Herrera Distant, 1905c

Sanborn, Allen F., 2020, The cicadas (Hemiptera: Cicadidae) of Ecuador including the description of five new species, a new subtribe, four new synonymies, and fifteen new records, Zootaxa 4880 (1), pp. 1-80 : 64-65

Genus Herrera Distant, 1905c

Herrera Distant 1905c: 486 .

TYPE SPECIES.— Cicada marginella Walker 1858a: 21 . ( Orizaba , Vera Cruz, Mexico)

REMARKS.—The characters used by Distant (1905c) to distinguish species of Herrera are a head that about as wide as the mesonotum, a vertex that is longer than the frons, a pronotum that is about as long as the mesonotum, an abdomen that is about as long as the distance from the apex of the head to the posterior cruciform elevation, small male opercula, strongly spined fore femora, and a fore wing width that is slightly greater than half the fore wing length. The fore wing width can be as little as one third the length in some species and the male opercula can be relatively large in some species as these characters have become more variable as more species have been described.

DISTRIBUTION.—Species of the genus have been recorded from Argentina, Belize, Costa Rica, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Panama ( Metcalf 1963c; Sanborn 2013; 2014; Sanborn and Heath 2014; Sanborn 2020d). The first records for Bolivia, Brazil, French Guiana, Peru and Venezuela were reported only recently ( Sanborn 2019b, c; 2020a, b, c) along with the first record for Ecuador ( Sanborn 2020b). These records continue to connect the previously disjunct populations in southern South America and Central America and more than doubled the known diversity of the genus.