brood II is coming!

After a 17-year hiatus, billions of cicadas are expected to crawl out of the ground this spring and swarm the U.S. East Coast.

According to the New York Daily News, teeming hordes of Brood II cicadas will likely emerge sometime between mid-April and late May. The insects are expected to fill the skies from North Carolina through New England with a noisy chorus that has been compared to the rumble of a New York City subway train.

"Brood II is a periodic cicada that hatches out every 17 years," Craig Gibbs, an entomologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society's Queens Zoo, told CBS News.

"It'll be noisy. There's no getting around the noise," he said, adding that the insects will be identifiable by their dark-colored bodies and the bright red of their eyes and wing veins. (via)

i fucking love cicadas, for some reason.

thx thomas wilhelm!