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Brood XIV Magicicada Periodical Stragglers

Be on the lookout for Brood XIV stragglers?

Be on the lookout for Brood XIV stragglers. A few Magicicada that didn’t emerge in 2008 should appear in 2009! Keep your eyes and ears peeled.

7 replies on “Be on the lookout for Brood XIV stragglers?”

Generally, when thousands of stragglers have been observed at once in the past (at a given site), it has usually been a four-year-premature emergence of 17-yr cicadas. That kind of life-cycle plasticity seems especially likely to involve large numbers at once compared to other kinds of straggling (like 1 or 2 yrs early or late, where usually only a few are observed). So these are probably going to turn out to be Brood II. I would recommend a separate item on cicadamania that alerts people within the range of Brood II to keep an eye out so we can see if it happens throughout the whole range of the Brood or not.

Right. By the maps they’re either Brood II accelerated 4 years (which sort of makes sense), or XIX accelerated 2 years which would make them Magicicada neotredecim. John Cooley took a look that the photos and said Magicicada septendecim, but until we get a specimen and test them, we won’t know.

We had some kind of mass emergence over the weekend (sometime between May 1 and May 5, 2009) of red-eyed, black-bodied cicada. Literally thousands of them all over our neighborhood. They look like the periodicals I see on this and other sites, and do not look like the typical cicada that we usually see later in the summer.

We live in north-central North Carolina, and the emergence seems localized to our neighborhood. Nobody else around town seems to have had the emergence.

Any idea what this could be?

Tommy

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