Dog-day Cicadas

Overview

Neotibicen is a genus of medium-sized to large cicadas known as Dog-day Cicadas. It occurs in the United States and southern Canada east of the Rocky Mountains and in Mexico.

There are 12 living (extant) Neotibicen species. All of them occur in the United Sates and 4 occur in Minnesota. One species, the Bermuda cicada, is now extinct.

Dog-day cicadas spend two or more years as nymphs, living underground and feeding on roots. They emerge in the “dog days” of summer, late July through September. Their emergence is not synchronized, so that some adults emerge every year.

Adults spend most of their short lives in the canopies of trees. They use their needle-like mouthparts to suck xylem sap from twigs. Their “songs” are in a low to medium pitch and have a grinding, mechanical resonance. Most species have a rhythmic, pulsing, “scissor grinder” song, others have a steady, high-pitched whine that rises at the beginning and tapers off at the end, and one, the swamp cicada, combines both.

Description

Adults are green and brown with black markings. The body is robust and 1″ to 2″ (25 to 51 mm) in length. The wings extend well past the abdomen, giving them a total length of 2½″ to 3″ (65 to 76 mm).

On the male, the plate on the underside of the thorax between the rear legs is noticeably swollen and rounded (bulbous), and abdominal segments (tergites) 2 and 3 are greatly enlarged, about twice as wide as tergites 4 through 7.

Distribution

Sources

24, 27, 30, 82, 83.

Biodiversity occurrence data published by: Minnesota Biodiversity Atlas (accessed through the Minnesota Biodiversity Atlas Portal, bellatlas.umn.edu. Accessed 5/3/2026).

Neotibicen Hill & Moulds, 2015 in GBIF Secretariat (2023). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via GBIF.org. Accessed 5/3/2026.