Assessment of Ovipositional Preferences of Adult Periodical Cicadas (Broods XIX 2011 and X 2021) (Hemiptera: Cicadidae: Magicicada spp.) among Commercial Nursery Tree Species1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Periodical cicada oviposition during emergence of 2008 (17-yr cycle Brood XIV) and 2011 (13-yr cycle Brood XIX) in Middle Tennessee caused millions of dollars in damage to field-grown nursery trees. Brood XIX returned in 2024, and Brood XIV returned in 2025. Following the 2011 emergence of Brood XIX (13-yr cycle), an assessment was conducted at seven Tennessee commercial nurseries to identify damage caused by female cicada oviposition on woody plant species. At each nursery facility, female cicadas laid eggs on multiple tree species that were being grown as ornamentals, including genera like Acer , Betula , Cornus , Gleditsia , Liquidambar , Nyssa , Malus , Oxydendrum , Prunus , Quercus , and others. In 2021, Brood X (17-yr cycle) emerged in east Tennessee and northern Kentucky providing an interim opportunity for this project to quantify ovipositional damage on 34 trees of 7 genera at two sites of a Kentucky commercial nursery. At each site, various tree rows were examined, and tree species, cultivar, and ovipositional damage were evaluated. The oviposition damage was severe (55–100% of canopy branches) on Amelanchier , Carpinus , Cercis , Ostrya , Prunus , and Quercus . However, four cultivars, including Cercis canadensis L. ‘Forest Pansy’, Liquidambar styraciflua L. ‘Hapdell’ and ‘Slender Silhouette’, and Prunus virginiana L. ‘Canada Red’, had minimal oviposition damage (0–38% of canopy branches), possibly indicating some undesirable traits to female cicadas. Host-related factors that may reduce oviposition preference could be anatomical (e.g., rough corky bark, frequent buds on trunks, etc.) or physical and chemical conditions (e.g., gummy coniferous sap, toxic or repellent secondary metabolites). Other factors like nursery habitat (e.g., tree type and diversity), site location (e.g., proximity to adjacent forests), and absence of preventative pest management practices by nurseries might influence oviposition damage. Some trees were extensively damaged; thus, removing them was more cost effective than pruning severely injured branches to restore canopy structure and allow new growth. Consequently, host damage data from this project caused by periodical cicadas will facilitate future nursery grower tree selections during brood emergence years to reduce costly pruning or tree removal costs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".