A Naturalist Picking Blueberries Makes First Sighting of a Rare Cicada in a Century - Observation(s) of the Week, 8/12/20

Our Observations of the Week are these Okanagana arctostaphylae cicadas, the first documented in over 100 years! Seen in the United States by @lcollingsparker and @easmeds.

[As the hoodwinker mola observations showed, one of the coolest things about iNaturalist is how it can bring people of all interests and experience levels together, and here’s another cool example. I apologize for the tardiness of this post, but it took some time to synthesize everything.]

Lucinda Collings Parker (@lcollingsparker, photo below) tells me “I spent my early life and the past 20+ years living in the country and mountains, which I love, but never really paid attention to the individual plants, animals, insects, or fungi.” After retiring two years ago, she took an iNaturalist class run by UC Davis and the American River Conservancy and credits iNat, along with nature journaling, “[as playing] a big part in learning to really look. My current aim is to get familiar with what lives in my part of California, first focusing on my own property. I’m still just a beginner.”

Last month, while out picking blueberries in her garden (a garden surrounded by many wild plants, including manzanita), Lucinda found the cicada you see above in the shade cloth draped over her blueberry bushes. She posted her photo to iNaturalist, where Will Chatfield-Taylor (@willc-t) identified it as the first documented observation of Okanagana arctostaphylae since 1915. “It was exciting to see how quickly the researchers responded and how more sightings were quickly made,” she says, “and since I mainly use iNaturalist to learn about what I’m seeing, it was fun to be able to give back, however accidentally, with a helpful observation.”

Will is collaborating with Jeff Cole of Pasadena City College (@bugsoundsjc) and Elliott Smeds (@easmeds), a Master’s student at Sonoma State University, and they’re “currently working to create a complete molecular phylogeny of the 57-species genus [Okanagana] and numerous species that will need to be described,” he tells me. 

iNaturalist has become a critical way for us to obtain specimens that we would be unlikely to ever collect. You can see the full list of contributions on the Okanagana Citizen Science Project I created on iNaturalist. It's become so important that we are actually considering writing it into a grant as a citizen science aspect to reimburse costs for shipping specimens from people.

Because no one had seen this cicada in over a century, Elliott (below) says “all of us were understandably freaking out a little bit. I live a couple of hours away from the area, so I ended up being the one to go look.

I got into cicadas largely thanks to iNaturalist. I had just received my degree in Biology and I was trying to figure out what to do with it. And meanwhile I had begun looking at local cicada observations on iNat and very quickly realized that there was a staggering diversity of species right in my backyard. At that point there were no active iNat users with expertise in Western North American cicadas, so the identifications were often either very broad or completely inaccurate. So I dug into the literature and started cleaning things up. I created a project called Cicadas of the Western US to keep track of all the observations people post. It became clear that there is precious little known about these Western taxa, and I decided I wanted to help fill that gap.  

Alas, his first day on the hunt was unsuccessful, and as not much is known about this species Elliott had no idea if he would find any at all. But while driving back from the field,he heard a call very similar to its likely closest relative, Okanagana opacipennis, and “got chills.” He returned the following day, received permission to search a stand of manzanitas from the property owner, and found them (*photo below).

“Cicada biology is not a large or glamorous field,” says Elliott. 

Collecting this species and including it in our research was going to be big news for maybe fifteen people on the entire planet. But finding that beautiful insect, camouflaged so perfectly against the smooth red bark, and knowing that I’m the first scientist in 100 years to see this creature—that’s a moment I will cherish for the rest of my life.

Elliott heard quite a few more individuals in the area, and two more independent observations of Okanagana arctostaphylae have been posted since. So, “as for why it took so long for anyone to find it, the main answer seems to be that no one was looking particularly hard...the population is not small by any means,” he surmises. But now that they know where to look, this species can be monitored over time.

“I currently have 4 different people actively collecting cicadas for us,” says Will. “One in Utah, one in New Mexico, and two in Eugene, Oregon. @birdernaturalist (Rich Hoyer) possibly re-found a species called O. sequioae, which was last seen in 1964 when it was described.” Another quite rare cicada was found in Ontario, Canada by an iNat user and @silversea_starsong (more on him below) contacted a friend and a specimen is on its way as well.

“iNaturalist has been an invaluable research tool, but just as importantly it has made me more curious about organisms that I might have overlooked previously,” Elliott says. “It is now almost effortless to snap a few photos of a plant and have an expert tell me what it is, and going forward I will have that knowledge filed away in my head for the next time I encounter it. I am a better biologist thanks to the iNaturalist community.”

Bonus Content!

This is not the only manzanita-loving cicada in California that has recently been photographed on iNaturalist. @silversea_starsong and @ronvanderhoff posted the first known photographs of living Okanagana opacipennis last year. Unlike most members of the genus, these two species do not have transparent wings. And as Elliott mentioned above, the two have a similar call. James explains, 

I've been hearing the song of "opacipennis" in that part of the state, and when I was out with Jeff and Will, we also heard this song and were puzzled by it. It's fitting that this song turned out to be arctostaphylae -- the two manzanita species are closely related in habits, appearance, and genetically, so the shared song makes sense. That song type is quite distinct to all the other Okanagana.

James, who has currently observed the most species of anyone on iNat, visited the Bay Area last summer and was kind enough to talk with me on camera about the cicada find, as well as iNat in general. Here’s the cicada part of our discussion, I’ll post a longer video soon (hopefully!).

* This photo is taken from another observation made later on the same day, to give a clearer view of the bug. :-)

Publicado el 12 de agosto de 2020 a las 09:07 PM por tiwane