Watch for Cicadas: Billions From Brood XIV Will Soon Emerge After 17 Years Underground The insects from this group were last seen in 2008 and will appear across the eastern U.S. for a brief, dramatic frenzy of mating and dying A Brood XIV cicada in 2008, the last time this group of the insects emerged Bill Uhrich / MediaNews Group / Reading Eagle via Getty Images The cicadas are coming. Billions of the insects from Brood XIV are emerging from Tennessee to Georgia to Massachusetts this spring after spending the last 17 years hiding underground as nymphs. You might remember last year’s dual cicada emergence, but this one involves a different brood. Some cicadas emerge annually, while others emerge at 13- or 17-year intervals. Brood XIV has been around for a long time—all other 17-year broods branched off from it. “Brood XIV is the same brood that was first recorded in 1634 by the pilgrims in the Plymouth colony,” explains Gene Kritsky, an entomologist at Mount St. Joseph University, to Jason Bittel at National Geographic. “And there it is, still emerging in Plymouth.” Once above ground, the so-called periodical cicadas get rowdy fast. The nymphs molt out of their exoskeletons, turn into winged adults and start their loud, chirping mating call. They mate, lay their eggs and quickly die off. But things get gory for the many cicadas that are unlucky enough to be infected by the deadly fungal parasite Massospora cicadina. The fungus produces drugs that suppress cicadas’ appetites and essentially puppeteer them to mate, even as their genitals fall off, so that it can spread its spores. “It’s sex, drugs and zombies,” says John Cooley, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut, to Mindy Weisberger at Scientific American. “Nature is stranger than any science fiction that’s ever been written.” After the brood’s offspring hatch, they’ll crawl back underground for the next 17 years. And the cycle will continue. The emergence isn’t all sex and death. Periodical cicadas actually play an important role in the local ecosystem. Their emergence tunnels aerate the soil, and they serve as food for many species. Their carcasses are useful, too. The dead cicadas’ bodies provide nitrogen and other nutrients to the soil as they decompose. The native insects are not pests, scientists say. “They don’t swarm,” says Kritsky to Jeffrey Kluger at Swarms are usually directed, coordinated movements of individual [insects] in a particular area. They’re lousy flyers. They’re flying around, but they’re really not doing much, just going from tree to tree. They don’t carry disease. They don’t bite. They won’t carry away your pets.” “In pediatric journals you read about people being harmed by cicadas,” adds Cooley to TIME. “But it was always something stupid, like riding down the road on a motorcycle without a helmet and one hits them in the eye.” If you come across a cicada that you think is part of Brood XIV, you can upload photos of the insect to an app called Cicada Safari. This helps scientists like Kritsky with their work to understand the animal’s patterns. “I’ve got a team of parataxonomists verifying every individual photograph,” he says to National Geographic. They will confirm that the insect is a periodical cicada and add it to a map that helps scientists track cicadas and their emergence cycles. Kritsky received 128,000 photographs last year, and he’s hoping to see the same amount of participation this time around. Even if you don’t spot something as gruesome as a fungus-infected zombie cicada, the size of the emergence alone is impressive. “Everybody loves a spectacle,” Cooley tells Scientific American. “And if these aren’t a spectacle, I don’t know what is.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.