The cicadas are coming! This spring, more than a trillion cicadas will crawl out of the ground in the eastern U.S. They will mate, lay eggs, and die.

Double whammy

These aren’t annual cicadas that surface every year. They’re broods of periodical cicadas. These groups of insects appear in cycles. Some broods appear every 13 years, some every 17 years. And this spring, two big broods will emerge at the same time in the same part of the country.