Cicada ManiaCicada researchers associated with academic institutions.
If you’re in the Sydney, Australia area and you see or hear a cicada this season, report it to the Great Cicada Blitz, an iNaturalist website set up by cicada researcher Nathan Emery. The purpose of this website is to map and identify the various cicada species in the Sydney area.
Elias Bonaros shared this photo of a Neocicada hieroglyphica that he observed emerging in Riverhead, Long Island, New York, which is the north-most point of their range, as documented by William T. Davis.
They were taken today, July 13th, 2015.
Here is the Neocicada hieroglyphica hieroglyphica exiting its nymphal skin.
Annette DeGiovine wrote an extensive blog post with many images and video of emerging Neocicada hieroglyphica. Check it out.
Sometimes you wake up and the whole world is different. See this cicada:
photo by me.
… when I went to sleep she was a Tibicen tibicen tibicen, but now I know she is a Neotibicen tibicen tibicen. 10 years ago, she was a Tibicen chloromera. 130 years ago, she was Cicada tibicen. Cicada names change as researchers discover their differences.
Two new papers have split the Tibicen (or Lyristes) genera into many genera: Tibicen (European Tibicen), Auritibicen (Tibicen of Asia/Japan), Neotibicen (mostly eastern North American Tibicen), and Hadoa (Tibicen of the western United States).
The first paper is Description of a new genus, Auritibicen gen. nov., of Cryptotympanini (Hemiptera: Cicadidae) with redescriptions of Auritibicen pekinensis (Haupt, 1924) comb. nov. and Auritibicen slocumi (Chen, 1943) comb. nov. from China and a key to the species of Auritibicen by Young June Lee, 2015, Zootaxa 3980 (2): 241—254. This paper establishes the new genera Auritibicen, and the members of the Tibicen/Lyristes genera fall into that genera. Here is a link. So, Tibicen flammatus aka Lyristes flammatus of Japan, for example, becomes Auritibicen flammatus.
Auritibicen flammatus photo by Osamu Hikino.
The second paper is Molecular phylogenetics, diversification, and systematics of Tibicen Latreille 1825 and allied cicadas of the tribe Cryptotympanini, with three new genera and emphasis on species from the USA and Canada (Hemiptera: Auchenorrhyncha: Cicadidae) by Kathy B. R. Hill, David C. Marshall, Maxwell S. Moulds & Chris Simon. 2015, Zootaxa 3985 (2): 219—251. This paper establishes the Neotibicen (Hill and Moulds), and Hadoa (Moulds) genera. This paper also sought to establish the Subsolanus genera for the Asian Tibicen/Lyristes species but the previously mentioned paper by Young June Lee has precedence because it was published first. Link to paper.
To recap, European Tibicen/Lyristes are Tibicen…
Tibicen plebejus photo by Iván Jesus Torresano García.
… Asian Tibicen/Lyristes are now Auritibicen. Mostly-eastern North American Tibicen are now Neotibicen, and Western North American Tibicen are now Hadoa. Note that, the catagorization is not due to location, but to genetic and physiological evaluation (read the papers).
Needless to say this website and others have a lot of name changing to do, but in the mean time, here’s where the North American species fall out:
| Neotibicen | |
|---|---|
| Tibicen auletes | Neotibicen auletes |
| Tibicen auriferus | Neotibicen auriferus |
| Tibicen canicularis | Neotibicen canicularis |
| Tibicen cultriformis | Neotibicen cultriformis |
| Tibicen davisi davisi | Neotibicen davisi davisi |
| Tibicen davisi harnedi | Neotibicen davisi harnedi |
| Tibicen dealbatus | Neotibicen dealbatus |
| Tibicen dorsatus | Neotibicen dorsatus |
| Tibicen figuratus | Neotibicen figuratus |
| Tibicen latifasciatus | Neotibicen latifasciatus |
| Tibicen linnei | Neotibicen linnei |
| Tibicen lyricen engelhardti | Neotibicen lyricen engelhardti |
| Tibicen lyricen lyricen | Neotibicen lyricen lyricen |
| Tibicen lyricen virescens | Neotibicen lyricen virescens |
| Tibicen pronotalis pronotalis | Neotibicen pronotalis pronotalis |
| Tibicen pronotalis walkeri | Neotibicen pronotalis walkeri |
| Tibicen pruinosus fulvus | Neotibicen pruinosus fulvus |
| Tibicen pruinosus pruinosus | Neotibicen pruinosus pruinosus |
| Tibicen resh | Neotibicen resh |
| Tibicen resonans | Neotibicen resonans |
| Tibicen robinsonianus | Neotibicen robinsonianus |
| Tibicen similaris | Neotibicen similaris |
| Tibicen superbus | Neotibicen superbus |
| Tibicen tibicen australis | Neotibicen tibicen australis |
| Tibicen tibicen tibicen | Neotibicen tibicen tibicen |
| Tibicen tremulus | Neotibicen tremulus |
| Tibicen winnemanna | Neotibicen winnemanna |
| Hadoa | |
| Tibicen bifidus | Hadoa bifida |
| Tibicen chiricahua | Hadoa chiricahua |
| Tibicen duryi | Hadoa duryi |
| Tibicen inauditus | Hadoa inaudita |
| Tibicen longioperculus | Hadoa longiopercula |
| Tibicen neomexicensis | Hadoa neomexicensis |
| Tibicen parallelus | Hadoa parallela |
| Tibicen simplex | Hadoa simplex |
| Tibicen texanus | Hadoa texana |
| Tibicen townsendii | Hadoa townsendii |
It is important to note that when we talk about cicada broods, we are talking about the 17 & 13-year periodical Magicicada cicadas. We are not talking about Tibicen or other species.
There are 12 groups of Magicicadas with 17-year life cycles and 3 groups of Magicicadas with 13-year life cycles. Each of these groups emerge in a specific series of years, rarely overlapping (17 & 13-year groups co-emerge every 221 years, for example). Each of these groups emerge in the same geographic area their parents emerged. These groups, each assigned a specific Roman numeral, are called broods.
Gene Kritsky’s book, Periodical Cicadas: The Plague and the Puzzle, documents the history of the recognition and naming of the broods. The first person to document that different groups of periodical cicadas emerged in different years was Nathaniel Potter in 1839. Benjamin D. Walsh and Charles V. Riley devised the system for numbering the different broods in 1868, and then C. L. Marlatt sorted the 17 year broods out from the 13-year broods, giving us the system we have today.
Visit our Broods page which features a grid of the Brood names, their lifespan, when & where they’ll emerge next and links to maps.
You can say “si-kah-da” or “si-kay-da”. Either pronunciation is correct. The pronunciation changes depending on your regional accent.
Around New York and New Jersey folks pronounce it “si-kah-da”. William T. Davis pronounced it “si-kah-da”. Davis was a naturalist and entomologist located in Staten Island, NY, active in the late 1800′s and early 1900′s. Davis collected the largest collection of cicadas in the United States. The collection is currently housed at the Staten Island Museum. Davis described over 100 cicadas in his career — he should know what he’s saying. 🙂
Allen F. Sanborn & Maxine S. Heath published a new paper about cicadas titled The cicadas of Argentina with new records, a new genus and fifteen new species (Hemiptera: Cicadoidea: Cicadidae) in Zootaxa Vol 3883, No 1, in November of 2014. Website for the document.
The abstract of the paper reveals some exciting discoveries:
The document is 94 pages long.
According to Nathan Emery on Twitter, four new species of cicadas belonging to the genus Yoyetta have been described:
See this paper for more information:
Emery, N.J., Emery, D.L., & Popple, L.W. (2015) A redescription of Yoyetta landsboroughi (Distant) and Y. tristrigata (Goding and Froggatt) (Hemiptera: Cicadidae) and description of four new related species. Zootaxa 3948 (3): 301—341.
New #cicada paper out w/ @_DrPop_ on the re-description of 2 Australian Yoyetta spp. and 4 new Yoyetta spp. Preview: http://t.co/P7491ZqH4h
— Nathan Emery (@ecotechnica) April 22, 2015
A little fun before the periodical cicada season starts. This is a “wordcloud” of the last names of people who have identified species of cicadas. The bigger the name, the more cicada IDs are attributed to them.
The are a couple of errors (misspelled Stal, split up Van Duzee). If you’re interested in making your own wordcloud, you can use the program R with the R package wordcloud.
Isn’t this a lovely picture (updated with colors sorted)?
This image represents the combined range of all Magicicada periodical cicada broods, including the extinct Broods XI (last recorded in Connecticut) and XXI (last recorded in Florida).
To produce this image, I visited John Cooley’s Cicadas @ UCONN Cicada Geospacial Data Clearinghouse and downloaded the Shapefile of Magicicada broods. Then I used the computer program QGIS to change the Shapefile to a KML file, and then I opened the file in Google Earth. Credit goes to John for pulling the data together into the Shapefile.
I manually edited the KML file to try to give each Brood a different color.
An interesting area is Fredrick County, where 5 different broods seem to exist (or have existed) at once.
Peach = Brood I
Green = Brood II
Purple = Brood V
Cyan = Brood X
Red = Brood XIV
It’s also interesting that four of the broods are separated by four years: X, XIV, I, V.
The fungus Massospora cicadina preys on Magicicadas cicadas. This is particularly interesting because the fungus is able to prey upon them in spite of their long 17 year life cycle (apparently fungi are not phased by prime numbers).
When the fungus destroys the abdomen of male cicadas, they will behave like female cicadas and flick their wings in response to the songs of male cicadas, and attempt to mate with other males.
A photo by Roy Troutman from Brood XIV (2008):
Two photos by Dan Mozgai from Brood II (2013):
magicicada fungus (massospora cicadina) from Roy Troutman on Vimeo.
New from 2017: the Massospora cicadina viewed under a microscope.
Examining & measuring #Massospora spores for #MSA2017 in GA. Here's M. cicadina resting spores (#BroodVI, 2017). #fungi @MSAFungi @zygolife pic.twitter.com/b78R9VwDgP
— Matt Kasson (@kasson_wvu) July 12, 2017