Recently, I was offered the chance to assess the health of the
cicadas of my country and use this knowledge for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species…
Let me give you all a heads-up. The Red List is an awesome
endeavor that voices the scientists works onto a broader and more
political bubbles, making conservationists life somewhat easier. My
immediate response: LET’S GET TO WORK!
I skimmed along the list looking for any threatened or vulnerable cicadas, but none to be found… Here in Portugal, we have listed, as of 2004, 13 species of cicadas. None have yet been assessed… And if you ever been to Algarve during the Summer, you can understand the title! Cicadas make lots of noise during the day, and, in Algarve, the likely culprit is Cicada orni, below for your viewing and sounding pleasure!
Me and four other colleagues make up The Cicada Group at the
Faculty of Sciences of Lisbon and these past summer months we have
been hard at work mapping these 13 species… And let me tell you, it
has not been easy! The season was very irregular with lots of rain
and wind and cold and cloudy days! Cicadas HATE this weather and are
completely mute… Making our job next to impossible! When we are in
the field we go by their sound… Gently, we approach the star of the
show so as not to surprise it…A cicada can be singing two feet in
front of you and it will a feat trying to even see it in the
vegetation! Then we swing our nets hoping to see the cicada caught…
But nope… It will keep singing on another hidden perch… Now
without the calling song, can you even imagine?! Like bats with
earmuffs!
But, we pulled through! Of
the all the species, we recorded 12, leaving only a species behind for
next year! We updated their distributions, expanding some territories,
but on many cases reducing. And it’s disheartening… On some cases
well-known and healthy populations have been paved over to build malls,
housing or supermarkets to feed the tourist influx during the Summer; on
other cases wildfires that have left Portugal burnt may have affected
cicada populations in an unpredictable way. And this is yet another
hurdle… Cicadas generally live three years (some up to 17!!!) below
ground and the adult for about two to three weeks. All the aspects of
the cicadas’ life are derived from the adults and we know next to
nothing from 99.9% of the rest of their life.
This
is what makes my work even more thrilling and exciting! We
need to invent new ways to study these critters – even with the
lack-of-funds ghost looming above our heads – and it rewards us in
the most surprising ways, with the “Uh… That’s funny…” moment,
we scientists crave! Have you got cicadas in your country? Have you ever
seen a cicada? How about your work? What do you love – and hate –
about it? Let’s discuss it below in the comments!
If you aren’t Portuguese, or wish to know more, consider scrolling below!
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About the project:
The Cicada Group at FCUL, to which I belong, is led by Paula Simões with Vera L. Nunes, Eduardo Marabuto and Raquel Mendes as fellow members.
A small side-note: Only the male cicada does the singing, and each species has its own tune. And with this information alone, we can tell which species it is with a pretty good margin of certainty!
The group’s mission is to study the divergence patterns of some selected species of Mediterranean cicadas. Let me break it to you: Imagine trying to piece together a huge puzzle of parts, where each part is a cicada and we need to connect it to other parts with the help of the tools at our disposal…
The group first began with Cicada sp. (it’s the most common species singing in our Portuguese cities) and then the Tettigettalna spp., an European genus of cicadas – or should I say mostly European..? These cicadas are very abundant in the Baetic mountain region (the southern and easternmost part of Spain) and we asked ourselves… Morocco is just a swim away… Could we actually find a Tettigettalna singing in Africa?!
The one lost in Africa: Tettigettalna afroamissa
The group went there in 2014, – and boom! – We found it! The first ever African Tettigettalna, to which we baptized Tettigettalna afroamissa, meaning the lost one, or the one left behind in Africa. Also, we found other species, just waiting to be described! The other species I described with my colleagues was Berberigetta dimelodica, a cicada so different it needed to be placed in its own genus, its own drawer so to say! The name means “the berberian cicada with two melodies”, and it only has this name because I was “censured” at the time… And you can read more about this in a 2-part video I made on Instagram @thefinalcries, a funny story to say the least!
The melodious farting, the two-melodies cicada: Berberigetta dimelodica
This is where the NatGeo project enters!
It was a brain-child of our need – better yet! – it was born out of our near complete ignorance about North African cicadas. We do have got material, we have acoustics, genetics, morphology, but our sampling is very limited leaving us with huge gaps! Also, the few already described species are very hard to study, because they were described from very old museum specimens, with some celebrating their 100th and só years… these animals are very precious, thus taking a leg for genetics is very unlikely (and possibly not worth the time and resources because DNA degrades over time) and acoustics are out of the picture (i do remember reading a very old paper, where the author describes the cicada song with the help of music sheets!).
It’s like painting a lush Bob Ross canvas, but with only one colour…
Adding to this, we also noticed a huge pressure on the cicada’s habitat. Picture this: In the Middle Atlas, near Azrou. Here, the primary living of shepherds is out of sheep and goat herding. This may seem innocuous at a first glance, but the amount of goats is astounding!!! If you ever seen a goat eat, or had a goat you will know that they’ll eat everything clean at their reach. Now let me give you some numbers… imagine over 200 thousand goats and sheep (registered, there are much likely more) razing through a landscape of just over 750km². Source: Kouba et al., (2018)
Vast herds of sheep cover the Middle Atlas, eating away the landscape.
Cicadas live 99% of their lifetime underground, happily burrowing the ground and eating plant roots. They need a good and mixed plant cover to thrive, and during this time is when they are most vulnerable, because we think it is when they disperse, or spread the least. And they are the mercy of cattle eating everything and leaving behind bare ground, and without a chance for the earth to naturally regenerate itself… then cicadas are pretty much f*cked up… With nowhere to go, and a limited ability to go elsewhere, they seem to be condemned to extinction… and extinction, people, it’s forever… The only places they do thrive are atop the hills that are protected by small fences, that limit the entrance of cattle. And not only cicadas live here, other creepy crawlies like crickets, spiders, caterpillars, butterflies, dragonflies so many more make their home here. And these are the only places where you can see how the Middle Atlas is without the cattle: A lush oasis!
This photo was taken atop a small mount, protected by a small fence. Compare it with the photo above! How many young trees can you count in each?
Then again, these small oases are at the mercy of someone toppling these fences and letting the cattle raze onward.
Hence the project’s name: The final cries of the unheard Moroccan cicadas!
I cannot give, to my full knowledge, estimates on the impact of overgrazing to insect populations in Morocco, as there haven’t been any studies published, but the situation does looks dire… If we don’t act and go forward with the immediate conservation of these species, we will be to late to save them… Add it to climate change, the overall lack of knowledge on these species, living below-ground, hard to study, and a below-standard taxonomy, mix it thoroughly, preheat the oven and you have the perfect shitstorm to go wrong!
We are only five
tackling this enormous problem and funding is very short nowadays,
and we mostly do it out of our love for science, curiosity and doing
what’s right for these insects.
And who’s to say that Portugal won’t be the next in line? We already have the ingredients: The Alentejo region is teeming with super-intensive olive orchards, and now avocado too, lesser dam waters levels, year after year, and of course, the looming threat that the weather in Portugal will resemble Morocco in less than a century. We are already giving small steps in this sense, with the Invertebrate Red List of Portugal, and species like Euryphara contentei are set to receive an IUCN protection status! Our next step will be to sample Algeria, the Balearic Islands and Northern Spain, which will be a challenge on its own!
This cicada, smaller than your thumb, is Euryphara contentei, known from 3 very small populations in Portugal.
Well, this went from
being a project description to a small rant, but I hope you got the
raison d’être of my work!
I’m Gonçalo, and I have always been fascinated with insects! After discovering two new species of cicadas, from Morocco, I felt the need to protect these little critters. I belong to the Cicada Group at the Faculty of Sciences of Lisbon and in collaboration with 4 other researchers, we tackle the unknown of the cicada’s lifes.
Now a NatGeo explorer, I can tell you all the nuances of a scientist, all the guessing, all the worrying, all the rants (and it’s many) but also all the small steps we make.
Heralds of Summer 