May 3, 2024

Cicada Coloring Book using Vintage Cicada Illustrations

Charles Lester Marlatt is the most well-known Magicicada researcher of all time. He spent the late 19th and early 20th-century researching periodical cicadas and establishing the location of their broods. Marlatt is responsible for the concept of broods and the name Magicicada (he thought the cicadas were Magical).

The illustrations contained in his publications make excellent decorations that you can color and make crafts with.

Download a free PDF of Magicicada illustrations that you can print out and color and festoon around your house or classroom.

Sources:

More cicada activities:

Comments Off

July 5, 2015

What are Broods?

Filed under: C.L. Marlatt | FAQs | Magicicada | Periodical — Dan @ 6:29 pm

It is important to note that when we talk about cicada broods, we are talking about the 17 & 13-year periodical Magicicada cicadas. We are not talking about Tibicen or other species.

There are 12 groups of Magicicadas with 17-year life cycles and 3 groups of Magicicadas with 13-year life cycles. Each of these groups emerge in a specific series of years, rarely overlapping (17 & 13-year groups co-emerge every 221 years, for example). Each of these groups emerge in the same geographic area their parents emerged. These groups, each assigned a specific Roman numeral, are called broods.

Gene Kritsky’s book, Periodical Cicadas: The Plague and the Puzzle, documents the history of the recognition and naming of the broods. The first person to document that different groups of periodical cicadas emerged in different years was Nathaniel Potter in 1839. Benjamin D. Walsh and Charles V. Riley devised the system for numbering the different broods in 1868, and then C. L. Marlatt sorted the 17 year broods out from the 13-year broods, giving us the system we have today.

Visit our Broods page which features a grid of the Brood names, their lifespan, when & where they’ll emerge next and links to maps.

Comments (3)

May 2, 2008

C.L. Marlatt’s Periodical Cicada bulletin online

Filed under: C.L. Marlatt | Magicicada | Periodical — Dan @ 4:35 am

The USDA National Agriculture Library has published the full 148 page bulletin from 1898 titled The periodical cicada: an account of Cicada septendecim, its natural enemies and the means of preventing its injury : together with a summary of the distribution of the different broods.

The document is viewable as images or in PDF form, and features an abundance of information, and excellent, now public domain illustrations (like those below).

Illustration from Marlatt

Comments (2)