The Okanagana Citizen Science Project's Boletim

21 de setembro de 2023

Finally Published

It's been a long road, but our manuscript was finally published last night:

Cole, J.A., Chatfield-Taylor, W., Smeds, E.A., Cooley, J.R., Gonzalez, V.A., and Wong, C. 2023. Phylogeny of North America's largest cicada radiation redefines Tibicinoides and Okanagana (Hemiptera: Auchenorrhyncha: Cicadidae: Tibicininae). Zootaxa 5346 (5): 501-531.

https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5346.5.1

This journey started many years ago with Jeff Cole's @bugsoundsjc work collecting and recording Okanagana and Tibicinoides (and other genera) but gained steam after a crazy field season in 2019. In 2020, we started using iNaturalist to find specimens and recruit help from all over the country. And we received it, and now, thanks in part to all of your help, we've finished the revision.

It rather expanded in scope from what we envisioned, and the taxonomy underwent some massive changes.

The three species that were in Tibicinoides were found to be part of a group of Okanagana that are defined in part by the shape of their genitalia and timbals. Based on genetic, morphological, and behavioral characters, this entire group was split off from Okanagana and are now considered Tibicinoides.

Tibicinoides boweni, T. catalina, T. cupreosparsa, T. hesperia, T. mercedita, T. minuta, T. pallidula, T. pernix, T. rubrovenosa, T. simulata, T. striatipes, T. uncinata, T. utahensis, and T. vanduzeei

Multiple other changes were made:

A new genus, Hewlettia Smeds, 2023, was erected for Okanagana nigriviridis, which is now Hewlettia nigriviridis (Davis, 1921).

A second genus, Chlorocanta Chatfield-Taylor 2023 was created for Okanagana viridis, now Chlorocanta viridis (Davis, 1918).

Within Okanagana a few species disappeared and a new one was erected:

O. lurida is now O. occidentalis based in part on the DNA from Rachel M. and multiple other lines of evidence.

Apologies to @upupa-epops , but O. noveboracensis was found to be a regional color form of O. canadensis and they are now synonyms, with O. canadensis provincially retaining the name. The Niagra Cicada is no more, Long Live the Canadian Cicada.

O. tristis rubrobasalis has been given species status, and is now Okanagana rubrobasalis Davis, 1926

There will be more changes and more studies down the road that continue to refine these groups, but this is the culmination of years of effort.

We couldn't thank all of you in the paper, but I'd like to acknowledge you all here.

@alice_abela while we didn't use your specimens here, they will have a place before too long in future work!

@ameeds You helped get me started on using iNaturalist and helped with another paper, looking forward to meeting some day

@emwalke We can't think you enough for your generosity in hosting us. Tibicinoides catalina was able to get a lot of attention thanks to you. I'm really excited to continue to work on its acoustics.

@brandonwoo We keep missing each other in Florida, but you've helped be work on my synoptic collection.

@upupa-epops and @jamiehunter , I'm not sure how you'll feel about it, but the songs Caleb provided and the DNA from Jamie helped give us the evidence that O. noveboracensis and O. canadensis are the same species. I'm afraid your regional cicada is no longer regional, but we couldn't have done it without you.

@gallandoaks Your arctostaphylae went into this paper, helping us affirm what group this species went with (O. opacippenis), it was the only other sample of this species we were able to get!

@kmosbruger We're still not sure what you sent us, but we're working to figure it out!

@emshaph Your catalina, flying randomly into your car, also had its DNA make its way into our paper. That is such a weird creature!

@drjakuna Jackie, you've been helping for a long, long time. Your specimens not only went into this paper, but the paper describing Tibicinoides boweni as well!

@jenny109 It's kind of hard to even go into to how much you've helped along the way!

@jessica239 The saga of balli has been able to continue thanks to you!

@madamcoyote Thanks for the tristis! We're still working on that one!

@stepanni O. tanneri owes you quite the dept; as do we! We never did get any other DNA!

@richardwasson Surprisingly, ornata was one of the hardest to find, thanks for your help!

@rickwalks Your series of nigrodorsata and occidentalis will be very helpful going forward!

There are a few people who have not only helped along the way, but have become great friends

@joeeggy30 It's been weird. It's been fun. There are a lot of trip in the future! It's also been like 16 years... when did we get old?

@rlsanders Robert, you've been helping and working with us all the way. The idea that noveboracensis was the same thing as canadensis was due to those weird specimens you sent me, and here we are. Our viridis specimens and call are also thanks to you!

@birdernaturalist Rich, it's been so fun to get to know you! Not only did you help us find a home for sequoiae and vocalis, but your songs will continue to help me immensely as I go forward in school.

@mnishiguchi I don't know if you're one here any more, but I'll call you later!

@silversea_starsong Well, Tibicnoides is now defined, and no small thanks to all the things you found!!! And everything else along the way! I'm sure I'll see you soon.

Others have helped along the way and we will always be grateful.

All the best,

Will, Jeff,

Posted on 21 de setembro de 2023, 12:57 PM by willc-t willc-t | 7 comentários | Deixar um comentário

07 de junho de 2022

Long overdue but quite a bit of news!

Hi everybody!
Thanks for following our project along so far, and I know many of you have actively contributed to the work Jeff, Elliott and I are doing.

Biggest news first: I've been accepted and have started my Ph.D. at Carleton University in Ottawa! I'm continuing and building on the work I've been doing with Jeff and Elliott the last 5 years, adding in new angles, such as sound production mechanisms. Not only am I studying what they do and how they're related, I'll be delving in to how it's actually accomplished!

There's going to be some really exciting things coming down the pipeline in the next year; the first results of the culmination of our years of work and your contributions!

22 people from iNaturalist have contributed material to our work. I want to acknowledge everyone and how much they have helped!

George D. sent us over 30 Okanagana fumipennis and put us on to an awesome locality

@drjakuna Has helped us for 3 years now collect cicadas while she and her students do their own impressive work! They have sent us O. utahensis (photos used in a publications), O. gibbera, and O. vanduzeei(?), as well as some Platypedia and Hadoa

@jenny109 Has also closely been working with us, and we have sequenced a Platypedia putnami from them as well as getting O. hesperia and a great assortment of non-Okanagana

@linak found our first O. arboraria and provided some specimens and recordings

@mnishiguchi Was one of the people who started us off working with iNaturalist. Since 2019 he has been collecting for us and sent our only specimens of Okanagana vocalis and Okanagana salicicola, both of which we are sequencing/have sequenced. But what he sent me first is still unknown, and by that I mean is clearly a new species.

@rachtile sent us an Okanagana lurida to sequence, and it's been a boon for us, and so far the only specimen we have.

@richardwasson sent me a type Okanagana ornata, a beautiful specimen and it remains one of only a few we have, and the only type locality specimen

@rlsanders Has been helping us for years now, way before we started to work with iNaturalis. We have huge series of O. hesperia, O. synodica, our only two O. viridis, and two oddballs from northern New Mexico. He's also sent a huge number of recordings our way

@ameeds Sent me an Okanagana magnifica for a paper I was writing and has been working with us since to explore his area in the hunt of Okanagana georgi

@birdernaturalist Has also spent the last couple of years collecting for us. Our only samples of O. sequoiae come from him, successfully sequenced now. He's also recorded virtually everything he has sent, which, as I'm not only studying bioacoustics, but also how it related to physiology and morphology is an incredible boon to be able to directly associate the song with the specimen. Also, if you are a birder who likes to travel, shoot a message his way!

@kmosbruger helped us find a wide assortment of oddball species from northern Utah. Some of which we are a bit baffled by!

@brandonwoo provided me with with some Okanagana rimosa to aide my reference collection. This is the type species of Okanagana, meaning it was the very first described/assigned to that genus.

@emshaph sent us our one and only Okanagana catalina (successfully sequenced). That story is just hilarious.

@jamiehunter Managed to track down our single Okanagana noveboracensis, which has been sent on its way to Jeff to get sequenced, and a huge number of songs were recorded by @upupa-epops.

@fmgee sent us O. canadensis and O. occidentalis. The former is on the far side of its range, and the latter is about as near the type locality as we will ever get.

@steppani had two specimens of O. tanneri collected last year during a huge emergence that was off our radar. And sent both to us to help our work. It was more than successful and now we have DNA sequenced for Okanagana tanneri

@rickwalks Sent an amazing series of Okanagana occidentalis and O. nigrodorsata along with some great recordings to help me really firm up what a true occidentalis looks like.

@jessica239 Sent me a great specimen of Okanagana balli, an oddball from the northeast great plains and I hope I can help her in turn learn more about it.

@madamcoyote sent a strange Okanagan tristis our way that we are still working on

@geeahmatree sent us an Okanagana arctostaphylae and it allowed us to be able to sequence a pair of this enigmatic species, thought lost for over 100 years, but rather thriving in places nobody would ever go look.

I would like to thank each and every one of you for your help the last couple of years, and I hope I can continue to work with you as time goes on. It's funny how life connects people. Making friends you never would have had, meeting those you never would have known, and for all of you, helping a student begin a long journey that I might never have been able to even contemplate.

Please expect a different profile picture with me in graduation robes in about 4 years.

All the best,

Will

Posted on 07 de junho de 2022, 11:52 AM by willc-t willc-t | 5 comentários | Deixar um comentário

18 de novembro de 2021

To the museums!

With the season finished and quite a few good specimens found, I'm heading out west again to compare some of our material to the museum specimens that have already been identified. I'll be hitting the California Academy of Sciences to look up the potential Bliven material and a few others, and Oregon State to look at the material they have and see what is unidentified.

@stepanni added a badly-needed Okanagana tanneri to our holdings, the DNA of which has now been extracted

@jessica239 sent the odd prairie-dwelling Okanagana balli from Minnesota

@rickwalks sent us some great nigrodorsata and occidentali from Tahoe.

It's honestly a lot like Pokemon Go, but with cicadas. The end product will be a bit more exciting though! We have begun to put together a phylogeny with some interesting result!

Posted on 18 de novembro de 2021, 03:09 PM by willc-t willc-t | 0 comentários | Deixar um comentário

18 de junho de 2021

Off and Running

Saturday Jeff Coll and @easmeds and I are off for field season to see if we can clean up a few of the last remaining species we need. We're doing a whirlwind trip down south through Arizona, New Mexico, up into Colorado and back through Utah. We are hoping to find:

O. georgi near Prescott, AZ
O. sugdeni in Orangeville, UT (long-shot, but hey)
O. schaefferi in Cedar City, UT
O. tanneri near Mesa Verde, CO
O. formosa anywhere in UT

A few others we're hoping for are type location O. bella, O. gibbera, and Platypedia mohavaensis

In other news Okanagana canadensis and O. magnifica now have 100+ observations, which means they'll be added to the AI training! O. rimosa is 4 away, so it should hit the mark easily in the next few weeks.

We are now down to 7 species left that we no specimens for whatsoever. And 2 of those are sketchy.

Posted on 18 de junho de 2021, 02:35 AM by willc-t willc-t | 0 comentários | Deixar um comentário

12 de março de 2021

Wow. Long time, but cicada season is coming up!

Hi All!
It's been a while but cicada season is coming up. Platypedia are already out and about in Southern California and Tibicinoides ought to be making an appearance soon enough. @bugsoundsjc and @easmeds and I are making a big push to try and round up the last few Okanagana standing (at least the ones that are reasonable).

Our molecular work is getting started and we're hoping to be off and running sometime by late spring. If we can collect the last 5-6 species we will be ready to start the minor task of sorting this all out and getting it written in under 300 pages and some remaining sanity.

The suspects at large are:

O. sugdeni; a very large, red cicada that haunts central Utah and doesn't like to come out and play but has in theory been collected in the last 10 or so years
O. georgi; one of the most recently described Okanagana prior to Jeff and I describing O. boweni. This one is only known from Coconino County, AZ @ameeds I'm counting on you
O. hirsuta; this one presents a problem as it is only found in the Channel Islands (and not the accessible ones) but there are observation on here.
O. schaefferi; We know this is out there. There are a few observations on iNat and we know it can be found in Cedar City, UT or the type locality in Arizona. A giant of an Okanagana.
Tibicinoides cupreosparsa; it's out there, and we have a line on it. It just doesn't play well with others.

The rest... well, they don't play well with anyone, some for over 100 years, and some are flat BS.
O. napa; described in 1919 by Davis, this is 95% a color morph of some other species though because of taxonomic precedence things will get a bit weird if we find out what that species is.
O. sperata; this is probably, maybe a species. Almost identical to O. magnifica, but known from a single specimen in NW California, about as far away from other magnifica as possible. This is why you don't describe from 1 specimen, even if you really, really want to.
O. pernix; a Bliven species. Now given that @mnishiguchi and @birdernaturalist found a bunch of these species that I also thought were BS it might be a thing, but it is so badly described that I honestly wouldn't recognize it if it was in front of me. Type is from Sage Hen.
O. yakimaensis; two specimens known from central Washington. Looks more like a color morph of something. Not holding my breath. Hasn't been seen since it was described. Most people have never even heard the name.
O. mariposa oregonensis; not sure what the deal with this is. I am mostly counting on @birdernaturalist and @mnishiguchi to find it for me though since it's found in Oregon. Big cicada with green basal membranes to the wings. Otherwise looks like O. mariposa. Might be protoperiodical which isn't good.

I hope all of you have been safe and healthy and here's to a better 2021!

Posted on 12 de março de 2021, 11:08 PM by willc-t willc-t | 4 comentários | Deixar um comentário

09 de novembro de 2020

31 de outubro de 2020

A new addition to the genus: Okanagana boweni

In 2019 Jeff Cole (@bugsoundsJc), @silversea_starsong, @joeeggy30 and myself were outside Reno and hit up Tamarack Beach on Pyramid Lake. There we encountered a huge Okanagana congregating around Tamarisk and Artemisia. We recorded songs and collected a good number of specimens. When we got back to the hotel Jeff and I started glaring at the thing because it was clearly not a O. utahensis which was also found relatively nearby despite a similar patterning. It look in shape like a O. simulata but wasn't it either since we'd collect some earlier in our trip back in San Bernardino County. We compared it against more reference material and concluded it was something different. Then we realized that a unknown Okanagana Jeff had collected way south was the same things and we began to get a better grasp of what we were dealing with.

We decided to publish the species as the first step in our revision. After nearly a year the manuscript was ready, having now included a phylogenetic hypothesis, range maps, bioacoustic analyses, and a LOT of images. The species was named after the man who introduced me to birding and changed the course of my life; C. bowen.

And so came about Okanagana boweni Chatfield-Taylor and Cole 2020

This link is to the Holotype from Tamarack Beach as well as the recording I made of it before collecting it. The paper will eventually be Open Access and I'll post a link to it.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/63853977

Posted on 31 de outubro de 2020, 10:12 AM by willc-t willc-t | 0 comentários | Deixar um comentário

21 de setembro de 2020

The End of a Season

It's the end of another Okanagana season and like everything else this year it's been a weird one. The rediscovery of Okanagana arctostaphylae after 105 years, 4 of the mysterious Bliven taxa randomly showing up in Eugene, Oregon, and fantastic finds from an O. catalina flying into someone's car before they left the island to hand raised O. arboraria. Other places that have been hopping in other years were practically devoid of Okanagana to our complete bafflement but had other genera in abundance.

Jeff and I will now be able to start molecular work in February thanks to the huge number of taxa collected by the folks here on iNaturalist. You have all helped fill in major gaps, many of which we though would never be filled. The last few are some highly targeted species that require going to very specific areas in hopes of finding them.

Tomorrow the last two mailers make their way back to me and I can get a good look at the last two sets of cicadas that were collected. One includes the quite uncommon Okanagana gibbera.

A big thanks to all of you!

Posted on 21 de setembro de 2020, 11:30 AM by willc-t willc-t | 0 comentários | Deixar um comentário

27 de agosto de 2020

First paper on Okanagana using iNaturalist data

At the end of September a paper I wrote over the last year will be published.

Chatfield-Taylor, W. 2020. Predator avoidance leads to separate emergence cycles in the protoperiodical Okanagana magnifica Davis, 1919 (Hemiptera: Cicadidae). Pan-Pacific Entomologist 96(3) (In Press).

This work made huge use of the GBIF data that is taken from iNaturalist to map the emergences of Okanagana magnifica around which the paper's analysis was based, something that would have been made far more difficult without the data found here - there are nearly 100 observations of this species now!

Once it is released I'll make another post going into more detail about the paper and its premise, as well as how iNaturalist played its part.

Posted on 27 de agosto de 2020, 12:34 AM by willc-t willc-t | 2 comentários | Deixar um comentário

14 de agosto de 2020

The Bliven Conundrum

In 1964 an entomologist name Bliven published a paper describing 6 new species of Okanagana "endemic" to California". Holotypes and a couple paratypes of each were deposited, and then the species were promptly forgotten about as nobody else had ever seen them.
O. rhadine
O. orithya
O. pernix
O. sequoiae

O. salicicola
O. vocalis

Cut to 53 years later when a chance discovery led us to believe that maybe Bliven was not quite as... off... as he had seemed: One of the species was rediscovered. The details on that are currently private, but it gave rise to the obvious question: if one, why no the rest. That brings us to 2020, when @birdernaturalist found this individual while helping collect cicadas:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/55435090 An individual that is quite likely O. sequoiae! Further examination will be necessary to confirm it. However, this is from Eugene, OR, not northern California, and as though the very dim bulb that lives in my head went on for a change, it occurred to me to ask "what if he just badly mistook the range of his species?". Rather than endemic to northern California, what if that was the southern part of the range of a mostly Oregon group of species.

This led to a quest. Was another Bliven species already on iNaturalist just waiting to be identified. As it turns out, it was. @umpquamatt photographed this individual of Okanagana rhadine 3 years ago.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/7247167

And as though the cosmic cicada forces came together, yesterday a friend in Eugene collected one! Now 3 were down, and there were 3 to go. When will they appear I don't know, but I no longer doubt that they will!

Posted on 14 de agosto de 2020, 02:02 AM by willc-t willc-t | 7 comentários | Deixar um comentário