Billions of Brood X cicadas — and their buzzing sound — will soon emerge across Indiana

The early settlers from Europe didn’t know what they were talking about.

When they first saw armies of red-eyed bugs crawl out of the dirt in America, they assumed the insects were pests: crop-destroyers on par with the locusts back home.

Cicadas aren’t anything like that. They want nothing more than to eat, sing a few songs and find someone to mate with. They aren't dangerous to humans and the worst thing they usually do to plants is damage a few tree branches after laying eggs.

But that first jolt of bad publicity nagged them for centuries. And now, mere weeks before hordes of them rise from the earth in Indiana and parts of 15 states across the Eastern U.S., they’re hearing it again.

Brood X is coming:Billions of cicadas set to swarm parts of 15 states, DC in just a few weeks

Brood X – a group of periodical cicadas that emerge every 17 years – will be all over the place by mid-May. Indiana will see one of the densest populations. The bugs will show up pretty much anywhere there are mature trees, and the males will unleash loud mating calls that will fill the late spring with buzzing music.

“To me, they sound like a stock-movie sound effect that you hear when the alien spaceship is landing,” said Eric McCloud, an associate professor of biology at the University of Southern Indiana. “It’ll be an unusual and awe-inspiring natural history moment – like the upcoming total eclipse, but louder.”

Some headlines don’t cast it that way. If you punch “cicada” into Google, you’ll find words like “plague” or “invasion.” Others take a stranger route. A Washington Post story put the forthcoming swarm alongside 2021 calamities such as the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol. And the paper quoted a woman comparing it to an “Alfred Hitchcock movie.”

A visual guide:When will the cicadas emerge in 2021? How long will they be around after they come out? When will they be back?

John Lill is fighting against all that. The chair of biology at George Washington University helps run the group Friend to Cicadas, which aims to undo the bad reputation heaped on the bugs so long ago.

They’ve put together workbooks and a haiku contest, among other things. They especially want to get through to kids who won’t see Brood X again until well into adulthood.

For a few short weeks, cicadas will change the world around us in fascinating and strange ways (just wait until you get to the parts about rats and “tree shrimp”). In all, it’s a “once in generation” occurrence.

“We’re really trying to push the narrative that this is something to get excited about,” Lill said.

How it happens

Cicadas spend most of their lives underground.

Some emerge after only a year, while the periodical types like Brood X wait 13 or 17 years. The forthcoming crop has languished in the dirt since 2004, feasting on tree roots.

In mid-to-late May, they’ll make their grand exit. They’ll crawl out of the ground, scamper up a tree and shed crunchy brown exoskeletons that will litter the earth for weeks.

Then they’ll get down to the reason for their emergence: reproduction. The males will unleash their flying-saucer calls to attract a mate. Once they find one, the females will fly to a nearby tree and lay eggs on the branches.

For the adults, that’s where it ends. They’ll be dead and gone in a matter of weeks.

“By mid-June, the whole party is over,” Lill said.

The next generation will linger in the treetops until hatching in August. The rice-sized nymphs will then fall to the ground, burrow into the soil and stay there until they surface in 2038 to start the process all over again.

Some adults, though, won’t live long enough to participate.

“Pretty much any animal that can eat cicadas will eat cicadas,” Lill said. “They’re totally defenseless.”

They don’t have toxins or stingers and can’t even bite, he said. “They really can’t do anything but buzz a little bit and try to fly away. But they’re not even good flyers.”

That means Indiana and other states will play host to a “mass slaughter.” Everything from songbirds to possums will belly-up to the buffet. Lill said gray squirrels will literally drag their engorged stomachs on the ground.

Rats love cicadas, too. And that’s where we run into a problem.

Because of the new abundance of food, rat populations can “explode” after a cicada emergence and remain that way for years, Lill said. It’s especially an issue in urban areas.

Bon Appetit

Of course, humans can eat bugs, too. It happens all over the world. 

And cicadas can be a delicacy. Lill said plenty of high-end restaurants in Washington D.C. incorporate the insects into their menus after an emergence. They’re a sustainable source of lean protein and can show up in salad and stir-fry. Lill has a colleague who sometimes dry-roasts and dips them in chocolate, giving them a nutty flavor.

The best time to eat them, though, is right after they molt. They’re basically the consistency of soft-shell crab at that point, earning them a strange moniker from one of Lill’s colleagues: “tree shrimp.”

Brood X map

In danger

But the dangers posed by humans go well beyond a creative chef.

“The exact size of the emergence … will depend on how well they’ve survived since the eggs were laid 17 years ago,” McCloud said. “There has been a fair amount of development (and) urban sprawl … in that time, so that will reduce the numbers of critters emerging.”

Cicadas live under the tree from which their mothers dropped them 17 years ago. If it’s been cut down – or paved over – they can die underground.

“They can’t emerge through concrete and asphalt,” McCloud said.

Farmland can thin-out numbers as well, and scientists have already seen some species vanish.

“A number of the broods that we know historically occurred – there were 30 or so originally – several of them have already gone extinct (in some places),” Lill said.  

That’s why researchers are asking residents to help track the bugs. Free apps like Cicada Safari allow users to upload pictures of cicadas in their neighborhood, creating a mapping project that can help biologists pinpoint where the insects are – and where they’re likely to emerge when the party kicks off again in 2038.

“This is a natural phenomenon that is unique to the Eastern United States,” Lill said. “We find it nowhere else in the world.”

Contact Jon Webb at jon.webb@courierpress.com.