Tibicen lyricen virescens Davis

Sanborn, Allen F., Phillips, Polly K. & Gilllis, Philip, 2008, The Cicadas of Florida (Hemiptera: Cicadoidea: Cicadidae), Zootaxa 1916, pp. 1-43 : 10

Tibicen lyricen virescens Davis (Figs. 71, 85–93)

Tibicen lyricen var. virescens Davis 1935: 175 . Type locality: Paradise Island, Homestead, Dade County, Florida. Holotype male is in the American Museum of Natural History ( Sanborn 1999). The allotype female was collected in Gainseville, FL and is in the Snow Entomological Museum, Kansas Museum of Natural History and a male paratype collected on Paradise Key, FL is housed in the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences ( Sanborn 1999).

The subspecies has green (fig. 86) instead of the fulvous areas on the pronotum and mesonotum of T. l. lyricen (fig. 77). Tibicen lyricen virescens was said to be a southern variety found along the Atlantic coast from North Carolina to Florida ( Davis 1935).

Tibicen lyricen virescens is another summer cicada. The species first emerges in mid-July and can be heard singing until mid-to-late October. The most common collection dates are in August and early September. No analysis of the song has been published but it has similar characteristics to T. l. lyricen (personal observation).

The subspecies Tibicen lyricen virescens has been recorded from 13 Florida counties: Alachua, Citrus, Dade, Glades, Hernando, Lake, Leon, Levy, Madison, Palm Beach, Putnam, Suwannee, and Wakulla. The distribution is similar to T. l. lyricen being found in all ecoregions of Florida and being restricted to the Miami Ridge/Atlantic Coastal Strip in the South Florida Coastal Plain. However, the overlap in the distributions of the species and subspecies (Fig. 71) suggests the validity of the subspecies needs further investigation to determine if it is simply a color morph.