Cicada invasion: Billions of Brood X bugs set to emerge in US cities | Science | Information

The US prepares for a cicada invasion while Brood X prepares to surface. Brut X is the name for the large 2021 cicada hatch that has been in production for 17 years. Also known as the Great Eastern Brood, the insects emerge from the ground and spend their last days in the sun.

Brood X will be released in the northeastern United States, including New York and Washington, as well as parts of the American Midwest.

The insects have lived underground for the past 17 years, but they will emerge for two weeks.

This is because they are periodic cicadas – something that is unique to the United States.

Periodic cicadas occur every 13 or 17 years – depending on the species.

When the first settlers from Europe arrived, they were shocked by the sudden appearance of billions of flying insects in a year, which attributed the phenomenon to biblical activities, similar to the locust plague.

However, scientists now know that it is a natural phenomenon as the insects count the seasons and match the growth patterns of plants and flowers.

Once the plants have completed 17 cycles, the insects will emerge from their burrows when the soil temperature reaches the right point, around 18 ° C – a temperature that is about to enter.

Experts expect them to appear from mid-May to early June.

READ MORE: Ithaca: Hypnotized by the chirping of cicadas

They are then visible to the public for two weeks to a month before they naturally become extinct.

Before they die, however, they devastate crops and local produce as they feed like the plague.

Brood X will be built in the states of Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, and Washington DC.

Michigan State University entomologist Gary Parsons said in a question-and-answer session at MSU, “With millions of adult cicadas popping up at once, predators tend to delight in them.

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“Sometimes dogs or pets will eat so many of them that they will get sick, but they are not poisonous or otherwise harmful.

“Periodic cicadas have probably been doing their 13- or 17-year cycles for millions of years. It is believed that through their long life cycles, leafhoppers prevented predators from targeting food.

“Then when they turn up in the millions, they are too numerous for all the predators to eat because they ever wiped them out.”

“There are so many of them that many of them will always survive. In the past, it was likely that the various broods were more geographically dispersed.

“It is likely that urbanization, widespread commercial agriculture, and other factors have diminished and limited it over the years.”