Tibicina steveni (Krynicki, 1837)

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

Tibicina steveni (Krynicki, 1837)

Distribution

General distribution: Southern Europe: Bulgaria, France, Greece ( Gogala and Trilar 2014), Italy ( Hertach and Nagel 2013); Central Europe: Switzerland; Eastern Europe: Russia (South European Russia), Ukraine; Middle East: Turkey; Transcaucasia: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia (all data except for the countries with the citation in brackets are summarised by Duffels and van der Laan 1985 and Sanborn 2014).

Distribution in Bulgaria: This species is reported for Bulgaria as literature data, but without the citation of the source, by Janković (1971) for Petrich, which was erroneously placed in North Macedonia ( Gogala et al. 2005). Petrich is a town in the Strumeshnitsa valley in SW Bulgaria, not far from the North Macedonian border. We recorded the singing males of this species on 23 July 2008 near Bozhkinoto on the slope of Belasitsa Mt. and confirmed their presence in this area.

In Bulgaria, data are known for 32 localities (Fig. 73 ). Tibicina steveni is distributed in the southern part of the country along the Greek and Turkish borders. The data are known from Belasitsa Mt., Tundzha-Burgas Valley, eastern Rhodope Mts., Haskovo Hills Land, Sakar Mt. and Strandzha Mt. (Fig. 73 ) with altitude distribution between 20 and 820 m a.s.l. (Fig. 74 ).

Notes

Acoustic behaviour: The song was described by Popov (1975), Sueur et al. (2003) and Sueur and Aubin (2003).

The calling song (Fig. 75 ) is a long, simple, monotonous buzz with easily audible fibrillation, lasting from one minute to many minutes without interruption, on average 186 ± 187 s ( Sueur et al. 2003, Hertach 2020). It consists of a long, sustained sequence of groups of pulses (Fig. 75 C) with a slow increase in amplitude at the beginning. The groups of pulses are generated at a rate of 58.5 ± 3.9 per second, the pulse-group duration is 12.3 ± 1.3 ms and the pulse-group period is 16.8 ± 1.0 ms. The pulse-groups consists of 9-10 pulses (Fig. 75 D) ( Sueur and Aubin 2003, Sueur et al. 2003). The frequency range of the calling song is between 5.5 and 9.5 kHz with three frequency peaks: a frequency band with the highest energy at 7.2 kHz with two lateral frequency bands at about 6.4 kHz and 8.2 kHz, the lateral bands being generated by pulse amplitude modulations ( Sueur et al. 2003).

Selected sound sample of Tibicina steveni is available on the web pages Songs of the European singing cicadas ( Gogala 2020).

Materials: Suppl. material 17

Diagnosis

Tibicina steveni (Fig. 72 ) is one of the largest European species of the singing cicada. The species occurs mainly in closed high shrubland and woodland on deciduous trees such as oaks, sycamores and chestnuts. The males usually sing high up in the tree canopies.

Figures

Figure 72. Tibicina steveni male.

Figure 73. Map with localities of Tibicina steveni in Bulgaria. Black - literature data, blue - data from collections, red - bioacoustic data collected in this survey.

Figure 74. Altitudinal distribution of Tibicina steveni. The percentage of the recorded localities is displayed in 200 - metre altitude zones.

Figure 75. Calling song of Tibicina steveni. (A) spectrogram and oscillogram of the selected part of the calling song; (B) oscillogram of the enlarged part corresponding to the inverted window in (A); (C) detailed oscillogram showing subgroups of pulses corresponding to the inverted window in (B); (D) detailed oscillogram showing pulses corresponding to the inverted window in (C).