchen

Cicadas have a life span of five to six years. They could sometimes bring headache to city management because one cicada could lay about 100 eggs each time, stated China Central Television.

According to a report published by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, insects could provide twice as much protein per 100g as meat and fish; they are also rich in fat, calcium, iron and zinc.

The phenomenon of eating insects can be observed in parts of central Africa, south-east Asia and China.

Officials in Hangzhou (file photo) ask their residents to help control the population of cicadas