Durham, home to Duke University, also became the home of hundreds of thousands of cicadas in the summer of 2011. The cicadas, a noisy insects that leaves scars on trees and keeps people up at night, emerge from under the ground in the thousands every 13 17 years, depending on the brood. 2011 saw a cicada outbreak in the Durham region, where Durham pest control services tried helplessly to eradicate them. Cicadas inhabit every continent except Antarctica, but the only place they emerge en mass is in the Eastern United States. Though their above-ground life is short-lived, exterminators in Durham, North Carolina say people still dread the not-so-frequent eruption.