Cicadas Rising
A visual guide to 2024’s rare dual appearance
May 3, 2024 | Source: CNN | by Katie Hunt, Henrik Pettersson, Tiffany Baker, Marco Chacón, Annette Choi, Rachel Ramirez and Lou Robinson
Billions of bugs are emerging from the soil across a large swath of the United States in a natural phenomenon last witnessed in 1803.
It involves two broods, or groups, of periodical cicadas, insects with relatively long life cycles that show up after a certain interval. The Northern Illinois brood spends 17 years underground before surfacing and is known as Brood XIII, while the Great Southern Brood, or Brood XIX, lives underground for 13 years.
“What’s so stunning is that they’re here all along … but because they’re underground everybody forgets about them,” said cicada expert John Lill, a professor of biology at George Washington University.
The synchronous dual emergence of these two particular broods, which happens once every 221 years, is underway until June. The next time the two broods appear together, it will be 2245.