Jason G.H. Londt contributed almost a quarter of the KwaZulu-Natal Museum’s specimens of Cicadidae, including a strong sample of females, and probably the best set to date of African records of predation on cicadas by robber flies. The collection provides evidence that robber flies catch more male cicadas; speculatively, because attacks on the heavier-bodied female fail more often. The metadata derived from these specimens also provide a small gazetteer of Londt’s collecting sites.

behavioural ecology, cicadas, Festschrift, gazetteer, museology, predation

Jason Gilbert Hayden Londt graduated from Rhodes University with a doctoral degree in Entomology in 1974, and briefly worked on ticks for the Agricultural Research Council at Onderstepoort, but moved to the Natal Museum late in 1976 (Guest 2006; Dikow and Midgley 2023). There he refocused his research on flies and hangingflies, and served in several roles, including Head of Entomology, minute secretary to the Board of Trustees, Editor of the Museum’s two journals, Assistant Director and, eventually, Director of the Museum from 1991 until his retirement in 2003 (Guest 2006; Stuckenberg and Mostovski 2006).

The Museum itself was initiated in 1879, passed from the Natal Society to the Natal Government in 1903, and is currently named the KwaZulu-Natal Museum. It houses internationally significant specialist collections of African insects (particularly dipterous flies and hangingflies), arachnids, molluscs, oligochaetes and cultural history. Since 1906 it has also published academic journals that are currently named “African Invertebrates” and “Southern African Humanities” and available on-line. Jason Londt was only the Museum’s sixth Director in a century.

Starting in 1976, Jason’s taxonomic research career focused on true flies (Diptera), particularly robber flies (Asilidae) and hangingflies (Mecoptera, Bittacidae) (Guest 2006; Londt 2006). However, he regularly accumulated specimens of other groups as by-catch during field trips. One such group is the cicadas, true hemipterous bugs of the family Cicadidae that are known for their males’ conspicuous mating songs. Many of these specimens were adventitious captures, but a few resulted from capturing robber flies with their prey (Londt 2006).

This article reviews the cicada species deposited in the KwaZulu-Natal Museum by Jason, one of which is illustrated in Fig. 1.

Figure 1. 

Male (NMSA-HEM 017489) and female (NMSA-HEM 017491) of Quintilia aurora (Walker, 1850) in the KwaZulu-Natal Museum collection, collected by Jason Londt in 2011, about 2 km W of Sutherland, Northern Cape. Scale bars: 10 mm. Photographs by kind courtesy of Terence Bellingan.

The cicada specimens in the KwaZulu-Natal Museum (KZNM) collection were determined by the author and their sexes noted. Metadata from the KwaZulu-Natal Museum’s database were transcribed to appropriate fields in a spreadsheet and augmented with details from the specimens’ labels as necessary. Other missing information was inferred through reference to the specimens’ KZNM collecting event codes.

Some collectors’ names that were missing from the Museum’s database were inferred through the associated KZNM collecting event code, and all of these names were reviewed for completeness and consistency of initials and spelling (where possible).

The locality data were reviewed to locate the sites with appropriate precision. Where the geocoordinates of a locality were not specified on a specimen’s label, the metadata of conspecific specimens from the same nominal site were consulted (on the basis that this would avoid creating spurious sites); if this produced no solution, the metadata of other species caught by the same collector were consulted (on the basis that collectors usually use locality names consistently and rarely collect over large areas in short periods). The remaining localities were attributed the geocoordinates associated with the sites’ names as they appear on Google Earth (http://earth.google.com) if the identities of the taxon and the collector made them plausible. Unless a label specified a finer precision, locations were estimated to the nearest minute (~1.6 km at South African latitudes) and converted to decimal degrees with three significant decimal places, which is adequate for mapping at the national scale. Localities were viewed using Google Earth to affirm their plausibility (e.g., that they were not at sea).

The resulting spreadsheet was used to map the localities and to compile statistics on the collection.

The collection contains 51 male and 22 female specimens from a total of 28 species, placed in five tribes and three subfamilies (Tables 1, 2). This represents most of the family-level taxa in Africa (Marshall et al. 2018) and 22.3% (74/332) of the cicada specimens in the museum. Cicadas are generally small or well camouflaged to avoid predation, but collectors (and predators) can locate males by their mating calls, which make them easier to find. Female cicadas are harder to find, but may be noticed when they are flying towards males or if (in a very few species of Platypleurini) they are attracted to lights at night. The high proportion of females in this sample is therefore a notable collecting effort for a taxon that was not Jason’s research focus. In the rest of the KZNM cicada collection, the sex ratio is 139♂♂:110 ♀♀ (perhaps due to large numbers of female Platypleurini that may be attracted to lights). The majority of the specimens bear only Jason’s name, but one specimen’s label also bears his wife’s name (“J & A. Londt”); Clive Quickleberg (1 specimen) and Torsten Dikow (4 specimens) are also credited with co-captures.

Fifteen of the specimens are predation records. These records are comparatively rich in male specimens of Zouga, a genus that is challenging for entomologists to sample because the cryptically-coloured, clear-winged males call intermittently while flying (making them especially hard to locate) and fly rapidly and erratically (making them hard for humans to catch; pers. obs.). It is also surprising that all but one of the records are of male cicadas (binomial probability, p < 0.05). Perhaps the relatively lighter body mass of males (due to the large abdominal air sacs associated with their calling organs) makes them easier to subdue than conspecific females. Londt (2006) has already noted that the predators are more usually females. Londt (2006) mentions 22 other records of cicadas (including two more of Stagira and eleven more of Melampsalta) as prey of robber flies, but some of these may originate from publications, e.g. Hobby’s (1935) records (Londt 2006).

The earliest specimen, a prey item of Microstylum sp., was collected in 1977 (Table 2), and the first independent specimen was collected in January 1987, just before the author started to describe new species of cicada from South Africa (Villet 1987); the most recent specimen was caught in November 2019 (Table 1). These records start soon after Jason was employed in 1976 (Londt 2006) and represent 24 years (and at least 26 excursions) out of his 34 years of collecting.

The localities are generally well documented on the labels, although a few were refined from collecting event numbers and background knowledge. The sites are mostly in KwaZulu-Natal, but include records from five other South African provinces (Fig. 2) and a specimen from Malawi. The metadata in Tables 1, 2 provide a limited gazetteer of Jason’s collecting sites. Such gazetteers are useful in tracing the activities of collectors and fixing type localities (e.g. Dean et al. 2022).

Figure 2. 

Map of Jason Londt’s collecting sites of the KwaZulu-Natal Museum’s (white circle) primary specimens of Cicadidae and (black circle) predation records involving Cicadidae. Abbreviations: EC – Eastern Cape; eS -eSwatini; FS – Free State; G – Gauteng; KZN – KwaZulu-Natal; L – Limpopo; M – Mpumalanga; NC – Northern Cape; NW -North West; WC – Western Cape.

In summary, Jason is responsible for collecting almost a quarter of the Museum’s holdings of Cicadidae, including a strong sample of females, and probably the best set of records of predation on cicadas by robber flies in Africa.

Warm thanks are extended to Jason for collecting the specimens that made this study possible, and which has advanced knowledge of the Cicadidae of southern Africa. Thanks are also directed to John Midgley for the opportunity and encouragement to contribute this work, to Kirstin Williams, Mandisa Ndlovu and Terence Bellingan for arranging the loan of the material (loan numbers E7 2021 and E8 2021); to Terence Bellingan for providing Fig. 1; and to Adilson Pinedo-Escatel for his useful comments about the manuscript.