Don’t Worry Iowa, We’re Missing the Cicada Swarm
Summer is the best time of the year, isn't it? The weather is warm, there's no school, and the nightmare-inducing creatures that emerge from the depths of the underworld, cicadas.
Every seventeen years, right around this time cicadas emerge from underground to live, mate, and shed their exoskeleton in a huge swarm. Every summer we usually see and hear a few cicadas just buzzing around, but this year a hoard of them will appear across the continental United States.
“You’ve got a creature that spends 17 years in a Covid-like existence, isolated underground sucking on plant sap, right? In the 17th year these teenagers are going to come out of the earth by the billions if not trillions,” said University of Maryland entomologist Michael Raupp in an interview with the Hill.
Fifteen states will see this flock of hellspawn come out of the ground. These states include Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and Georgia.
Iowa is not on this list, and will not be seeing cicadas this year. However, officials do say that Iowans are not all in the clear yet.
As reported in Radio Iowa, the Hawkeye State will have to wait another ten years before our hoard of hellions rises up. 2031 will be the year that we get our share of cicadas. Officials say that they will most likely come up sometime around July of that year and stay around until the first big frost of the year.