Butterfly Cicada
Ambragaeana ambra
At first glance, Ambragaeana ambra seems to have missed the usual instructions for looking like a cicada. Its broad wings are washed with amber and brown, interrupted by pale spots and darker markings instead of being mostly clear. Open them and they occupy far more visual space than the compact black body between them. There’s something distinctly butterfly like about the result.
Hence the name butterfly cicada. It isn’t a butterfly, of course, nor is that name a formal taxonomic group. A. ambrabelongs firmly within Cicadidae, complete with the underground youth, piercing mouthparts and remarkable sound producing equipment expected of a cicada. It just happens to wear rather different wings.
Classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Hemiptera
Suborder: Auchenorrhyncha
Family: Cicadidae
Subfamily: Cicadinae
Tribe: Gaeanini
Genus: Ambragaeana
Species: Ambragaeana ambra
Common Name: Butterfly Cicada
Distribution: Southeast Asia, with records including Thailand and Vietnam
When a Cicada Borrows Butterfly Wings
The forewings of A. ambra are amber to brown and partly translucent, scattered with pale cream to white spots. Darker hindwings carry their own contrasting markings, while the body is glossy black with yellow around the head and thorax.
It’s an unusual arrangement if your idea of a cicada comes from the clear winged species more commonly encountered. In those, the network of veins tends to attract attention. Here the wings themselves become the display.
Their broad shape helps. Folded over the body, the insect is still recognisably cicada like. Spread out, the pattern takes over. That resemblance has led particularly colourful members of Gaeanini to be called butterfly cicadas, including species within Ambragaeana, Gaeana and Becquartina.
Put one beside a familiar clear winged cicada and the name suddenly makes a lot more sense.
Growing Up Underground
However flamboyant the adult becomes, it starts life following the familiar cicada plan. Eggs are laid in plant material and, after hatching, the young nymphs eventually make their way into the soil.
Much of their immature life passes underground, where they feed from plant roots using piercing and sucking mouthparts. How long this lasts varies considerably among cicadas, and the exact underground development period isn't well documented for every tropical species.
Eventually a mature nymph returns to the surface, climbs onto vegetation or another support and begins one of the stranger transformations to find attached to a tree trunk. The old skin splits along the back and the adult slowly works itself free.
At first it looks unfinished. The body is pale, the wings are soft and crumpled, and the rich colours of the mature insect haven't yet appeared. Fluid expands the wings before they harden, while pigmentation develops over the following hours. Observations of A. ambra have recorded emergence beginning at night, with its final colouring continuing into the following morning.
The empty shell stays behind.
Turning a Membrane into a Song
Crickets rub body parts together. Cicadas have another arrangement entirely.
Male cicadas produce their calls using specialised structures on the abdomen called tymbals. These ribbed membranes buckle when muscles contract and spring back again when released. One movement doesn't amount to much. Repeat it extraordinarily quickly and use the body as an amplifier, and you get something much harder to ignore.
The resulting calls aren't simply interchangeable cicada noise. Species produce characteristic signals used in communication and courtship. In a forest where several species may be calling at once, that distinction matters.
To human ears, the result can become one enormous wall of sound. Another cicada is listening for something much more particular.
The Colourful Side of the Family
Ambragaeana ambra belongs to Gaeanini, a tribe containing some remarkably colourful cicadas from across Asia. Black, yellow, red, green, orange and white all turn up within the group, sometimes in combinations that look rather extravagant beside their more subdued relatives.
The genus Ambragaeana was established in 1985, with A. ambra designated as its type species. Ambra refers to amber, an appropriate name once the warm colouring of those forewings is in front of you.
Several recognised Ambragaeana species share the broad winged appearance of the genus while differing in their markings. Older references can make the group a little messy to follow because species now placed within Ambragaeanahaven't always been classified there. Taxonomy has a habit of moving the labels around while the insects remain exactly where they were.
A True Bug in Butterfly Clothing
Cicadas belong to Hemiptera, the true bugs, alongside insects as varied as shield bugs, aphids and leafhoppers. They may not look especially alike, but one of their important shared features is hidden around the mouth.
Cicadas don't chew leaves with jaws like a beetle. Instead they have a piercing and sucking rostrum used to draw fluid from plants. Adults feed primarily from xylem, the tissue carrying water and dissolved minerals upwards through a plant. Xylem is dilute, so cicadas process considerable quantities of fluid to obtain what they need.
The underground nymph uses the same broad feeding arrangement on roots. A cicada changes enormously between those two stages, but its relationship with plants continues on both sides of the soil.
Amber Under the Light
Butterflies and moths can lose scales with remarkably little encouragement. Cicada wings are different. Their colour and pattern aren't carried on the same dense covering of detachable scales, and the insect itself is considerably more robust.
The wings still need careful handling. Broad surfaces can crease or tear, particularly along the veins, and in A. ambrathey're far too interesting to treat as simply the bits attached to either side of the body.
Light is worth playing with here. Against a pale backing, the cream spots and dark patterning read clearly. Let light pass through the wings and the translucent amber areas change character. A feature that looks predominantly brown from one angle can become surprisingly warm from another.
In the Apotheca
Beside a clear winged cicada, Ambragaeana ambra almost looks as though someone changed the rules halfway through. The broad head, large eyes and compact cicada body are all there. Then the wings open into amber, black and cream.
That makes it particularly useful as a specimen. Classification can become very tidy on paper, while actual animals insist on showing how much variation fits inside those categories. Put A. ambra beside another cicada and the similarities are there to find, but so are the differences.
Cicada doesn't have to mean transparent wings and mottled brown.
Sometimes it looks remarkably like a butterfly.
Excerpt:
Meta Description: Explore Ambragaeana ambra, a Southeast Asian butterfly cicada with broad amber wings, an underground nymphal stage and the remarkable sound producing anatomy of Cicadidae.
Tags: Ambragaeana ambra · Cicadidae · Cicada
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