Cicada Crawls on CNN Reporter Manu Raju’s Neck Ahead of Live Shot: ‘Had an Unwelcome Visitor’

Manu Raju/Twitter

Manu Raju is, ahem, bugging out.

On Thursday, the 41-year-old CNN journalist shared a video on Twitter of a moment captured when a cicada crawled onto his neck ahead of a live shot.

Seen sporting a blue suit as he talks to another team member who is off-camera, Raju is unaware that the large bug is climbing up his collar before he eventually catches on and grabs the insect off of his neck.

Throwing the bug down in disgust, Raju exclaims, “Oh my god!” and curses, though the latter is bleeped out. “A cicada?” he continues. “What the hell?”

“Had an unwelcome visitor try to crawl into my live shot earlier,” Raju wrote alongside the clip of the more than unwelcome encounter on social media.

RELATED: Cicadas Living Underground for Past 17 Years to Emerge in Parts of Eastern U.S. and Illinois This Summer

A specific brood of periodical cicadas living underground for the past 17 years have begun to emerge in great numbers.

These cicadas — dubbed Brood X or The Great Eastern Brood — have tunneled their way to the surface in parts of Maryland, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Illinois as the ground temperature gets warmer, according to a cicada mapping site from the University of Connecticut.

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Other states in which the brood may surface include Georgia, Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

One of 15 broods of periodical cicadas found in the eastern United States, Brood X is among the largest by geographical extent of 17-year cicada broods, the university said.

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Raju later spoke more in-depth about his cicada encounter while chatting with CNN’s New Day on Friday.

He told John Berman and Brianna Keilar that “the context here is important,” before he said that another cicada fell out of his pocket “a couple of minutes” before his on-screen dilemma.

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“There was another cicada that allegedly fell out of my pocket, and that happened as I was waiting to go on,” Raju said. “Our producer, Morgan Rimer said, ‘A cicada just fell out of your pocket’ and I saw it on the ground and I was a bit stunned.”

Though Raju later explained that he is grossed about by the critters, his twins “love cicadas.”

“All they do is talk about ’em,” Raju said. “They put them on their hands, they’re on the cicada research committee in their pre-K class in school, so I can tell you, they love the video.”