Dedicated to cicadas, the most amazing insects in the world.
Here’s a Tibicen auletes found in Winston-Salem, North Carolina by my friend Erin Dickinson. The T. auletes is also known as Northern Dusk Singing cicada. It can be found in most Southern states, IL, IN, MI, OH, MD, DE, NJ and CT.
The Tibicen auletes is the largest species of the Tibicen cicadas (largest in terms of physical size). Visit Insect Singers to hear its song.
New Tibicen auletes photos from Elias Bonaros.
The Tibicen auletes aka Northern Dusk-singing Cicada is the largest of the Tibicen cicadas in the U.S.A.
You might know Elias from his posts on the Message Board. Monday, after a lot of searching, he found a female Tibicen auletes in Lakewood New Jersey.
I was down in Lakewood NJ yesterday and after finding 5 more additional huge exuvia, the unthinkable happened. a female T. auletes flew to a light, hit the pole after circling many times and slid down to the ground. I easily captured her on the ground. Wanted to share this picture. look how beautiful she is with all that pruinosity!
Tibicen auletes are the largest of the North American Tibicen species. Their bodies a a little under 2″ long. Auletes are also know as the Sissor-Grinder, Northern Dusk-singing Cicada, or Great Dusk-calling Cicada. Read more at Bug Guide. The Songs of Insects site has sound files so you can listen and hear if you have auletes in your yard too.
Here’s Elias’ photos:
Thanks to Cicada Mania friend Joe Green we now have 3 new cicada galleries featuring cicadas we didn’t have before one the site: Neocicada hieroglyphica, Diceroprocta olympusa and Megatibicen resonans.
This is a Neocicada hieroglyphica:
Hang in there, we’ll be back to the 17 Year Cicadas tomorrow.
Cicada researcher Kathy Hill took this unbelievable photo of 18 different USA Neotibicen & Megatibicen specimens, plus a Quesada gigas (upper right) for comparison.
Click/tap the image for a much larger version. Contact Insect Singers for more information about the image.
I just took a photo of all the “eastern USA” Tibicens except
latifasciata, which we haven’t got yet (I didn’t include the “little
western” Tibicens like T. texana that are more centrally located
either). But I did also add T. duryi from the west coast and Q.
gigas, just for comparison.I just wanted to prove that auletes IS the biggest USA cicada 🙂
Note that the these cicadas were reorganized into two new genera: Megatibicen (larger USA Tibicen) and Neotibicen (smaller USA Tibicen) since this original announcement in 2006.