This year, between May and June, two different broods of the insect (one that lives on a 13-year cycle and another on a 17-year cycle) will mate simultaneously, causing the usual number to double. The last time both emerged at the same time from underground was in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was president. Cicadas crawl to the surface, mate, then lay eggs and die off. According to Cicada Mania, which catalogues statistics and information on the flying insects, these cicadas will start to emerge once the soil eight inches below the ground reaches 64 degrees Fahrenheit, after the trees have grown leaves. Brood XIX, also known as the Great Southern Brood, is the largest brood of 13-year cicadas, and was last seen in 2011 in the southeastern U.S. They can be expected to be seen in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Brood XIII, also know as the Northern Illinois Brood, was last seen in 2007 and can be expected to appear in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin and possibly Michigan. “Nobody alive today will see it happen again,” Floyd W. Shockley, an entomologist and collections manager at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, told the New York Times. “That’s really rather humbling.” Shockley says the dual emergence will likely result in more than one trillion cicadas appearing. With cicadas being just over an inch long, laid end-to-end, they would stretch more than 15.7 million miles. “That cicada train would reach to the moon and back 33 times,” he said. “Under just the right circumstances and with just the right number of individuals cross breeding,” he said, “you have the possibility of the creation of a new brood set to a new cycle. This is an extremely rare event.” He added that forested areas, which include green spaces in urban areas, will see higher numbers than agricultural regions.Anyone who believe we are currently living in the “end times” won’t receive much comfort this spring when billions of cicadas emerge across the U.S. in a rare display that occurs only once every 221 years.
