Are There Cicadas in Florida? What to Know

Florida is home to a surprisingly rich community of cicadas. A taxonomic survey recorded 15 species and 4 subspecies across 4 genera in the state, making it one of the more diverse cicada regions in the southeastern United States.¹ What Florida does not have, however, are the periodical cicadas that dominate national headlines every 13 or 17 years. Every species in the state is an annual or “dog-day” type, emerging in overlapping generations each summer rather than in synchronized mass broods. That distinction matters a lot for what you’ll actually experience living in or visiting Florida.

What Kinds of Cicadas Live in Florida

The cicadas you encounter in Florida belong to genera like Neotibicen, Diceroprocta, Melampsalta, and Beameria. The genus names shifted in recent years after molecular phylogenetic work split the old catch-all genus Tibicen into several new groups, including Neotibicen for many North American species and Hadoa for others, based on divergences that trace back tens of millions of years.² If you look up older field guides, the names may not match current taxonomy, but the insects are the same.

Among the more common species in the state, Neotibicen tibicen (the swamp cicada) and Diceroprocta olympusa are widespread across much of the peninsula and panhandle. Some species have restricted ranges within Florida, especially those tied to particular coastal or scrub habitats. The 15-species count spans the full state, from the subtropical tip of the Keys northward through the temperate panhandle, and different species dominate in different zones.¹

Why Florida Has No Periodical Cicadas

When news outlets cover a “cicada invasion,” they almost always mean periodical cicadas in the genus Magicicada, which spend either 13 or 17 years underground before emerging in staggering numbers across parts of the eastern and midwestern United States. None of the recognized periodical cicada broods include Florida in their range. The broods are mapped by the USDA, and the southernmost 13-year broods reach into parts of Georgia, the Carolinas, and the Gulf states, but stop short of the Florida peninsula.

The reasons are likely ecological and climatic. Periodical cicadas are adapted to deciduous hardwood forests where winter provides a clear seasonal signal. Florida’s subtropical climate, particularly in the central and southern portions of the state, lacks the sustained cold periods that may help regulate the cicadas’ precisely timed developmental clocks. The nymphs of periodical cicadas spend over a decade feeding on xylem fluid from tree roots, a liquid so nutritionally dilute that it may explain why these species need 13 or 17 years to mature.³ Florida’s annual cicada species likely have shorter underground development periods, on the order of two to five years, though exact durations for many Florida species haven’t been closely studied.

If you live in Florida and see breathless social media posts about billions of cicadas emerging, those events are happening hundreds of miles to your north. You will not experience a periodical cicada emergence in Florida under any known brood schedule. What you will hear, every single summer, is the steady drone of annual species calling from trees.

When and Where You’ll Hear Them

Florida’s cicada season stretches longer than in most other states, largely because the warm climate gives the insects a wider window of activity. In central and south Florida, cicadas can begin calling as early as April and continue into October, with peak activity from June through August. In the panhandle, the season more closely tracks the pattern seen in neighboring states like Alabama and Georgia, ramping up in late May and fading by September.

You’ll hear them most in areas with mature deciduous or mixed trees, since that’s where both the adults call and the nymphs develop underground. Suburban neighborhoods with large oaks, pecans, or sweetgums are prime cicada habitat. Heavily landscaped areas with young trees or mostly palms tend to have fewer cicadas, though some species in Florida use a surprisingly wide range of host plants. Coastal habitats, including mangrove forests, support specialized cicada populations. Mangrove cicadas have been studied in Florida for their ability to tolerate high temperatures and unique tidal-zone conditions, representing one of the more unusual habitat specializations found in any North American cicada.

The chorus is loudest on hot, sunny afternoons. Each species tends to call at a preferred time of day and temperature, so the overall soundscape shifts as the day progresses. If you hear a pulsing, high-pitched whine from the treetops on a July afternoon in Jacksonville or Tampa, that is almost certainly a cicada.

How They Make That Sound

The sound of cicadas is one of the defining features of a Florida summer, and the mechanism behind it is unusual in the insect world. Only males call. They produce sound by rapidly contracting a pair of specialized muscles attached to stiff, ribbed membranes called tymbals, located on the sides of the abdomen. Each muscle contraction buckles the tymbal inward through five or six stages as the ribs deform, and when the muscle relaxes slightly, spring-loaded structures snap the tymbal back. The muscle fires at roughly 50 contractions per second, and each contraction produces multiple clicks as the ribs buckle in sequence, creating a rapid buzz or whine.⁴

The hollow abdomen acts as a resonating chamber, amplifying the sound dramatically. Some species can produce calls exceeding 90 decibels at close range, comparable to a lawn mower. Each species has its own distinctive call pattern, which is how females identify males of the correct species in areas where multiple species overlap. In Florida, where several species share the same trees, this acoustic partitioning is particularly important. You can learn to tell species apart by ear once you know what to listen for: some produce a steady, unbroken whine, others a pulsating rhythm, and still others a series of sharp clicks.

Life Underground

The buzzing adults are only the final chapter of a cicada’s life. The vast majority of a cicada’s existence is spent as a nymph burrowed underground, attached to tree roots. The nymphs feed by inserting their mouthparts into root xylem vessels and slowly extracting the sap that flows through them. Xylem fluid carries water and dissolved minerals upward through a plant, but it is extremely dilute compared to phloem sap, which carries sugars. Cicada nymphs excrete amino acids rather than sugars, a chemical signature of their xylem-feeding habit.³

Because the nutritional content of xylem is so low, cicadas grow slowly. For Florida’s annual species, the underground phase likely lasts several years, though overlapping generations mean that adults emerge every summer rather than all at once. When a nymph is ready, it tunnels to the surface, usually after a rain softens the soil, climbs the nearest vertical surface, and molts one final time. The shed exoskeleton, or exuvia, is the familiar hollow brown shell you find clinging to tree trunks and fence posts around Florida homes each summer. The freshly emerged adult is pale and soft, darkening and hardening over the next few hours before it flies off to begin calling.

Cicada Killers and Other Predators

Florida cicadas sit at the center of a food web that includes birds, lizards, spiders, and one especially dramatic predator: the eastern cicada killer wasp (Sphecius speciosus). These large solitary wasps are common in north Florida and can alarm homeowners because of their size, often exceeding an inch in length. Despite their intimidating appearance, they are not aggressive toward people. Their focus is entirely on cicadas.

A female cicada killer hunts by locating a calling cicada, stinging it into paralysis, and flying it back to a burrow she has excavated in sandy soil. The paralyzed cicada becomes food for the wasp’s larva. Research on cicada killer populations at two north Florida sites found that the wasps carry prey loads ranging from about a quarter to two and a half times their own body mass, with the upper limit apparently representing the physical maximum they can carry in flight. Smaller wasps were restricted to smaller cicada species, while larger wasps provisioned with medium and large cicadas.⁵

If you see large wasps digging holes in your yard or carrying limp cicadas through the air, these are almost certainly cicada killers. They prefer bare or sparsely vegetated sandy patches for nesting, which are abundant in Florida’s well-drained soils. They are solitary, meaning they don’t form defensive colonies the way yellowjackets do, and stings are extremely rare.

The Zombie Fungus That Rewrites Cicada Behavior

One of the strangest stories in cicada biology involves a fungal parasite called Massospora cicadina, which infects periodical cicadas and essentially turns them into spore-dispersing machines. While this pathogen primarily targets Magicicada species that don’t occur in Florida, the biology is worth knowing because it often comes up in cicada discussions and because related fungal parasites may affect other cicada species.

Massospora infects cicadas during or shortly after their emergence from the soil. The fungus colonizes the abdomen, eventually destroying the reproductive organs and replacing the rear segments with a chalky mass of spores. Remarkably, infected cicadas keep moving and attempting to mate, spreading spores to every cicada they contact. The behavioral manipulation goes further: researchers found that infected males begin mimicking the wing-flick signals that females use to attract mates. Healthy males approach the infected males expecting to mate, and the close contact spreads the fungus. In this way, Massospora functions partly as a sexually transmitted disease, with the altered behavior serving the fungus’s reproductive interests rather than the cicada’s.⁶

The fungus produces two types of spores at different stages of infection. Early-stage infections produce spores that spread directly between living adult cicadas during the current emergence. Later-stage infections produce resting spores that drop to the soil, where they can remain viable and infect cicadas during a future emergence. Experiments in Arkansas showed that resting spores collected from one species of 17-year cicada could infect a different species of 13-year cicada less than a year later, suggesting the spores don’t need to wait a full 13- or 17-year cycle to remain infectious.⁷ The infection modifies the cicada’s sexual behavior in species-specific ways that maximize transmission, a level of host manipulation that continues to fascinate parasitologists.⁸

Cicadas Are Not Locusts

A persistent source of confusion in the United States is the habit of calling cicadas “locusts.” When early European colonists encountered periodical cicada emergences, the sheer number of insects reminded them of locust plagues described in the Bible and observed in Europe and Africa. The name stuck in American English, and you’ll still hear people in Florida and elsewhere refer to cicadas as locusts.⁹

The two groups are not closely related. Locusts are a swarming phase of certain grasshopper species in the order Orthoptera. They eat vegetation voraciously and can devastate crops. Cicadas are in the order Hemiptera, the true bugs, and they feed exclusively on plant fluids extracted through piercing mouthparts. Adult cicadas do not chew leaves. They can cause minor twig damage when females cut slits in small branches to lay eggs, but this is generally cosmetic and rarely threatens the health of a mature tree. In Florida, where periodical cicada mass emergences don’t happen, even twig damage is minimal because the annual species emerge in much lower densities.

The locust confusion matters practically because it sometimes leads people to reach for pesticides when they hear cicadas, assuming a crop-eating swarm is descending on their property. This is unnecessary and counterproductive. Florida’s cicadas don’t damage gardens, and spraying insecticides to reduce cicada numbers harms beneficial insects and predators while accomplishing very little against a population that mostly lives underground.

What Cicadas Do for the Ecosystem

Cicadas play a larger ecological role than their status as summer background noise might suggest. When adult cicadas die, their bodies represent a significant pulse of nutrients, particularly nitrogen, returning to the soil. Research on mass emergences of periodical cicadas has shown that decomposing cicada carcasses stimulate soil nitrogen cycling, increasing the release of nitrous oxide and ammonia from the soil as the organic matter breaks down.¹⁰ In areas with mass emergences, this nutrient pulse is large enough to measurably affect tree growth in the following year.

Florida doesn’t see those massive synchronized die-offs, but the annual species contribute a steady, lower-level nutrient input every summer. Underground, the nymphs also influence soil structure by creating tunnels as they move between roots, and their feeding provides a pathway for xylem nutrients to enter the broader soil food web. Above ground, cicadas are a calorie-rich food source for birds, mammals, and reptiles. The predictable summer emergence of annual cicadas in Florida provides reliable prey for species like mockingbirds, blue jays, and anole lizards.

Living with Florida Cicadas

For the most part, Florida’s cicadas require no management. They don’t bite, they don’t sting, they don’t infest homes, and they don’t damage crops. The two situations where they get people’s attention are noise and egg-laying. The calling of male cicadas can be genuinely loud, and if a large tree in your yard hosts many individuals, the sound can be intrusive on a quiet afternoon. There’s no practical way to reduce the noise short of removing the trees, which would be a dramatic overreaction. The calling season is finite, and most species wind down by early fall.

Egg-laying can occasionally cause what arborists call “flagging,” where the small branch tips that a female has sliced open wilt and turn brown. On a large, healthy tree, this is insignificant. On a recently planted young tree, especially one under two inches in trunk diameter, it can set back growth. If you’re planting new fruit or ornamental trees in late spring, some gardeners in heavily affected areas drape lightweight netting over the canopy during peak cicada season as a precaution. For established trees, no action is needed.

One thing Florida residents should know is that the hollow exoskeletons clinging to walls and trees are harmless remnants, not living insects. They can be brushed off or left to disintegrate naturally. Pets sometimes eat cicadas, which is safe in small quantities, though a dog that gorges on them may get a stomachache from the sheer volume of exoskeleton material. There are no toxins involved.

Citizen Science and Identifying Your Local Species

Because Florida’s annual cicadas don’t make national news the way periodical broods do, they are comparatively understudied. The 15-species inventory for the state was based on museum collections and targeted field surveys, and there may be more to learn about the ranges, calling seasons, and population trends of individual species.¹ Platforms like iNaturalist and the Cicada Safari app have started filling some of these gaps by allowing anyone with a smartphone to photograph and geolocate cicadas they encounter.

If you want to identify a cicada you’ve found in your yard, the most useful features to photograph are the wing venation pattern, the body color and markings, and, if you can capture it, the sound of the call. Many Florida species are superficially similar in size and coloring, and even experienced entomologists lean on acoustic data to confirm identifications. The recent reclassification of many North American cicadas into new genera means older resources may use outdated names, but the physical descriptions and range maps in pre-2015 guides are still largely accurate for telling species apart in the field.² If you record a calling cicada on your phone and upload the audio, researchers can often make an identification that would be impossible from a photograph alone.