Slightly Musical Coneheads Extend West

October 1, 2017 at 6:07 am (singing insects)
Tags: Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, Neoconocephalus exiliscanorus, slightly musical conehead

by Carl Strang

The slightly musical conehead (Neoconocephalus exiliscanorus) bears my favorite common name among all the singing insects of the Chicago region. That name was bestowed because W.T. Davis, who first described the species in 1887, thought its song was faint. He later changed his tune for good reason, as I find I can hear them easily through the open window of a car driven at a moderate speed. This was, in fact, how I came to add the slightly musical conehead to the species list for the Chicago region. Previously it was unknown in the northern third of Indiana, so I hadn’t expected to find it. Then, prowling the roads of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore with me in 2012, graduate students Gideon Ney and Nathan Harness, of the University of Missouri, recognized the katydid’s distinctive rapid buzz pulses.

Slightly musical conehead. They can be brown or green, and have longer cones at the tips of their heads than our other species in genus Neoconocephalus.

Subsequently I found slightly musical coneheads in several northern Indiana counties. They have not been a priority in my 22-county survey of the Chicago region’s singing insects, but I may make them one next year. In 2017 I added three counties: LaPorte and Lake in Indiana, and Kankakee in Illinois. Those last two additions extend the range significantly west, and provide the first observation of the species in the northern half of Illinois, according to the database in the Singing Insects of North America website.

Here is the updated map of my observations for this species:

Black dots represent the counties where I have found slightly musical coneheads through 2017.

And here is a recording of the song:

I often hear them singing in rural roadside ditches, and they are increasingly abundant as you go south. They sing only at night, in my experience.