The "Are You Ready To Be Serenaded" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading about the trillions of evolution's bizarro wonders, the red-eyed periodical cicadas that have pumps in their heads and jet-like muscles in their rears, and are about to emerge in numbers not seen in decades and possibly centuries.  Digging out from underground every 13 to 17 years, with a collective song as loud as jet engines, the periodical cicadas are nature's kings of the calendar.  These black bugs that have bulging eyes, differ from their greener tinged cousins that come out annually.  

They stay buried year after year, until they surface and take over a landscape, covering houses with shed exoskeletons and making the ground crunchy.  This coming spring an unusual cicada double dose is about to evade a couple parts of the United States in what the University fo Connecticut cicada esparto John Cooley called "cicada-geddom."  The last time these two broods came out together was in 1803 when Thomas Jefferson was President of our United States.  Mr. Cooley said, "Periodic cicadas don't do subtle!"  Hey...if you were excited about the recent solar eclipse, the cicadas are weirder and bigger!

 We've got trillions of these amazing living organisms that come out of the earth, climb up on trees, and it's just a unique experience, a sight to behold!  It's like an entire alien species living underneath our feet and then in some prime number years they come out to say hello."  Periodial cicadas are more annoying than terrible.  They can hurt young trees and some fruit crops, but damage isn't widespread and can be prevented.  The largest geographic brood in the nation - called Brood XIX are coming out every 13 years - is about to march through the Southeast.  They emerge when the ground warms to 64 degrees.  Soon after the insects appear in large numbers in Georgia and the rest of the Southeast, cicada cousins that come out every 17 years will inundate Illinois.  They are Brood XIII.  "You've got one very widely distributed brood in Brood XIX, but you have a very dense historically abundant brood in the Midwest, your Brood XIII," said University of Maryland entomologist Mike Raupp.  "And when you put those two together...you would have more than anywhere else any other time," University of Maryland entomologist Paula Shrewsbury said.  The numbers that will come out this year average around 1 million per acre over hundreds of millions of acres across 16 states -- are mind-boggling.  Easily hundreds of trillions, maybe quadrillions.  Can you envision a number that high?  An even bigger adjacent joint emergence will be when the two largest broods, XIX and XIV, come out together in 2076.  This is called the cicada-palooza.  It can be hard on the eardrums when all those cicadas get together in trees and start chorusing.  It's like a shingles break with the males singing to attract mates, with each species having its own mating call.  Wow! I can hardly wait!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.