Here Comes The Noise: Infamous ‘Brood X’ Returns This Spring

Just when you thought it was going to be a nice, calm, relaxing spring season, some of the most notorious noisemakers in America are set to return.

Every seventeen years, an incredibly robust swarm of cicadas emerge from their hibernation, like clockwork, to loudly sing their mating songs from high atop trees up and down the east coast.  This particular year, it’s “Brood X” who’s coming back to visit, and they are one enormous bunch.

A “tsunami” of cicadas will emerge from a 17-year slumber in more than a dozen states across the U.S. in the coming months, with billions of the insects surfacing from the earth to conduct a “boisterous” mating ritual.

The swarms, collectively “Brood X,” are periodical cicadas that have spent almost two decades preparing for the flight, which will see them mate and lay eggs before dying—enjoying a short burst of life before the hibernation process starts anew.

They will emerge in Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York , Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C., researchers have said.

The three species that make up Brood X will surface from the soil between May and late June. Periodical cicadas are found nowhere else on the planet except the eastern half of North America, with the last emergence event taking place back in 2004.

And they’re quite predictable.

It’s not a random event, either. Experts at the University of Connecticut have compiled a detailed map of locations where the insects are expected to appear in the U.S.

For those who are unaware of just how incredibly prominent the cicadas mating song in, we’ll leave you with a clip that should sufficiently explain: