The U.S. state of Illinois faces a historic summer of cicadas. Periodic cicadas live as grubs for many years underground before emerging, briefly and noisily, as adults. Some broods wait 13 years; others, 17. This year in Illinois, for the first time since 1803, the two broods’ cycles coincide. Cicadas’ reproductive strategy is to overwhelm predators with sheer numbers, so even the hungriest birds and raccoons can’t eat them all. Both groups emerging at once will mean an astonishing volume of insects: “Illinois is going to be ground zero,” one entomologist told WIRED. “From the very top to the very bottom of the state, it’s going to be covered in cicadas.”