One summer downside: here come one trillion cicadas

We love summer here. We assume you do too, since you keep reading the site even as we talk about it all the damn time. And even though there are bugs in the summer, we can usually console ourselves with the knowledge that at least we outnumber them. But not this year. As it gets warmer and warmer, we get closer to a terrifying invasion of cicadas, numbering in the billions, possibly even one trillion.

The AP reports that the bloodthirsty monsters actually harmless bugs, part of a grouping known as Brood II, will crawl out of their underground nests for the first time in 17 years when the temperature down there reaches 64 degrees. The potential date for this insect invasion, when we’ll be outnumbered 600-to-1 by the frankly terrifying looking bugs is “any day now.” Some brave souls on the Eastern Seaboard have been monitoring the ground temperature to better predict when the swarm will finally hit, and WNYC’s cicada tracker map is already showing some spots with 64 degree temperatures. And more terrifying, according to the map, cicadas have already been spotted as close as Central Park and Long Beach. Our only hope may be to eat our way out.

While they’re here, the bugs will be buzzing up a sex tornado (seriously, they come to fuck and then die) and creating the kind of racket that will make you beg to live next to a subway or a neighbor with an affinity for late-night dubstep. And while they’re technically and scientifically “harmless,” we’ve seen enough Sci-Fi original movies to know all it takes is one to get an accidental taste for human flesh, and then we’re running from a trillion angry sex bugs. All we can hope for is the cicadas are turned off by Brooklyn’s high rents and skip a visit to our fair city. Maybe that’s been Bloomberg’s plan all along?