Cicada

The name is directly from the onomatopoeic Latin cicada. ==Taxonomy and diversity==

, Magicicada, Robert Evans Snodgrass, 1930 The superfamily Cicadoidea is a sister of the Cercopoidea (the froghoppers). Cicadas are arranged into two families: the Tettigarctidae and Cicadidae. The two extant species of the Tettigarctidae include one in southern Australia and the other in Tasmania. The family Cicadidae is subdivided into the subfamilies Cicadettinae, Cicadinae, Derotettiginae, Tibicininae (or Tettigadinae), and Tettigomyiinae, and they are found on all continents except Antarctica. Some previous works also included a family-level taxon called the Tibiceninae. The largest species is the Malaysian emperor cicada Megapomponia imperatoria; its wingspan is up to about . Cicadas are also notable for the great length of time some species take to mature. At least 3,000 cicada species are distributed worldwide, in essentially any habitat that has deciduous trees, with the majority being in the tropics. Most genera are restricted to a single biogeographical region, and many species have a very limited range. This high degree of endemism has been used to study the biogeography of complex island groups such as in Indonesia and Asia. There are several hundred described species in Australia and New Zealand, around 150 in South Africa, over 170 in America north of Mexico, at least 800 in Latin America, and over 200 in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific. About 100 species occur in the Palaearctic. A few species are found in southern Europe, Many species await formal description and many well-known species are yet to be studied carefully using modern acoustic analysis tools that allow their songs to be characterized. Many of the North American species are the annual or jarfly or dog-day cicadas, members of the Neotibicen, Megatibicen, or Hadoa genera, so named because they emerge in late July and August. The best-known North American genus, however, may be Magicicada. These periodical cicadas have an extremely long life cycle of 13 or 17 years, with adults suddenly and briefly emerging in large numbers. Australian cicadas are found on tropical islands and cold coastal beaches around Tasmania, in tropical wetlands, high and low deserts, alpine areas of New South Wales and Victoria, large cities including Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, and Tasmanian highlands and snowfields. Many of them have common names such as cherry nose, brown baker, red eye, greengrocer, yellow Monday, whisky drinker, double drummer, and black prince. The Australian greengrocer, Cyclochila australasiae, is among the loudest insects in the world. , a species endemic to New Zealand More than 40 species from five genera populate New Zealand, ranging from sea level to mountain tops, and all are endemic to New Zealand and its surrounding islands (Kermadec Islands, Chatham Islands). One species is found on Norfolk Island, which technically is part of Australia. The closest relatives of the NZ cicadas live in New Caledonia and Australia. fossil fore wing of Mesogereon superbum, Australia Palaeontology Fossil Cicadomorpha first appeared in the Late Triassic. The superfamily Palaeontinoidea contains three families. The Upper Permian Dunstaniidae are found in Australia and South Africa, and also in younger rocks from China. The Upper Triassic Mesogereonidae are found in Australia and South Africa. This group, though, is currently thought to be more distantly related to Cicadomorpha than previously thought. '' from Germany, Jurassic, about 145–150 million years ago The Palaeontinidae or "giant cicadas" (though only distantly related to true cicadas) come from the Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous of Eurasia and South America. Tettigarctidae and Cicadidae had diverged from each other prior to or during the Jurassic, as evidenced by fossils related to both lineages present by the Middle Jurassic (~165 million years ago). The morphology of well preserved fossils of early relatives of Cicadidae from the mid Cretaceous Burmese amber of Myanmar suggests that unlike many modern cicadids, they were either silent or only made quiet sounds. Most fossil Cicadidae are known from the Cenozoic, and the oldest unambiguously identified modern cicadid is Davispia bearcreekensis (subfamily Tibicininae) from the Paleocene, around 56–59 million years ago. ==Biology==

Description -named Japanese , Hyalessa maculaticollis, an annual cicada Cicadas are large insects made conspicuous by the courtship calls of the males. They are characterized by having three joints in their tarsi, and having small antennae with conical bases and three to six segments, including a seta at the tip. Cicadas have prominent compound eyes set wide apart on the sides of the head. The short antennae protrude between the eyes or in front of them. They also have three small ocelli located on the top of the head in a triangle between the two large eyes; this distinguishes cicadas from other members of the Hemiptera. The mouthparts form a long, sharp rostrum that they insert into the plant to feed. The thorax has three segments and houses the powerful wing muscles. They have two pairs of membranous wings that may be hyaline, cloudy, or pigmented. The wing venation varies between species and may help in identification. The middle thoracic segment has an operculum on the underside, which may extend posteriorly and obscure parts of the abdomen. The abdomen is segmented, with the hindermost segments housing the reproductive organs, and terminates in females with a large, saw-edged ovipositor. In males, the abdomen is largely hollow and used as a resonating chamber. Bacteria landing on the wing surface are not repelled; rather, their membranes are torn apart by the nanoscale-sized spikes, making the wing surface the first-known biomaterial that can kill bacteria. Temperature regulation Desert cicadas such as Diceroprocta apache are unusual among insects in controlling their temperature by evaporative cooling, analogous to sweating in mammals. When their temperature rises above about , they suck excess sap from the food plants and extrude the excess water through pores in the tergum at a modest cost in energy. Such a rapid loss of water can be sustained only by feeding on water-rich xylem sap. At lower temperatures, feeding cicadas would normally need to excrete the excess water. By evaporative cooling, desert cicadas can reduce their bodily temperature by some 5 °C. Some non-desert cicada species such as Magicicada tredecem also cool themselves evaporatively, but less dramatically. Conversely, many other cicadas can voluntarily raise their body temperatures as much as 22 °C (40 °F) above ambient temperature. The sounds may further be modulated by membranous coverings and by resonant cavities. The male abdomen in some species is largely hollow, and acts as a sound box. By rapidly vibrating these membranes, a cicada combines the clicks into apparently continuous notes, and enlarged chambers derived from the tracheae serve as resonating chambers with which it amplifies the sound. The cicada also modulates the song by positioning its abdomen toward or away from the substrate (their perch). Partly by the pattern in which it combines the clicks, each species produces its own distinctive mating songs and acoustic signals, ensuring that the song attracts only appropriate mates. {{Listen |filename=New_Zealand_cicada_song.ogg | title=Amphipsalta zelandica cicada song | description=Song, New Zealand, 2006 Average temperature of the natural habitat for the South American species Fidicina rana is about . During sound production, the temperature of the tymbal muscles was found to be significantly higher. Many cicadas sing most actively during the hottest hours of a summer day; roughly a 24-hour cycle. Most cicadas are diurnal in their calling and depend on external heat to warm them up, while a few are capable of raising their temperatures using muscle action and some species are known to call at dusk. Kanakia gigas and Froggattoides typicus are among the few that are known to be truly nocturnal and there may be other nocturnal species living in tropical forests. Cicadas call from varying heights on trees. Where multiple species occur, the species may use different heights and timing of calling. While the vast majority of cicadas call from above the ground, two Californian species, Okanagana pallidula and O. vanduzeei are known to call from hollows made at the base of the tree below the ground level. The adaptive significance is unclear, as the calls are not amplified or modified by the burrow structure, but this may avoid predation. Although only males produce the cicadas' distinctive sounds, both sexes have membranous structures called tympana (singular – tympanum) by which they detect sounds, the equivalent of having ears. Males disable their own tympana while calling, thereby preventing damage to their hearing; a necessity partly because some cicadas produce sounds up to 120 dB (SPL) which is among the loudest of all insect-produced sounds. The song is loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss in humans should the cicada be at "close range". In contrast, some small species have songs so high in pitch that they are inaudible to humans. For the human ear, telling precisely where a cicada song originates is often difficult. The pitch is nearly constant, the sound is continuous to the human ear, and cicadas sing in scattered groups. In addition to the mating song, many species have a distinct distress call, usually a broken and erratic sound emitted by the insect when seized or panicked. Some species also have courtship songs, generally quieter, and produced after a female has been drawn to the calling song. Males also produce encounter calls, whether in courtship or to maintain personal space within choruses. The songs of cicadas are considered by entomologists to be unique to a given species, and a number of resources exist to collect and analyse cicada sounds. Life cycle In some species of cicadas, the males remain in one location and call to attract females. Sometimes, several males aggregate and call in chorus. In other species, the males move from place to place, usually with quieter calls, while searching for females. The Tettigarctidae differ from other cicadas in producing vibrations in the substrate rather than audible sounds. After mating, the female cuts slits into the bark of a twig where she deposits her eggs. Most cicadas go through a life cycle that lasts 2–5 years. Some species have much longer life cycles, such as the North American genus, Magicicada, which has a number of distinct "broods" that go through either a 17-year (Brood XIII), or in some parts of the region, a 13-year (Brood XIX) life cycle The long life cycles may have developed as a response to predators, such as the cicada killer wasp and praying mantis. A specialist predator with a shorter life cycle of at least two years could not reliably prey upon the cicadas; for example, a 17-year cicada with a predator with a five-year life cycle will only be threatened by a peak predator population every 85 (5 × 17) years, while a non-prime cycle such as 15 would be endangered at every year of emergence. An alternate hypothesis is that these long life cycles evolved during the ice ages so as to overcome cold spells, and that as species co-emerged and hybridized, they left distinct species that did not hybridize having periods matching prime numbers. The 13- and 17-year cicadas only emerge in the midwestern and eastern US in the same year every 221 years (13 × 17), with 2024 being the first such year since 1803. Cicadas excrete fluid in streams of droplets due to their high volume consumption of xylem sap. The jets of urine that cicadas produce have a velocity of up to 3 meters per second, making them the fastest among all assessed animals, including mammals like elephants and horses. Locomotion Cicadas, unlike other Auchenorrhyncha, are not adapted for jumping (saltation). They have the usual insect modes of locomotion, walking and flight, but they do not walk or run well, and take to the wing to travel distances greater than a few centimetres. ==Predators, parasites, and pathogens==

'') with cicada prey, United States Cicadas are commonly eaten by birds and mammals, as well as bats, wasps, mantises, spiders, and robber flies. In times of mass emergence of cicadas, various amphibians, fish, reptiles, mammals, and birds change their foraging habits so as to benefit from the glut. Newly hatched nymphs may be eaten by ants, and nymphs living underground are preyed on by burrowing mammals such as moles. In northern Japan, brown bears prey on final instar nymphs of cicadas during summer by digging up the ground. In Australia, cicadas are preyed on by the Australian cicada killer wasp (Exeirus lateritius), which stings and stuns cicadas high in the trees, making them drop to the ground, where the cicada hunter mounts and carries them, pushing with its hind legs, sometimes over a distance of 100 m, until they can be shoved down into its burrow, where the numb cicadas are placed onto one of many shelves in a "catacomb", to form the food stock for the wasp grub that grows out of the egg deposited there. A katydid predator from Australia is capable of attracting singing male cicadas of a variety of species by imitating the timed click replies of sexually receptive female cicadas, which respond in pair formation by flicking their wings. Their prime-number life cycle prevents predators with a life cycle of two or more years from synchronising with their emergence. This fungus is also capable of dosing cicadas with psilocybin, the psychedelic drug found in magic mushrooms, as well as cathinone, an alkaloid similar to various amphetamines. These chemicals alter the behaviour of the cicadas, driving males to copulate, including attempts with males, and is thought to be beneficial to the fungus, as the fungal spores are dispersed by a larger number of infected carriers. Plants can also defend themselves against cicadas. Although cicadas can feed on the roots of gymnosperms, it has been found that resinous conifers such as pine do not allow the eggs of Magicicada to hatch, the resin sealing up the egg cavities. Antipredator adaptations on an olive tree Cicadas use a variety of strategies to evade predators. Large cicadas can fly rapidly to escape if disturbed. Many are extremely well camouflaged to evade predators such as birds that hunt by sight. Being coloured like tree bark and disruptively patterned to break up their outlines, they are difficult to discern; their partly transparent wings are held over the body and pressed close to the substrate. Some cicada species play dead when threatened.