The Okanagana Citizen Science Project's Journal

Journal archives for August 2020

August 1, 2020

The curious case of Okanagana arctostaphylae

It started with a post. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/53902805
Innocent enough; a red cicada on white netting. Except it really wasn't. This was Okanagana arctostaphylae and it was the first time it had been seen since it was described by Van Duzee in 1915, 105 years ago. The question then became, were there more? @easmeds set out to find them and find them he did!

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/54571493

That they had remained undiscovered for so long is in part a testament to their superior camouflage and in part to people not looking for them. Part of that was due to it having been so long since they were seen, but it highlights the importance of always keeping an open mind and an open eye.

Thanks to the specimens taken we now have a DNA sample to figure out what the evolutionary relationship of O. arctostaphylae is. Is it really related to O. opacipennis like Davis thought when he described the latter as a subspecies in 1926? Or is it something else entirely?

Posted on August 1, 2020 11:27 PM by willc-t willc-t | 2 comments | Leave a comment

August 6, 2020

Contributors Continued

It's been a great season so far with many people contributing specimens to the project

The two stand-out finds of the season are from @easmeds who is part of our research team and went out and found Okanagana arctostaphylae after a sighting was posted on iNaturalist

On the other side of the continent @jamiehunter found O. noveboracensis (another incredibly rare Okanagana) in Ontario where it is restricted to a small area around the Niagara region.

Other contributions and contributors since my last update!

O. canadensis @fmgee
O. canescens (tentative) @alice_abela
O. catalina (a major find) @emshaph
O. occidentalis @fmgee
O. tristis @alice_abela
O. vanduzeei (?) @birdernaturalist
And more great unknowns: @mnishiguchi @birdernaturalist

Posted on August 6, 2020 12:43 AM by willc-t willc-t | 0 comments | Leave a comment

August 14, 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 August 14, 2020 02:02 AM by willc-t willc-t | 7 comments | Leave a comment

August 27, 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 August 27, 2020 12:34 AM by willc-t willc-t | 2 comments | Leave a comment