By Terence Jeffrey A reasonable person living in the United States over the past seventeen years might have been occasionally tempted to emulate a type of cicada that lives in the regions around Washington, D.C. This insect â known as Brood X â spends most of its 17 years sheltering underground. When the soil grows warm enough in the spring of its final year, as described in the 1995 edition of the Annual Review of Entomology and a 2004 story in the Daily Telegraph of London, a Brood X cicada crawls to the surface, mounts a tree, mates, leaves its eggs in the limbs of that tree, and then falls to the ground dead.