Cicada orni Linnaeus, 1758

Trilar, Tomi, Gjonov, Ilia & Gogala, Matija, 2020, Checklist and provisional atlas of singing cicadas (Hemiptera: Cicadidae) of Bulgaria, based on bioacoustics, Biodiversity Data Journal 8, pp. 54424-54424 : 54424

Cicada orni Linnaeus, 1758

Distribution

General distribution: Southern Europe: Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, France (including Corsica), Greece, Italy (including Sardinia and Sicily), Montenegro (Trilar & Gogala, unpublished data), North Macedonia, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain (including Balearic Islands); Central Europe: Austria, Hungary, Germany, Slovakia, Switzerland; Eastern Europe: Russia (South European Russia), Ukraine; Middle East: Cyprus, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey; Transcaucasia: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Russia (Chechnya); Northern Africa: Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia; Central Asia: Turkmenistan (all data except for the countries with the citation in brackets are summarised by Duffels and van der Laan (1985) and Sanborn (2014).

Cicada orni is in older literature cited also for the Greek island Crete ( Nast 1972, Quartau and Fonseca 1988), from where Cicada cretensis Quartau & Simões 2005 was later described ( Quartau and Simões 2005, Pinto-Juma et al. 2009, Simões and Quartau 2009, Trilar and Gogala 2010).

Cicada orni is on the eastern side of Rechinger's line in the Aegean Sea replaced by Cicada mordoganensis Boulard, 1979 ( Simões and Quartau 2013, Gogala and Trilar 2014), which is bioacoustically proven in the east Aegean Islands: Chios, Ikaria, Samos, Kos and Rhodes ( Simões and Quartau 2008, Pinto-Juma et al. 2009, Gogala and Trilar 2014), as well as Kalymnos (Trilar & Gogala, unpublished data) and further east in south-western Turkey along the sea coast (at least in the Provinces of Izmir, Aydin, Muǧla and Antalya) ( Boulard 1979, Lodos and Kalkandelen 1981, Boulard 1995, Kemal and Koçak 2010, Zeybekoğlu et al. 2011).

Distribution in Bulgaria: Cicada orni is a very abundant and widespread species of singing cicadas distributed in Bulgaria. Data are available for 74 localities (Fig. 5 ). In literature, we found data for Bulgaria in Nedyalkov (1908), Yoakimov (1909) and Sander (1985). Bairyamova (1992) lists the species for Rhodope Mts. The species is also listed in overviews by Nast (1972), Nast (1987), but without the exact localities for Bulgaria.

In Bulgaria, Cicada orni is distributed all over the country: in eastern Danubian Plane, northern lowest hills of the Pre-Balkan, southern Lower Mountain Pre-Balkan, northern Balkan Mts., southern Balkan Mts., Eastern Sub-Balkan valleys, Kraishte-Ichtiman, Kyustendil-Blagoevgrad Middle Struma valley, Sandanski-Petrich Middle Struma valley, Pirin Mt., Prespa-Chernatitsa Western Rhodope Mts., Upper Thracian Plain, Tundzha-Burgas Valley, Eastern Rhodope Mts. and Strandzha Mt. (Fig. 5 ).

In this survey the majority of the populations were found between sea level and 800 metres (95% of the population) (Fig. 6 ). The highest points where we recorded the species were in the Eastern Rhodopes at Hvoynova Polyana at Gyumyurdzhiyski Snezhnik (917 m a.s.l.) and at the slope above the Pass Makaza (909 m a.s.l.).

Notes

Acoustic behaviour: The song was described by Popov (1975), Joermann and Schneider (1987) and Boulard (1995). The variability as a function of location and environmental conditions was described in later works ( Claridge et al. 1979, Quartau et al. 1999, Quartau et al. 2000, Simões et al. 2000, Pinto-Juma et al. 2005, Seabra et al. 2008, Mehdipour et al. 2016). The sound reception of this species was recently investigated by Sueur et al. (2010).

The males of Cicada orni can sing for hours without interruption from a single spot, sometimes chorusing with other males. The calling song is a pattern of regular repetitions (5-8 times per second) of echemes and interecheme intervals, where the echemes are composed of a variable number of groups of pulses (Fig. 7 ). The duration of the echemes is 84-116 ms; the interecheme interval 84-93 ms, the frequency range is 4.45 ± 0.2 kHz and the peak frequency 4.24 kHz ( Popov 1975, Joermann and Schneider 1987, Fonseca 1991, Boulard 1995, Claridge et al. 1979, Quartau et al. 1999, Quartau et al. 2000, Simões et al. 2000, Gogala 2002, Pinto-Juma et al. 2005, Quartau and Simões 2005, Seabra et al. 2006, Simões et al. 2006, Sueur et al. 2010, Zeybekoğlu et al. 2011, Mehdipour et al. 2016).

Selected sound samples of Cicada orni are available on the web pages Songs of the European singing cicadas ( Gogala 2020).

Materials: Suppl. material 1

Diagnosis

Cicada orni (Fig. 4 ) is one of the most abundant and common cicadas throughout the Mediterranean area. The singing males are often singing in chorus and are commonly observed in closed high shrublands and woodlands, as well as in olive trees, fruit trees, vineyards and gardens and also on fences and poles ( Popov 1975, Patterson et al. 1997, Puissant and Sueur 2001, Sueur et al. 2004, Pinto-Juma et al. 2005, Hertach and Nagel 2013).

Figures

Figure 4. Cicada orni male.

Figure 5. Map with localities of Cicada orni in Bulgaria. Black - literature data, blue - data from collections, red - bioacoustic data collected in this survey.

Figure 6. Altitudinal distribution of Cicada orni. The percentage of recorded localities is shown in 200 - metre altitude zones.

Figure 7. Calling song of Cicada orni. (A) spectrogram (time vs. frequency vs. amplitude, amplitude scale is given on the right) and oscillogram (time vs. amplitude) of the selected part of the calling song; (B) oscillogram of six echemes corresponding to the inverted window in (A); (C) oscillogram of one echeme corresponding to the inverted window in (B).