In what can only be described as Mother Nature’s attempt at synchronized chaos, two broods of cicadas — Brood XIX and the geographically-minded Brood XIII — are emerging in the eastern and midwestern United States this year. They have been underground for either 13 years or 17 years depending on which brood you ask, although no one has ever accused a cicada of being good with numbers. But thanks to the marvels of evolutionary quirkiness and a shared taste for warm soil, both broods are now preparing to tunnel upward and scream into the summer air like tiny winged banshees who have just discovered the concept of “outside.”
This rare double emergence, last seen in 1803 when Thomas Jefferson was president and likely too dignified to comment on insects yelling from trees, is set to delight entomologists and slightly alarm everyone else. Scientists note that these two broods rarely overlap even though their life cycles have a habit of colliding catastrophically once every couple of centuries, like clockwork if the clock was drunk and buried in dirt for over a decade.
According to experts, including several who willingly refer to themselves as cicada specialists — a job title that surely sparks envy at family barbecues — the show will be spectacular, if loud. Across parts of the Midwest and Southeast, billions of cicadas are expected to emerge, mate noisily, and then promptly die, which in various ways captures the essence of most college music festivals. The males will serenade the females with persistent, high-pitched songs that can reach 100 decibels, which is just about the volume of a motorcycle engine or a teenager explaining why they need AirPods.
While the two broods belong to the same genus, Magicicada, they never interbreed, mostly because they emerge in different regions, and possibly because even cicadas have standards. Instead, they will each carry out their separate yet equally enthusiastic missions of mating, laying eggs in trees, and littering forests with a fine layer of molted exoskeletons that crunch unpleasantly underfoot and dissuade picnics faster than a wasps’ nest.
Scientists are excited about the data they can collect during this rare overlap, which is predicted to help answer age-old questions such as “Why do cicadas follow prime number cycles?” and “How much screaming from trees does it take before people stop going outside?”
The next time this numerical magic is expected to occur won’t be until the year 2245, giving generations ample time to forget entirely how loud it all was. Or possibly just enough time to invent noise-cancelling umbrellas.
So if you hear a whirring chorus this summer that sounds like a fleet of kettles on the verge of breakdown, do not worry — it is just nature’s very own pop-up concert, and the headliners have all been underground since the Bush administration.
Because nothing says romance like billions of bugs rising from the dirt just to scream and die in the trees.