Cicadas Know How to End a Multiyear Lockdown Katherine J. Wu A lot can change in 17 years. The last time the cicadas were here, the virus behind the SARS outbreak had finally retreated. George W. Bush was campaigning for his second presidential term, and Myspace had commenced its meteoric rise. Tobey Maguire was still the reigning Spider-Man. The year was 2004, and a roaring mass of red-eyed, black-bodied insects had just mated and died—and left behind billions of baby bugs, heirs of the hallowed Brood X, to burrow into the soil for a lonely stint underground. Now, as the world attempts to trounce a new SARS-like virus, these orphaned insects are resurfacing for their first taste of sunlight in nearly two decades. By mid-May or so, a dozen states in the Mid-Atlantic, South, and Midwest will be bombarded with teenage bugs, creaking out choruses of come-hither calls—some as loud as lawn mowers—and jonesing for sex. For a few short, glorious weeks, the newly liberated bugs will gather in clouds as dense as 1.5 million per acre, blanketing trees and roadways, filling buildings and buses and the bellies of dogs. They will mate, and then they will die, dropping a legion of eggs to hatch another generation of cicadas into the dirt, beginning the cycle anew. It is an X-rated