The last time Brood XIX and Brood XII emerged from underground at the same time, Thomas Jefferson was president
They look a little like cockroaches and have bulging orange eyes, and trillions of them are about to erupt from the earth in much of the midwestern and eastern United States. The emergence of two groups of cicadas will assemble a chorus of the insects not seen in several hundred years, experts say.
The simultaneous appearance of the two cicada broods – known as Brood XIX and Brood XII – is a rare event, not having occurred since 1803, a year when Thomas Jefferson was US president. “It’s really exciting. I’ve been looking forward to this for many years,” said Catherine Dana, an entomologist who specializes in cicadas at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “For the public, it’s going to be a really special experience.”
There are thousands of species of cicadas around the world but only 10 are considered periodical – having a life cycle that involves the juvenile cicadas living underground and feeding on plant sap for years before emerging en masse to the surface.
This year will see Brood XIX, the largest of all periodical cicada groups, emerge after a 13-year dormancy underground at the same time as Brood XII, a smaller group that appears every 17 years. The emergence will occur in spring, as early as this month in some places, and will see trillions of cicadas pop up in as many as 16 states, from Maryland to Oklahoma and from Illinois to Alabama.
Note that these broods are mostly not in the same region, so most places will see a fairly normal amount of cicadas this year.
Eastern Illinois gets both broods, it’s gonna be WILD there.
I am super excited because I am in the overlap. And I get the eclipse! Real banner year for me.
Pretty interesting getting to see these rare but predictable things coinciding and thinking about how it might have seemed like a series of omens to people in the past.
People of the present too. I hope this doesn’t ramp up some conspiracy cult ala QAnon due to the timing of everything. People are already spreading crazy beliefs over the eclipse.
Some people on instagram is gona start quoting the bible again when this comes
“For the public, it’s going to be a really special experience.”
That’s one way of looking at it …
Man, when we (2 Brits) lived in Sydney a couple of years ago, we unwittingly went camping during a mass cicada hatching. The cicada grubs were coming out of the ground and crawling up everything (tent, chairs, us!) to hatch.
We were 2 hopeless pommies fairly new to the Aussie bush and didn’t know what on earth was going on. Utterly freaked. Coupled with all the other crazy wildlife we encountered (stick insects the size of your forearm, lizard things the size of me!) and it’s amazing we didn’t pack up and leave. And also, I mean, the fact that half of Aussie animals can legitimately kill you.
But we stuck it out and had an awesome time. Cicadas were pretty amazing in the end - left fantastic exoskeletons (a bit like Geiger’s alien) and were deafening.
Generally, a 13-year brood emerges in the same year as a 17-year brood roughly every 5-6 years, though most of the 17-year broods are not in contact with a 13-year brood, so the different cicadas are clearly separated in space. A co-emergence involving adjacent broods of different life cycles is something that happens only roughly every 25 years. Any two specific broods of different life cycles co-emerge only every 221 years.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s exciting that these two broods are co-emerging, but broods co-emerge more frequently than hundreds of years
