The swarm will arrive any day now.
Billions, possibly trillions, of cicadas with bright red eyes will feverishly tunnel up from the ground where they’ve waited the past 17 years.
One to 2 inches in size, the insects will take advantage of the warming spring temperatures to dig their way free and swarm up into the nearby trees. Soon Brood X will invade the Washington, D.C., metro area and 14 other states to reproduce for about six weeks before disappearing again for another 17 years.
To the uninitiated, the flying, five-eyed periodical cicada with its frenzied, 96-decibel mating song might sound like something from an ambitious B movie. But entomologists with the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU) stress this is a harmless and unique chance to encounter the rare cicada event and, for the brave, maybe even a unique culinary opportunity.
Dr. James English, USU adjunct assistant professor of Preventive Medicine and Biostatistics now at the U.S. Geological Survey, recommends the best way to experience this phenomenon is to wait until midnight, get a flashlight and head to a forest as the insects emerge from the ground.
"Go out there with a headlamp or flashlight and watch them come out of the ground," English said. "Silently and slowly, they come out of these holes in the ground, climbing up a tree or a bush or a vine."
After ascending, the cicadas will then break out of their nymph exoskeleton and over the next five to six hours harden a new adult life stage with wings.
"(They'll) have translucent orange wings and orange legs and the beautiful cherry red eyes," he said.
The colorful insects will then spend the next six weeks trying to reproduce, laying eggs in the trees before dying, and the process begins all over again.
There are 15 documented cicada broods that come out either every 13 or 17 years. Brood X, named after the Roman numeral 10 and its order of classification, is one of the largest of these groups. The last time they debuted Facebook was still a new website and the television show 'Friends' had recently ended.
Some of the oldest living insects on the planet, cicadas are mentioned in Homer's 'The Iliad' and were observed by settlers in North America as early as the 1700s.
According to English, the reason the cicadas have such a long underground development period, where they spend their time feeding off the roots of trees, is because of the need to outlast their predators - which is basically everything. Squirrels, rabbits, birds, and mice will all enthusiastically eat cicadas when they emerge. It's essentially an all-you-can-eat cicada buffet, and all those extra calories go to increasing the predator population.
English said the number 17 has meaning. The prime number keeps the different cicada broods from coming out at the same time, except for every 221 years when hypothetical 13-year and 17-year broods might be co-located and emerge simultaneously, allowing them to breed with each other.