(NewsNation) — Tens of billions of noisy cicadas are set to emerge from the ground in the coming weeks in a rare synchronized event that last took place 221 years ago. Tamra Reall, entomologist and horticulture field specialist at the University of Missouri, joins NewsNation’s “Morning in America” to discuss what the event will look and sound like.
“Expect a lot of noise. So there are a lot of cicadas you can’t miss it. If you’re in one of the areas where they’re emerging, they will literally cover the trees, there will be so many that you will be able to see you can’t miss it. And it is loud,” Reall said.
These black bugs with 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 spring, an unusual cicada double dose is about to invade a couple parts of the United States in what University of Connecticut cicada expert John Cooley called “cicada-geddon.” The last time these two broods came out together in 1803 Thomas Jefferson, who wrote about cicadas in his Garden Book but mistakenly called them locusts, was president.
“These are only found in the eastern United States. So there’s about 15 states that we’ll see brood 19, Missouri is one of them, probably the biggest state with the emergence, and then brood 13 is up in the Chicago area, Illinois and then a few states up there,” Reall told NewsNation.
Crawling out from underground every 13 or 17 years, with a collective song as loud as jet engines, the periodical cicadas are nature’s kings of the calendar.
If you’re fascinated by the upcoming solar eclipse, the cicadas are weirder and bigger, said Georgia Tech biophysicist Saad Bhamla.
“We’ve got trillions of these amazing living organisms come out of the Earth, climb up on trees and it’s just a unique experience, a sight to behold,” Bhamla said. “It’s like an entire alien species living underneath our feet and then some prime number years they come out to say hello.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.