Cicadas are back—and this time it’s the ‘mother of all broods’
The eastern U.S. is about to be inundated with trillions of Brood XIV periodical cicadas—which were first documented by the pilgrims in 1634.
The last time the periodical cicadas known as Brood XIV emerged, Netflix was still sending DVDs through the mail, people were buying ringtones for their Blackberries, and Barack Obama was about to be elected president of the United States.
Seventeen years later, the world is a very different place. But for periodical cicadas, which spend more than a decade underground as nymphs before emerging in one giant wave as winged adults, it’s business as usual.
“Brood XIV is the same brood that was first recorded in 1634 by the pilgrims in the Plymouth colony,” says Gene Kritsky, professor emeritus at Mount St. Joseph College in Ohio, who’s been studying cicadas for more than 50 years. “And there it is, still emerging in Plymouth.”
Of course, it would be another century before Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus gave these large, loud insects their official genus name, Magicicada. In fact, while researching his new book, The Pilgrims’ Promise: The 2025 Emergence of the Periodical Cicada Brood XIV, Kritsky scoured historical newspaper accounts and found a great and recurring fascination with periodical cicadas, which were frequently called locusts or grasshoppers, even though they’re not closely related to either.
William Bradford, a governor of the Plymouth colony, wrote in 1634 that they were “great flies” that produced “a constant yelling noise” and “made all the woods ring of them.”
“European settlers had little to compare the emergence to, other than perhaps the stories of biblical plagues,” says PJ Liesch, an entomologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “Interestingly, Native Americans were well aware of the cicadas and actually used them as a food source.”
While scientists now know more about periodical cicadas, thanks to genetics and crowd-sourced mapping efforts, much of what we understand about these cyclical insects is still based off historical records.
“It’s a generational insect,” Kritsky says.
The mother of all cicada broods
Not all broods are created equal. Making the most basic distinction, there are annual cicadas, which have black or brown eyes, and then there are periodical cicadas, which almost always have red eyes and only emerge from the ground at 13- or 17-year intervals.
All periodical cicadas in a given year are part of the same brood, which is sort of like a graduating class. However, there are also five different species of periodical cicadas, and each brood year can include multiple species. To complicate things more, there are 15 different broods: thirteen broods of 17-year cicadas mostly in the north and three broods of 13-year cicadas mostly in the south.
For instance, Brood XIV includes three cicada species: Magicicada cassini, Magicicada septendecim, and Magicicada septendecula. Scientists think the Magicicada genus evolved about 3.9 to 4 million years ago, at which point there would have been no broods.
“That was before the Ice Age,” says Chris Simon, a biologist at the University of Connecticut who has been studying cicadas for half a century.
As the ice sheets ebbed and flowed across the North American continent, some cicadas started shifting their emergences, either arriving four years early or four years late. It’s thought that colder climates push periodical cicadas toward lateness, while warmer climates jumpstart the insects into an earlier emergence.
Eventually, enough cicadas changed schedule to break into broods, which is how we arrived at the patterns witnessed today.
Brood XIV is particularly special because it’s considered the “mother of all 17-year broods,” which means it’s the original that all the other 17-year broods broke off from.
To put it in the parlance of the youth, this year’s cicadas are the OGs.
Go on a Cicada safari
While the sudden arrival of trillions of baby-carrot-sized insects may cause concern for the squeamish, periodical cicadas are harmless—and for the adventurous, they are also edible.
“We don't have written records from prior to [European] contact, but we know that the Iroquois would excavate the nymphs early, just before they would come up, and clean them and dry roast them,” says Kritsky.
For those who choose to forgo a feast, Kritsky recommends observing them. He encourages cicada enthusiasts to download the free Cicada Safari app, which allows you to upload photos of cicadas as they emerge.
“I’ve got a team of parataxonomists verifying every individual photograph,” he says. Once they determine the animal in the photo is, in fact, a periodical cicada, that data point gets added to an ever-evolving map that helps experts track the insects and learn more about their cycles.
Last year, Kritsky received 128,000 photographs, and he hopes to match that number.
Of course, if you’re helping to document the emergence on the coast of Massachusetts, the insects you’ll encounter will actually be the descendants of those who made a raucous so loud, it’s echoed through history.
