Be on the lookout for Brood XIV stragglers. A few Magicicada that didn’t emerge in 2008 should appear in 2009! Keep your eyes and ears peeled.
April 24, 2009
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Generally, when thousands of stragglers have been observed at once in the past (at a given site), it has usually been a four-year-premature emergence of 17-yr cicadas. That kind of life-cycle plasticity seems especially likely to involve large numbers at once compared to other kinds of straggling (like 1 or 2 yrs early or late, where usually only a few are observed). So these are probably going to turn out to be Brood II. I would recommend a separate item on cicadamania that alerts people within the range of Brood II to keep an eye out so we can see if it happens throughout the whole range of the Brood or not.
Right. By the maps they’re either Brood II accelerated 4 years (which sort of makes sense), or XIX accelerated 2 years which would make them Magicicada neotredecim. John Cooley took a look that the photos and said Magicicada septendecim, but until we get a specimen and test them, we won’t know.
Greensboro is well out of the Brood XIV range according to current maps published & last year’s sightings data on the magicicada.org website ( https://cicadas.uconn.edu/media/ ). The southern range of Brood II (2013) gets into north central North Carolina ( https://cicadas.uconn.edu/brood_02/ ). These are most likely 4 year accelerated cicadas emerging from that particular brood. Cool to see that happening down there.
I will be on the look out for sure!
Once I get out of West Virginia
We’re in Greensboro, NC. I’ll attach photos to an e-mail to the address you listed.
Sounds like a late emergence of the Brood XIV cicadas. What town do you live in? If you have photos he would love to see them cicadamania@gmail.com.
We had some kind of mass emergence over the weekend (sometime between May 1 and May 5, 2009) of red-eyed, black-bodied cicada. Literally thousands of them all over our neighborhood. They look like the periodicals I see on this and other sites, and do not look like the typical cicada that we usually see later in the summer.
We live in north-central North Carolina, and the emergence seems localized to our neighborhood. Nobody else around town seems to have had the emergence.
Any idea what this could be?
Tommy