Category: Locations

Here’s a cicada I never thought I would see, but thanks to Raghu Ananth, here are two photos of a Tosena sibyla Gaeana atkinsoni.

This photo was taken on May 2nd, 2009:

Note the characteristic double stripes on the forewings. Note how the smaller stripe doesn’t make it all the way to the claval fold.

Here are observations about this cicada provided by Raghu Ananth:

Brief description –
The cicada has red eyes, red thorax with black patch above, red abdomen, black wings with yellow veins and a large yellow patch lines on the wings.

Numbers. found – several dozens.
Habitat – tree barks near forest path
length – 4-5 cms

The orange-red coloured cicada is one of the beautiful cicadas in the forests. It has a red body, red eyes and black wings with yellow patches. During one of our trips to the evergreen forests in the Uttara Kannada district (Karnataka), we spotted two of them camouflaged on the bark of each tree, actively walking up and down and then appearing a colourful red when in flight from one bark of the tree to another. Their singing, however, seemed not in sync with each another. On our approach, they would try to hide behind the bark or fly to a distant tree.

This illustration of a T. sibylla Gaeana atkinsoni comes from the document A monograph of oriental cicadidae (1892) by W. L. Distant.

Updated (5/8/2014) with a video by Harinath Ravichandran: