Weather.com - 5/06/13
5 year old Chase Harrison holds up a cicada he caught near his home in Alexandria, Virginia in May 2004. (Image: Stephen Jaffe/AFP/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON -- Any day now, billions of cicadas with bulging red eyes will crawl out of the earth after 17 years underground and overrun the East Coast. They will arrive in such numbers that people from North Carolina to Connecticut will be outnumbered roughly 600-to-1. Maybe more.
But ominous as that sounds - along with scientists' horror-movie name for the infestation, Brood II - they're harmless. These insects won't hurt you or other animals. At worst, they might damage a few saplings or young shrubs. Mostly they will blanket certain pockets of the region, though lots of people won't ever see them.
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