northeast-flora-and-fauna

Here's another one of the periodical cicadas I met at Sourland last week. Today I want to give a fairly quick discussion not of brooding cicadas with emotional issues, but of the cicada broods themselves. Our periodical cicadas consist of 3 groups, 7 species and 15 broods. The 3 groups consist of extremely similar species, sometimes where the main difference between the species is the brood cycle. Note I can't use common names since some of these guys don't have a common name beyond the periodical cicada umbrella. Here are the groups: Decim group . This is the biggest group, with 3 species. It has 1 17-year cicada species, Magicicada septendium (Pharaoh Cicada), and 2 13-year cicada species, Magicicada tredecim and Magicicada neotredecim. DNA differences and slight differences in their calls has led entomologists to split M. neotredecim off from M. tredecim. Just looking at them, you probably wouldn't be able to distinguish any of these cicadas. Cassini group . This gr...