Cicada Mania

Dedicated to cicadas, the most amazing insects in the world.

Cicada T-shirts

February 5, 2015

Visualizing all periodical cicada broods

Isn’t this a lovely picture (updated with colors sorted)?

All Broods

This image represents the combined range of all Magicicada periodical cicada broods, including the extinct Broods XI (last recorded in Connecticut) and XXI (last recorded in Florida).

To produce this image, I visited John Cooley’s Cicadas @ UCONN Cicada Geospacial Data Clearinghouse and downloaded the Shapefile of Magicicada broods. Then I used the computer program QGIS to change the Shapefile to a KML file, and then I opened the file in Google Earth. Credit goes to John for pulling the data together into the Shapefile.

I manually edited the KML file to try to give each Brood a different color.

An interesting area is Fredrick County, where 5 different broods seem to exist (or have existed) at once.
Fredrick County VA

Peach = Brood I
Green = Brood II
Purple = Brood V
Cyan = Brood X
Red = Brood XIV

It’s also interesting that four of the broods are separated by four years: X, XIV, I, V.

2 Comments

  1. Ron says:

    No cicadas in Canada?

    1. Dan says:

      Plenty of cicadas, just no periodical Magicicada Brood X type cicadas. Go to Cicadas by Continent & Country and look for the section for “By Canadian Provence:”.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Cicada T-shirts


We use cookies on CicadaMania.com to provide you with an excellent user experience.
We will assume that you are agreeing to our Privacy Policy if you continue accessing our site.