Most cicadas are daytime singers, and their choruses typically wind down well before full darkness. But the answer is not a flat no. Research on cicada communities in both urban and natural habitats has found that certain species do extend their calling into nighttime hours, particularly in cities where artificial lighting and trapped heat push conditions closer to what these insects need to keep singing. Whether you hear cicadas after dark depends on where you live, how warm the night is, and which species are in your neighborhood.
Why Most Cicadas Go Quiet After Dark
The biggest factor keeping cicadas silent at night is temperature. Cicadas produce sound using specialized muscles that buckle a ribbed membrane on the abdomen, and those muscles are highly sensitive to heat. Research on European Tibicina cicadas found that the minimum ambient temperature these species need just to begin calling falls in the range of 22 to 24°C (roughly 72 to 75°F), and that the power of their calls drops as temperatures fall because the acoustic muscles simply cannot contract as forcefully in cooler air.1Physiological Entomology. Ambient temperature and sound power of cicada calling songs (Hemiptera: Cicadidae: Tibicina) In most temperate environments, nighttime temperatures dip below that threshold for much of the season. A cicada trying to call in cool night air would be burning energy for a weak, ineffective signal that females are unlikely to detect or respond to.
This thermal constraint is the reason cicada choruses tend to peak during the warmest part of the day, often from late morning through mid-afternoon. As the sun drops and temperatures decline, the chorus thins out. By the time it is fully dark, most species have stopped entirely. It is not so much that cicadas “choose” to be quiet at night; the physics of their sound-producing system simply will not cooperate once the air cools.
Urban Heat and Artificial Light Change the Rules
Cities, however, create conditions that do not exist in forests or grasslands. Pavement, concrete, and buildings absorb solar energy during the day and radiate it back at night, keeping urban temperatures several degrees warmer than surrounding rural areas. On top of that, streetlights and building lights bathe urban trees in illumination that can blur the environmental cues insects use to distinguish day from night.
A study using autonomous recording units across urbanized and green spaces in Japan found exactly the pattern you would expect from these conditions. Two species, Platypleura kaempferi and Graptopsaltria nigrofuscata, extended their calling into nighttime hours at urban sites, behavior the researchers linked to artificial illumination and elevated nighttime temperatures from the urban heat island effect.2Ecological Research. Using Autonomous Recording Units to Detect Variation in Cicada Calling Pattern Across Urbanized and Green Spaces Four other species in the same area maintained strictly diurnal calling regardless of whether they were in the city or in a park. So the shift to nighttime calling is not universal even within a single community. Some species are more responsive to urban conditions than others, and the ones that do extend into nighttime are likely taking advantage of the warmer, brighter conditions that cities provide.
If you live in a warm urban area and hear what sounds like cicadas after dark, this is the most likely explanation. You are not imagining things, and the insects are not confused. They are responding rationally to conditions that, from their perspective, still feel like daytime.
How Cicadas Make That Sound
Understanding why temperature matters so much to cicada calling requires a quick look at how they actually produce noise, because it is unlike anything most other insects do. Crickets and katydids rub body parts together to produce sound. Cicadas use a completely different system. On each side of a male cicada’s abdomen sits a tymbal, a dome-shaped membrane reinforced with a series of ribs. Powerful muscles attached to the tymbal pull it inward, and the ribs buckle in rapid sequence, each buckle producing a distinct click. When these clicks happen fast enough, they merge into the continuous buzz or drone that defines cicada song.
A recent study in Nature Communications described the tymbal as a natural “metastructure,” modeling it as a chain of interconnected snapping elements whose behavior depends on the viscoelastic properties of chitin and resilin, the structural materials that make up the membrane.3PubMed Central. The tymbal of a cicada: nature’s sound-generating metastructure The hollow abdomen acts as a resonating chamber, amplifying those clicks into the loud calls that can reach over 100 decibels in some species. The whole system depends on rapid, powerful muscle contractions, and those contractions are directly regulated by how warm the muscles are. Cool muscles contract slowly and weakly, producing a feeble sound. Warm muscles contract rapidly, producing the full-throated chorus.
Temperature Changes More Than Just Whether Cicadas Call
Temperature does not just flip a switch between silence and singing. It also shapes the character of the song itself. Research on Taiwanese cicada species found that the rate at which cicadas produce syllables is positively correlated with ambient temperature: warmer air means faster syllable rates.4Academia.edu. Zoological Studies 47(1): 1-10 (2008) 1 The temporal properties of the song, things like pulse rate and syllable duration, shifted more dramatically with temperature than the pitch or frequency did. In practical terms, a cicada calling on a scorching afternoon sounds noticeably different from one calling during a cool morning: the hot-afternoon version is faster-paced and more intense.
This has an interesting implication for nighttime calling. Even when urban conditions are warm enough for a cicada to call after dark, the song might sound subtly different from the daytime version if temperatures have dropped even a few degrees. A nighttime caller on a 26°C evening is likely producing a slightly slower, less intense signal than it would at 34°C in the afternoon. Whether females respond differently to these temperature-modulated songs is still an open area of research, but the acoustic difference is measurable.
Cicadas That Make Their Own Heat
A small number of cicada species have evolved a workaround for the temperature problem entirely. Instead of relying on ambient warmth, these species are endothermic: they can generate their own body heat through muscular activity, raising thoracic temperatures well above the surrounding air. Research on three South American species, Dorisiana bonaerensis, Quesada gigas, and Fidicina mannifera, found that endothermy may serve several functions, including uncoupling reproductive behavior from environmental constraints and allowing cicadas to use habitats or time windows unavailable to species that depend entirely on environmental heat.5Journal of Thermal Biology. Diurnal activity, temperature responses and endothermy in three South American cicadas (Homoptera: Cicadidae: Dorisiana bonaerensis, Quesada gigas and Fidicina mannifera)
The researchers also noted that calling during cooler periods, such as dusk or nighttime, could reduce predation risk. Birds, the primary predators of adult cicadas, are largely diurnal. A cicada that can warm its own muscles and call at dusk or after dark faces fewer birds hunting by sound. The trade-off is that endothermy is metabolically expensive. Heating your own flight muscles burns fuel, and a cicada fueling itself on xylem sap, one of the most nutritionally dilute food sources in the insect world, cannot afford to waste energy. So endothermic species tend to be larger-bodied tropical cicadas with access to enough resources to sustain the cost.
If you are in the tropics and hear a loud cicada calling at twilight or into the early night, there is a reasonable chance you are hearing one of these self-heating species rather than a standard ectothermic cicada that simply found itself in warm enough air.
Why Different Species Call at Different Times of Day
In any habitat with multiple cicada species, the various species tend to divide up the day. One species might peak at dawn, another at midday, and a third in the late afternoon. This staggering is not random. When several species are broadcasting acoustic signals at the same time in the same frequency range, the signals interfere with each other and females have a harder time picking out the calls of their own species. Spreading out across the day solves this problem.
A study of cicada assemblages in Taiwan found evidence of diel partitioning among eight species at a mountain site, with statistically significant calling-time segregation in nine of the possible species pairs.6PubMed Central. Acoustic and Temporal Partitioning of Cicada Assemblages in City and Mountain Environments At urban sites, where only three species were present, no significant diel segregation was detected, likely because fewer species meant less acoustic crowding and less pressure to partition time. The same general principle of temporal acoustic partitioning has been documented in other singing insect groups. Research on co-occurring bladder grasshoppers in Southern Africa found highly significant differences in mean calling times across species, with peak calling activity clustered around specific times of night and very little overlap between species pairs.7Behaviour. The bladder grasshopper chorus: drivers of acoustic niche partitioning in Southern Africa’s Pneumoridae
For cicadas, the practical result is that most species have carved out a daytime slot, and relatively few have evolved to fill the nighttime niche. The night belongs more to crickets, katydids, and certain grasshoppers. Cicadas that do call at night are either exploiting unusual conditions like urban warmth, or they belong to the small subset of species physiologically equipped to operate outside the daytime thermal window.
Telling Cicadas Apart from Other Nighttime Insects
One reason people ask whether cicadas call at night is that they hear a loud insect noise after dark and assume it must be a cicada. In many cases, the culprit is actually a katydid or a tree cricket. The soundscapes of summer nights in temperate regions are dominated by orthopterans (crickets and their relatives), not cicadas, and some of these insects can be surprisingly loud.
The key to telling them apart is the quality of the sound. Cicada calls are typically a sustained buzz, drone, or pulsing whine. They often build in intensity and then taper off, or they maintain a steady, mechanical-sounding tone for long stretches. Cricket and katydid calls, by contrast, tend to be more rhythmic and chirpy: repeated short pulses with clear gaps between them. Tree crickets produce a steady trill that can superficially resemble a cicada drone, but the pitch is usually higher and the tone more musical than mechanical.
Geography and season matter too. If you are in a temperate city during a heat wave and the nighttime lows are staying above about 24°C, a nighttime buzz that sounds like a cicada might actually be one. If you are in a cooler suburban area where the temperature drops to 18°C after sunset, the sound is almost certainly a katydid or cricket, even if it is loud enough to seem cicada-like. Annual cicadas (the ones that appear every summer, as opposed to periodical species on 13- or 17-year cycles) are the most likely candidates for occasional nighttime calling, since they are active during the hottest weeks of the year when overnight temperatures stay highest.
Periodical Cicadas and Nighttime Noise
People in the eastern United States have a specific version of this question that comes up every time a periodical brood emerges: do those enormous swarms of Magicicada sing at night? The short answer is that periodical cicadas are even more strongly diurnal than most annual species. Their choruses are famously loud during the day, with massed singing that can exceed the decibel level of a lawnmower, but they go quiet once the sun sets. Periodical cicadas emerge in spring, when nighttime temperatures in their range routinely drop well below the calling threshold. Even on a warm late-May evening in the mid-Atlantic, temperatures fall enough that the tymbal muscles lose the efficiency needed for sustained calling.
That said, people do report hearing periodical cicadas making sounds at dusk and occasionally just after dark, especially on unusually warm evenings. These tend to be sporadic calls rather than the full-blown synchronized chorus of midday. Some of the sounds people attribute to periodical cicadas at night may also be disturbance calls, the short, sharp squawk a cicada makes when handled or startled by a predator, rather than the deliberate mating calls that form the daytime chorus. A cicada grabbed by a cat at 10 p.m. will still protest vocally, even if it would never spontaneously start singing at that hour.
What the Urban Effect Means Going Forward
The finding that certain cicada species extend their calling into nighttime in urban environments raises questions about what happens as cities expand and nights get warmer. Urban heat islands are intensifying in many regions, and global temperatures are trending upward, meaning more nights will exceed the thermal thresholds that cicadas need to call. If species that are currently marginal nighttime callers find conditions increasingly favorable after dark, urban soundscapes could shift noticeably.
The Japanese study that documented extended nighttime calling also highlighted that not all species responded the same way.2Ecological Research. Using Autonomous Recording Units to Detect Variation in Cicada Calling Pattern Across Urbanized and Green Spaces Four of six species in the study maintained strictly daytime calling patterns regardless of site type. Whatever drives the flexibility of the two nighttime-extending species, whether it is a lower temperature threshold for calling, a greater sensitivity to artificial light as a cue, or some combination, it is not shared by all cicadas. The interspecific differences mean that warming nights will not produce a uniform shift toward nocturnal cicada noise. Instead, certain species may become more conspicuous at night while others remain strictly tied to daylight hours, gradually changing the composition of what you hear when you step outside after sunset in a warm city.
Researchers monitoring insect acoustics increasingly use autonomous recording units deployed around the clock, which means that nighttime calling behavior that might have been missed by daytime field surveys is now being captured systematically. As these datasets grow, the picture of which cicada species call at night, and under what conditions, will sharpen considerably. For now, the evidence points to nighttime cicada calling being real but limited: a handful of species, under specific thermal and lighting conditions, in mostly urban environments.