Phylogenomic insights into the evolution and biogeography of global Cicadidae

The 3,400 species of Cicadidae (singing cicadas) are an interesting evolutionary study system due to their long underground life cycles, their ability to migrate long distances but tendency to stay close to home, and their species-specific courtship songs. Since the oldest unambiguous Cicadidae fossils date to the Paleocene, we hypothesized that the family may have arisen before and diversified after the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction. We assembled a global phylogenomic dataset of 490 nuclear AHE loci and mitochondrial genomes for Cicadidae, sampling all five subfamilies, 85% of tribes, and 25% of genera for a total of 160 taxa. We used concatenated maximum-likelihood (IQ-Tree) and multi-species coalescent approaches (SVDQuartets, ASTRAL) to resolve the phylogenetic relationships among Cicadidae subfamilies. We estimated divergence times of Cicadidae lineages using combined Bayesian multispecies coalescent (StarBeast 3) and fossilized birth-death models and 44 fossil taxa. We also conducted the first biogeographic analysis including all Cicadidae subfamilies using BioGeoBEARS v. 1.1.1 to determine the geographic origin of the major Cicadidae lineages and to test the hypothesized South American origin for the family. In support of our diversification hypothesis, we find that singing cicadas originated in the Cretaceous, with four of the five subfamilies diversifying shortly after the K-Pg extinction. Biogeographically, we find a Gondwanan rather than South American origin for Cicadidae with many lineages independently dispersing across the globe.