Learning to Love Cicadas In Time for Brood X

First came the nickel-sized holes in her backyard, and the small dirt turrets popping up near trees. Then the plump, beady-eyed creatures with mouths like drinking straws began to crawl forth from their underground hibernation and begin their brief, noisy quest for a mate.

This time, Martha Weiss was prepared. She had been waiting for this moment for 17 years, since the last batch of Brood X — also known as the Great Eastern Brood, a massive eruption of periodical cicadas that parts of 15 U.S. states will experience this spring and summer — appeared in the Georgetown University biology professor’s home city of Washington, D.C.

“Today, we are bombarded 100 times a day with articles about cicada this and cicada that,” Weiss said. “Back then, it was pretty much silence, and then all of a sudden there were millions of insects crawling all over the sidewalks and the trees and the bicycles and the mailboxes.”

Although Weiss, and her children, had been caught off guard by the 2004 cicada swarm, she delighted in every part of the winged invasion. But she knew that not everyone shared that openness.

“If somebody has a tendency to be a little bit scared of insects, this would be a great opportunity to develop a full-blown fear,” she said. So, along with illustrator Dio Cramer, she published a children’s book, What to Expect When You’re Expecting … Cicadas!, out this spring, and worked with a colleague to create cicada-prep materials for classrooms. “With a little bit of context and knowledge and information, what we hoped to do was to allay those fears and ideally foster appreciation and amazement at this phenomenon.”

For many, Brood X has already inspired its fair share of anticipation, not all of it eager. According to Jeffrey A. Lockwood, who wroteThe Infested Mind: Why Humans Fear, Loathe, and Love Insects, as many as 19 million Americans are considered entomophobic, meaning they possess a persistent, excessive and debilitating fear of insects. Many others have a more quotidian aversion to bugs.

As the ground warms and the first cicadas emerge, one coping strategy is getting out of town. D.W., 33, was in high school in Prince George’s County, Maryland, during the last 17-year awakening. “It was miserable and a bit traumatic,” she said in a Twitter direct message. She asked to be identified only by her first name. “I’ve had a fairly severe phobia of insects for as long as I can remember, and having large numbers of cicadas flying around everywhere and often flying into me was terrifying.”

Waiting for the school bus outside as a teen, she could do little to mitigate her interaction with the creatures. But this year, as an adult who is fully vaccinated and working remotely, she’s been able to wrest back control: She plans to visit friends and family in New England, outside of the cicada zone, for the next few weeks.