CNN Chief Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju was preparing to deliver a live report from Congress Thursday when he felt something crawling on his neck—a cicada, part of the emerging Brood X. “Where are the cicadas coming from?” he asked in a clip—complete with bleeped-out profanity—that has already been watched more than 1.8 million times on Twitter.

“I held back my tears,” Raju joked, adding that “I was only able to go to sleep because I was at the Capitol till midnight...otherwise it would have been hard to fall asleep after that horrific incident...those things gross me out.”

In the clip, the cicada can be seen crawling up the lapel of Raju’s jacket before he notices it and reacts with disgust. Raju then asks his CNN crew—who were laughing— if he “has more on me? Are they in my hair?”

Raju was forced to relive the nightmarish experience on Friday morning’s New Day, with Brianna Keilar asking, “Manu, I understand something’s really been bugging you lately?”

Raju, billed on-screen as “CNN Chief Cicada Correspondent” with a banner adding “FILIBUGSTER,” and “CNN’s Manu Raju survives attack by creepy, crawling cicada.”He revealed that a second cicada had fallen from Raju’s jacket pocket just moments before Raju found the big bug on his neck.

After surviving the insect’s visit, Raju says he and his crew decided “the world needed to see” the clip, and quickly moved to bleep out the profanity and get the video published on Twitter.

For fellow CNN correspondents and anchors, the clip was irresistible: