Categories
Brood XIV Magicicada

Reporting your cicada sightings

You can play an important role this year in documenting the Brood XIV 17 year cicada emergence. Brood maps are built using data from scientists and people like you. This year we have an opportunity to build a better Brood XIV map, but the scientists who collect the data will need your help.

Where to post your sightings

The two main web sites where you will be able to post your sightings this year are:

Both sites promise to feature interfaces that will easily allow you to enter your sighting.

Where else:

In the Massachusetts area (and beyond): Massachusetts Cicadas (Jerry Bunker).

In the Mid-Atlantic region: Cicadas.info.

Categories
Brood XIV Pop Culture

Share Your Brood XIV Cicadas!!!

I originally posted this article last year, but the information is still good.

A lot has changed since I started this site in 1996, including the web — back then websites where static pages with a couple of images and links, and only geeks like myself knew how to make them.

Now there are lots of web sites where YOU can share your cicada photos and video. Now you can write about your cicada discoveries on a blog, read other cicada blogs, or share cool cicada web sites with the world using bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us. The web is now all about you (and the cicadas you find). The power is in your hands: start sharing your cicadas!

Share Your Cicada Photos:

Flickr: Flickr is a web site where you can post and share your digital photos. You can also connect with other photographers and people with similar interests. It’s a fun site. When you post your cicada photos, don’t forget to tag them with tags like “cicada”, “broodxiv“, “Magicicada”, “17year”, “periodical”, etc. Don’t forget to include geographic information in the descriptions.

Panoramio: Panoramio is a photo sharing site like Flickr, but it places your photos in Google Maps, which is really cool.

As of 2008 Flickr lets you upload videos too.

Share Your Cicada Video:

YouTube: You’ve heard of YouTube, haven’t you? It’s a great site where you can upload your videos and share them with the world. Like Flickr, don’t forget to tag your cicada video with cool tags like “17year”, “cicadas”, “broodxiv”, and include geographic information in the description.

Others: MySpace videos, Veoh, Metacafe (has a family filter), Google Video (upload longer videos than with YouTube), Dailymotion, Yahoo Video (has SafeSearch) etc. Again the important thing is to look for a service that will allow to to send links to your videos and embed them in web pages.

Blog Your Cicada Stories:

You have a Blog, don’t you? If you don’t, it’s never too late to start! Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress, Typepad, and of course MySpace. Best of all, they’re free to use! So why not?

Reading & Searching Blogs:

The homepage of this site is a blog — if you notice, it’s composed of multiple posts about cicadas. Blogs aren’t like other websites, because they’re updated frequently and they’re composed of a series of posts. This series of post is known as a feed, which is available as both an xml file and the webpage you’re reading (too technical, I know…). Blog Search Engines are like regular search engines, but they’re adapted specifically to search blogs.
Blog Readers let you subscribe to blog feeds — subscribe to enough feeds and you can build your own virtual newspaper made up of the stories and news you care about (like cicadas).

Sharing the sites, video and images you find on the web:

Now, you’ve found a cool cicada website — you want to share it, and you want to remember it.

del.icio.us is my favorite bookmarking site. I can bookmark sites at work and then check them out later on my home computer, or at a friend’s house.

Digg is a super-popular forum where you can share and vote on (digg/bury) links. I read it every day.

StumbleUpon is a cool site and toolbar for your web browser. The toolbar will suggest cool sites for you to try. I’ve “stumbled upon” many cool sites using StumbleUpon.

More to explore: Furl, ma.gnolia, Newsvine, reddit, Simpy, Spurl, Yahoo MyWeb, Google bookmarks, Fark…

You don’t have to use these resources for just cicadas, but I’d be disappointed if you didn’t use them at all.

Categories
Brood XIV Magicicada

Gene Kritsky’s new cicada site and Brood XIV news

Gene Kritsky’s new site

Gene Kritsky’s new enhanced cicada site is now up here: THE MOUNT’S CICADA WEB SITE. The new site will feature much of the information you’ll need to know for 2008, including maps, a place to enter your cicada sightings, podcasts and more. You’ll want to bookmark this site.

Gene’s cicada temperature experiments

Gene is looking for folks to report where and when a emergence occurs in their yard/neighborhood/local park etc. “I would like to find several of your readers who are willing to let us know the day that cicada emerge in good numbers in their locations. I would like to test the emergence formula at several sites.” A good number would be an aggregation of approximately 25 cicadas on a single tree. Like the picture on this page. So, be sure to head to Gene’s site and make a report if the opportunity arises.

Nymphs in Long Island

Andrew from Long Island sent us photos of nymphs and soil with many cicada tunnels from Satauket L.I. Looks like 2008 will be a good year for Long Island cicadas.

Some random linkage

Photo: A woman in a giant cicada costume.

Cicadas ready to emerge on east side.

Categories
Brood XIV

Brood XIV Event on Thursday, April 24 in Massechusettes

Brood XIV Event on Thursday, April 24 in Massachusetts:

School vacation program “Year of the Cicadas,” David Simser, 2 p.m., Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, Route 6A, Brewster, free.

Categories
Dundubia Santisuk Vibul Thailand

Tymbals of the cicada of Genus Dundubia, Bangkok, Thailand

Santisuk Vibul sent us new photos of the tymbals of the cicada of Genus Dundubia, from Bangkok, Thailand.

Here’s a sample:

Tymbals of the cicada of Genus Dundubia by Santisuk Vibul. Thailand. 2008.

Categories
Brood XIV Gene Kritsky Magicicada Roy Troutman

2008 Cicada Temperature Study

Roy Troutman sent me these photos of temperature loggers that allow cicada experts, like Gene Kritsky, to measure the ground soil temperature, and improve their formulas for predicting Magicicada emergences.

We [Gene Kristsky and Roy Troutman] buried 3 temperature probes & tied one on a tree branch for air readings. The temperature loggers will take a very accurate reading every 10 minutes & after the emergence has started in full swing Gene will dig them up & hook them to a usb cable & download all the data to his laptop for study. He [Gene] is trying to determine the exact temperature that they will emerge so he can fine tune his formula for calculating emergence times.

Last year Gene’s emergence formula calculator (try it!) did a good job of predicting the Brood XIII emergence, and the 2008 temperature study should only improve it.

You might be able to participate in the 2008 cicada temperature study. If you’re interested, contact Gene Kritsky.

Temperature Logger

Temperature Logger

Categories
Magicicada

New cicada site

John Cooley, one of the folks behind the Michigan Cicadas cicada site and the Cicada Central site now has a third site, which promises to have the best and most up to date Magicicada information. The new site is magicicada.org.

This site is designed to serve several purposes for 2008:

  • It is a place where we are directing people to report cicada emergences, so that the records may be collected and geocoded.
  • It’s got the best set of brood maps yet.
  • It mirrors the information on Cicada Central.
  • It will have better photos (the species photos for M. tredecim are second generation, but I’m working on even better ones).
Categories
Brood XIV

Brood XIV: When, Where and What do they look like?

This is the first of several Brood XIV Magicicada posts to help you enjoy this year’s cicada mania experience:

When will they appear?

Nymphs

In April people will start to find cicada nymphs close to the surface of the ground, under stones, while landscaping, etc. This is what a nymph looks like:

Nymph and Adult

If you find a nymph in the soil, leave it alone so it will have the opportunity to become an adult.

Adults

Adults will emerge once the temperature is right, typically at dusk. The best method we know of is using Gene Kritsky’s emergence formula. This is a tool that will allow you to determine the approximate time when the cicadas will emerge in your area.

Generally speaking, Magiciadas will begin emerging in the last 2 weeks of May, and the last adults should have passed by the first week of July.

Where will they appear?

States:

In 2008 they’re set to appear in eastern Massachusetts, Long Island New York, south-western New Jersey, south-eastern Pennsylvania, south-eastern and north-western West Virgina, southern Ohio, most of Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, southern Indiana, and bits of Virgina.

Maps:

The great Cicada Central site has a map of Brood XIV emergence locations.

Gene Kritsky’s site has a map as well.

and this is the Cicada Mania map, made by Roy.

Do some research:

Okay! So now you know where the Magicicada might appear, but how will you know if these cicada will appear in your yard, neighborhood or local woods? Time for some investigation:

  1. Ask people who were around 17 years ago. Old timers, townies, local press — anyone how was around 17 years ago.
  2. Go to the library and check old news papers.
  3. Contact local colleges and universities. Try the entomology department or agricultural extensions.
  4. Encourage the local press to cover the cicadas, and let them do the research. The local press have the most resources to do this research.

Note that old timers call Magicicadas “locusts“; Magicicadas are not true locusts, but the term might help jar people’s memories. Magicicadas can also be called periodical cicadas, as well as 17-year cicadas. Don’t forget to use those terms while asking around

What do they look like?

You already saw what the nymph form looks like, but what does an adult look like? They look like this:

Magicicada

Black heads and and upper bodies, black and orange bellies (belly is not a scientific term), reddish-orange eyes, orange legs and wings. Yes, sometimes the eyes can be brown, yellow, orange and even white or blue!

Continue reading “Brood XIV: When, Where and What do they look like?”
Categories
Costa Rica Jose Mora

New Gallery from Jose Mora of Costa Rican Cicadas

We have a new set of galleries of Costa Rican cicadas courtesy of Jose Mora. Jose wrote:

Greetings from COSTA RICA!!!!!
Hello my friend, i really like your website please keep going!!, these fantastic insects have a very unusual and fascinating life.

I’m from Costa Rica, the name of the province where I live is HEREDIA and right now we’re in “cicada season” jajajaja .

Maybe you have heard about this already, the popular name for the cicadas here and probably all the rest of hispanoamerica is “CHICHARRA”…. well i would like to share with you some pictures i took around 3 days ago in a little park near my house, hope you’ll like it!!

Here are gallery 1, gallery 2 and gallery 3.

Here’s a sample:

Costa Rican Cicada

Costa Rican Cicada

Categories
Adam Fleishman Neotibicen Tacuini (Cryptotympanini)

New Cicada Photos from Adam Fleishman / ID this cicada

Here’s some new photos from photographer and cicada enthusiast Adam Fleishman. As always, they’re great photos. If you can help ID the first two photos, we’d appreciate it.

Neotibicen dealbatus:

Tibicen

Neotibicen dealbatus:

Tibicen

Neotibicen dorsatus (formerly T.dorsata):

T. dorsatus (formerly T.dorsata)

T. dorsata

Neotibicen superbus (formerly T. superba)

T. superba

Visit Adam’s website Cometmoth Sight and Sound