The Washington Post reports:

They’ve been buried — alive — for 17 years.

And now, Brood X, one of the world’s largest swarms of giant fly-like bugs called cicadas, is ready to rise. When the ground warms to 64 degrees, they’ll stop gnawing on tree roots and start scratching toward the surface by the hundreds of billions.

Georgia and other Southern states will probably be where they first emerge around the end of March, experts say. But residents of the Washington area are standing at ground zero. The District, Maryland and Virginia are likely to host more of these animals than any other of the 14 states that share the experience.

“We are at the epicenter of an event that happens nowhere else on the planet except here in the Eastern United States,” said Mike Raupp, a University of Maryland entomologist who travels the country giving speeches about cicadas.

“It’s going to be pretty remarkable, come the latter half of May,” Raupp said. “The densities of these things is going be phenomenal, about 1.5 million per acre. It blows your mind.” [Continue reading…]