Cercopidae, Spittlebug

Yes Pamsai, bayucca rocks!!!

One of my toughest to ID... There are many of them around, most without an ID and some with a wrong one (not exactly wrong as we see later). I had to extract or extrapolite the ID out of several historical description and taxonomic notes and changes. There is a Tomaspis 14 notata and Tomaspis semimaculata and also Tomaspis costaricensis, but they were now all called Mahanarva, like this one: http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/16134487 But that's obviously not yours if you look carefully. There was also a Tomaspis notata on flickr, what happened there? Russian guy, no latin, so he missed the 14 in the original BCA from Fowler so Tomaspis 14 notata is actually Tomaspis quatuordecimnotata (quatuordecim is 14 ;-)...). Then I found this one: http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/11960 Again Mahanarva costaricensis, but not yours. Then I checked the rest of the page: http://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/Mahanarva_costaricensis and there we are with our history. You see there are 3 subspecies of Mahanarva costaricensis: Costaricensis, Quatuordecimnotata and Semimaculata, so all my missing historic Tomaspis species. Unfortunately I did not find out what subspecies yours actually is. From the phenotype it is almost a mixture of Semimaculata and Quatuordecimnotata from BCA. Once in my lifetime I will find out which one it is...!! I suggest now that we call yours Mahanarva cf. costaricensis for the moment. I will place some of my working documents here for not loosing all links, thanks. http://www.flickr.com/photos/20462444@N00/5976270913 http://hemiptera-databases.org/cool/database.php?db=cool&lang=en&card=species&id=2932 http://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/Mahanarva_costaricensis http://www.flickr.com/photos/45930043@N03/5178454713/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/29697818@N03/3182231520 http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1653/0015-4040%282004%29087%5B0082%3AIAFROT%5D2.0.CO%3B2

I haven't seen one like this - nice pattern.

Beautiful Spittlebug (Cercopidae)