by Carl Strang
My first entry into singing insects study came when I ran across the University of Michigan cicada website in 2003 or 2004. The site includes recordings of cicada songs, and as I played them I realized that all my life I had been hearing the distinguishable songs of several species without knowing it. These were all members of genus Tibicen, and that summer I recognized three common species in DuPage County.
They look very much alike, and are hard to see when singing high up in trees, so it was well that their songs were distinctive. After a couple years, however, I began to notice that the songs I attributed to one of the three, Tibicen linnei or Linne’s cicada, had two variations and with references I was able to distinguish a fourth common species, Tibicen lyricen, the lyric cicada. The differences among these species and their songs I described in some detail in a post last year.
Recently I was reviewing a wide range of singing insects reference recordings when I realized I need to pay attention again to the songs I have been identifying with Linne’s cicada. The swamp cicada, Tibicen chloromera, has a vibrato very close in speed to linnei’s. It has, however, a percussive quality in each vibration that sets it apart from linnei’s smoother, more wavelike vibrato. I had paid too close attention to written descriptions of the swamp cicada, in both the popular and scientific literature, which imply that chloromera is found only in wetlands and sings only from low perches. In fact I am now finding that at least around Culver, Indiana, chloromera often sings hundreds of yards from wetlands, and at least as often from high trees as from perches in lower ones. I have heard them in forests as well as more open stands. This is in keeping with other Tibicen cicadas, which at least in their singing perches show wide ranges in habitat.
So far I have not heard chloromera in DuPage County. I have found that I need to listen carefully, because when lyricen are singing their first, warmup songs of the day they have a slower vibrato with a percussive quality like chloromera’s.
The two areas I frequent most, DuPage County, Illinois, and Marshall County, Indiana, have different Tibicen species lists though they are only about 100 miles apart. Both are homes for canicularis, linnei, lyricen and pruinosa (the dog day, Linne’s, lyric and scissor-grinder cicadas, respectively). So far, only Marshall County appears to have chloromera, the swamp cicada, but I don’t consider the case to be closed. Marshall County also has a sixth species, Tibicen auletes, the northern dusk-singing cicada, which is associated with sandy soils and so does not occur in DuPage County’s clays.