New Cicada Info for Martha's Vineyard

New Cicada Info for Martha's Vineyard

At first I was not successful in capturing a specimen but the 13th of August prooved to be a very fruitful day. Prior to that on my first day there, I was successful in recording the call of T. auletes and even managed to obtain an exuvia of a male.

Below are some quick images and a link to a 44 second video of this specimen's alarm squawk.

The full account of my 4 day Cicada trip to Martha's Vineyard can be found the "Cicada Missions" section. I was able to obtain specimens of T. canicularis and T. lyricen. I have even noted a different color variation for T. lyricen. In addition, I posted alarm squawk videos of the two T. lyricen specimens I captured.

Also I've never done this before but there is an image of me with my prized T. auletes specimen. If you want to see what I look like, then check it out.

Cicada Killers Also On Martha's Vineyard!

I guess wherever there are cicadas there are bound to be cicada killers. I noted four separate cicada killer burrows at various locations on the island. I even managed to capture a specimen. So don't forget to read the full account of Cicadas On Martha's Vineyard. There's tons of images and video for your enjoyment.

More Reader Submissions Have Been Posted.

I'm still getting tons of email with regards to your cicada killer and cicada sightings. Unfortunately, I am going to have to discount the sightings of Cicada killers if they do not come with either a specimen in the mail (thanks to those who have sent them in) or a digital image that I can have for confirmation. It's important that the distribution data is accurate.

Please keep sending in the inquiries and questions however even if you don't have a picture, you can use the Contact Us form. I answer ALL EMAIL.

Tibicen chloromera tibicen Sighting in Massachusetts.

On August 20th, 2006, John Cooley of University of Connecticut at Storrs sent in an email indicating he heard a T. chloromera T. tibicen calling in Cambridge, Ma. around Harvard Square from a Walnut tree. Normally, I would discount this report but John Cooley and I have been out together studying T. chloromera T. tibicen in Connecticut previously. Not to mention John has published many-a-paper on cicadas so I will take his report as valid.

Site Maintenance

I have been getting complaints that a lot of the videos on this site are way too big for some to download. To that end, I have been working on compressing all the video files on this web site. Starting with the most recent and working backwards. So the videos uploaded now are all in .wmv format which makes them a lot faster and easy to download. When this new project is completed for every video on this site, I will let you know.

Update 3/15/11: The species name T. chloromera has been officially changed to Tibicen tibicen