Are Cicadas in Georgia? Types, Timing, and Locations

Georgia is home to both periodical and annual cicadas, making it one of the more cicada-rich states in the Southeast. The state sits within the range of at least two major periodical broods and hosts several species of annual cicadas that sing through every summer. Georgia also holds a notable distinction as the southernmost state where Brood X periodical cicadas emerge, with researchers documenting the brood across nine Georgia counties during its 2021 appearance.

Periodical Broods That Reach Georgia

The periodical cicadas that generate the most excitement and alarm are those in the genus Magicicada, which spend either 13 or 17 years developing underground before emerging in synchronized masses. Two broods are particularly relevant to Georgia residents.

Brood X is a 17-year brood whose range extends from the mid-Atlantic states southward into the north Georgia mountains. During its 2021 emergence, the first adult Brood X cicada in Georgia was photographed on April 26 in Lumpkin County, and the most commonly encountered species was Magicicada septendecim. Researchers used a combination of site visits and online records to confirm the brood in nine Georgia counties, six of which had produced no records during the previous 2004 emergence.¹ That expansion of documented counties could reflect a genuine range shift, or it could simply mean nobody was looking closely in 2004. Either way, the Brood X population in Georgia tends to concentrate in the mountainous northern part of the state, and its next emergence is expected in 2038.

Brood XIX, known as the Great Southern Brood, is a 13-year brood and the largest periodical brood by geographic area. Its range blankets much of the southeastern United States, including large swaths of Georgia. Brood XIX last emerged in 2024, meaning Georgia residents who heard dense choruses of periodical cicadas that spring were likely witnessing this brood. Its next emergence is expected in 2037. Historically, brood distributions have shifted over time: some broods have expanded while others have contracted or even gone extinct, as documented through records stretching back over a century.²

Annual Cicadas and the Summer Soundtrack

Periodical cicadas get most of the press, but the cicadas most Georgians hear every year are annual species, sometimes called dog-day cicadas because they tend to peak during the hottest weeks of July and August. These belong to genera like Neotibicen and Megatibicen, and they’re the ones producing that sustained, buzzy drone from treetops on summer afternoons. Unlike their periodical cousins, annual cicadas don’t synchronize on long cycles. Individual broods overlap enough that some adults emerge every year, even though each individual may spend two to five years underground.

Georgia’s warm climate and abundant hardwood and pine forests support several annual species. You can often distinguish them by sound alone: some produce a steady, high-pitched whine that rises and falls, while others make a rapid ticking or pulsing call. They’re generally green or brown with clear or mottled wings, larger-bodied than the black-and-orange periodical species. If you hear cicadas in Georgia between June and September, you’re almost certainly hearing annual species rather than periodical ones.

Where in Georgia Cicadas Concentrate

The distribution of cicadas across Georgia depends on which type you’re looking for. Brood X periodical cicadas cluster in the mountainous counties of the North Georgia region. The 2021 documentation effort confirmed their presence in counties including Lumpkin County, with most records coming from areas with mature deciduous forest at higher elevations.¹ Brood XIX covers a broader footprint, reaching into the Piedmont and potentially parts of the Coastal Plain.

Annual cicadas are far less picky. You’ll find them in suburban backyards, city parks, rural woodlands, and along river corridors across virtually every part of the state. Anywhere with mature trees offering root systems for nymphs and branches for adults to perch on can support a population. That said, research from other regions has shown that urban soil compaction reduces cicada diversity. A study across an urban-to-forest gradient found that harder, more compacted soils correlated with fewer cicada species, though at least one species was able to tolerate compacted conditions better than others.³ For Georgia, this suggests that heavily developed areas in metro Atlanta or Savannah may host fewer species than surrounding forests, though individual cicadas still turn up regularly in urban trees.

What Happens Underground for All Those Years

Whether periodical or annual, cicada nymphs spend most of their lives underground feeding on tree roots. They’re xylem feeders, meaning they tap into the water-conducting vessels in roots rather than the sugar-rich phloem that aphids and many other sap-feeding insects prefer. Xylem fluid is extremely dilute in nutrients, which likely explains why development takes so long. Histological examination of tree roots where periodical cicada nymphs had fed confirmed that all feeding structures terminated in xylem vessels, with no evidence of phloem feeding at any developmental stage.⁴

Living underground on such a thin diet sounds like a raw deal, but it confers real advantages. Nymphs avoid surface predators, weather extremes, and competition for resources. Fossil evidence shows that this root-feeding, burrowing lifestyle has been a successful strategy for cicadas across deep evolutionary time, with preserved nymph fossils showing the specialized digging forelegs that allow them to navigate soil and position themselves on roots.⁵ When conditions are finally right, nymphs dig their way to the surface, climb the nearest vertical structure, and molt into winged adults. In Georgia, periodical cicada nymphs emerge when soil temperatures at about eight inches deep reach roughly 64°F, which typically happens in late April through May depending on the year and location.

Timing of Emergences in Georgia

Georgia’s relatively warm spring means its periodical cicadas tend to emerge earlier than populations farther north. The 2021 Brood X records from Georgia documented adults as early as April 26, weeks ahead of emergence dates in states like Indiana or New Jersey where Brood X is also present.¹ For Brood XIX, emergence in 2024 followed a similar late-April-to-May timeline in Georgia, while populations in Tennessee and the Midwest emerged closer to mid-May.

Annual cicadas in Georgia start appearing in late May or June, with peak calling activity in July and August. Some stragglers persist into September or even early October. The overall window of cicada activity in Georgia can stretch from late April through early fall if you count both periodical and annual species in the same year. During a periodical emergence year, the overlap can mean cicada noise is essentially continuous from spring into summer, though the periodical adults are usually gone within about six weeks of their first appearance.

How Periodical Cicadas Affect Trees and Yards

A common concern during emergence years is whether cicadas damage trees. The short answer is that healthy, mature trees typically handle an emergence fine, but young trees and new plantings can be vulnerable. The main source of injury comes from egg-laying, not feeding. Female periodical cicadas use a saw-like ovipositor to cut slits into small branches, depositing eggs inside the wood. These slits can weaken branches enough that the tips die back and break off, a process sometimes called “flagging” because the brown, dangling branch tips resemble small flags.⁶

For established trees with large canopies, flagging amounts to a natural pruning that the tree recovers from. But for young fruit trees, ornamentals, or newly planted saplings with only a few small branches, the damage can be serious. Georgia homeowners expecting a periodical emergence year can protect small trees by draping them with fine mesh netting before cicadas appear. Insecticides are generally ineffective and unnecessary because the sheer volume of cicadas during a mass emergence makes chemical control impractical, and the adults don’t feed destructively on foliage. They continue to sip xylem fluid as adults, but the amounts are negligible.

Ecosystem Effects of Mass Emergences

When billions of cicadas emerge, mate, and die within a few weeks, the resulting pulse of dead insects delivers a significant input of nutrients to forest soils. Research has found that decomposing cicada bodies increase plant-available nutrients in soil and shift the community of soil organisms, with bacterial- and fungal-feeding nematodes increasing in abundance on plots where cicada carcasses accumulated.⁷ Interestingly, that same study found no measurable effect on tree growth over a four-year period, despite the nutrient boost. The benefits of all that decomposing protein seem to get processed by soil microbes and small invertebrates rather than translating into bigger or faster-growing trees.

The emergence itself also affects what comes out of the soil. Billions of exit holes left by emerging nymphs increase soil aeration and respiration. A study of Brood X found that these holes boosted annual soil respiration by roughly 2.5%, translating to a substantial pulse of additional carbon dioxide released from forested areas.⁸ Additional research has indicated that cicada carcasses decomposing on the soil surface can trigger pulses of greenhouse and trace gases, with the potential to alter nutrient cycling in ways that enhance nitrogen emissions from forest ecosystems.⁹ For Georgia’s forests, which range from dense hardwood stands in the Blue Ridge to mixed pine-hardwood in the Piedmont, these effects are transient but ecologically meaningful.

Safety in Numbers

The reason periodical cicadas emerge in such overwhelming numbers is a survival strategy called predator satiation. The idea is simple but effective: if enough individuals appear simultaneously, predators can eat their fill and still leave most of the population untouched. Birds are the primary predators of adult periodical cicadas, and research confirms that the strategy works. In a study of 13-year cicadas, birds consumed between 15 and 40 percent of the standing crop when cicada densities were low, but at high densities exceeding around 24,000 individuals per hectare, the proportion consumed dropped dramatically. Overall, birds took only about 15 percent of the total adult population across the emergence period.¹⁰

Early emergers face the worst odds, as birds are hungry and the cicada buffet has just opened. But within days, predators become overwhelmed by the sheer volume. By the time nestling birds create renewed demand for food later in the emergence period, adult cicada density is already declining naturally.¹¹ Georgia birders during emergence years often report seeing everything from blue jays to crows gorging on cicadas, and it isn’t unusual to see fish, dogs, and even curious humans getting in on the feast. Periodical cicadas are nontoxic and essentially protein with a nutty flavor, though this is admittedly a niche enthusiasm.

The Fungus That Turns Cicadas Into Zombies

One of the stranger things Georgia residents might notice during a periodical emergence is cicadas flying around with chalky white or yellow plugs where their abdomens used to be. These insects are infected with Massospora cicadina, a fungal parasite that consumes the cicada’s abdomen from the inside and replaces it with a mass of fungal spores. The infection doesn’t kill the cicada immediately. Instead, infected males begin mimicking female wing-flick signals, which lure other males into close contact and spread the spores further. Researchers have described this as a fungal “extended phenotype,” essentially the fungus hijacking the cicada’s behavior to turn it into a vehicle for transmission.¹²

Infected cicadas continue to fly and attempt to mate despite missing half their body, which is unsettling to witness. The fungus has two stages: an early stage producing spores that spread to other adults in the current emergence, and a late stage producing resting spores that settle into the soil to wait for the next generation of nymphs 13 or 17 years later. For Georgia homeowners, Massospora is harmless to people, pets, and plants. It is strictly a cicada pathogen. If you see a cicada with a conspicuous white or yellow plug where its rear end should be, you’re looking at one of entomology’s more dramatic examples of parasitic manipulation.

How Citizen Science Helps Map Georgia’s Cicadas

Much of what we know about where periodical cicadas emerge in Georgia comes from volunteer observations rather than dedicated field teams. Crowdsourced mapping has a surprisingly long pedigree in cicada research, with records of organized citizen collection efforts dating to the 1850s. Researchers tracking the 2021 Brood X emergence used crowdsourcing to gather observations of where periodical cicadas appeared, continuing a tradition that the USDA formalized in the early 1900s.¹³

Modern tools have made this far more efficient. Apps like Cicada Safari allow anyone with a smartphone to photograph a cicada, geotag it, and submit it for verification by researchers. These reports are especially valuable in peripheral range areas like Georgia, where populations may be thin or patchy and professional surveys are infrequent. The discovery of Brood X in six previously undocumented Georgia counties in 2021 came in part from this kind of public participation.¹ If you live in north Georgia and notice an unusual number of dark-bodied, red-eyed cicadas emerging from the ground in spring during a known brood year, reporting your sighting to one of these platforms contributes to a scientific record that researchers genuinely rely on.

Urban Development and Georgia’s Cicada Future

Georgia’s rapid suburban sprawl, particularly around metro Atlanta, raises questions about the long-term viability of cicada populations in developed areas. Periodical cicadas are especially vulnerable to land clearing because their nymphs depend on undisturbed tree root systems for over a decade. If a forested lot is cleared and paved over while a brood is underground, that local population is simply erased. Unlike annual species that have overlapping generations and can recolonize from nearby areas relatively quickly, a periodical brood that loses its habitat has no backup cohort waiting in the wings.

The soil compaction that accompanies development is another factor. Research has shown that compacted urban soils support fewer cicada species overall, likely because newly hatched nymphs struggle to burrow into hard ground.³ Georgia’s ongoing expansion of residential developments into formerly forested land in counties north of Atlanta, right in the heart of Brood X territory, makes monitoring these populations increasingly important. Brood distributions have shifted substantially even without human development as a factor, with some broods expanding while others have contracted or gone extinct over the past century.² Add suburban sprawl to these natural dynamics, and the question of whether Georgia’s periodical cicada populations can persist at their current extent becomes a real conservation concern, one that won’t be answerable until the next emergence years provide fresh data to compare against older records.