Taxonomy
The floury baker was originally described by German naturalist Ernst Friedrich Germar in 1834 as Cicada curvicosta, using two specimens now in the Hope Entomological Collections, Oxford. However, he did not designate a type specimen, nor are the exact localities where the specimens were collected known. Germar had not specified a location within Australia. In 2003, one of the original specimens was designated the lectotype and the other the paralectotype. French entomologist Jean Baptiste Boisduval described two specimens collected from Port Jackson as Cicada tephrogaster; this is a junior synonym.
Swedish entomologist Carl Stål named the genus Abricta in 1866, and it was either treated as a subgenus of the genus Tibicen or a genus in its own right. Thus the species was known as Tibicen curvicostus, T. tephrogaster and finally Abricta curvicosta from 1906. However, a review of the genus in 2003 showed Abricta to be a disparate group of species, and the Australian members were moved to other genera. S.M. Moulds conducted a morphological analysis of the genus and found the cicadas split naturally into clades according to biogeographical region. Of the 15 Australian species, the floury baker was the earliest offshoot. Unpublished data confirmed it was quite genetically distant from the other 14 species and so it was classified in a new monotypic genus Aleeta, while most of the others were placed in the genus Tryella. The name Aleeta is derived from the Greek aleton meaning flour or meal.
The floury baker gains its common name from the appearance of having been dusted with flour, and both the common names baker and miller were known to be in use by 1860. As of 1905 the same common name "floury baker" was also in use for another species of Australian cicada (Altria perulata, now Arunta perulata), which has white "sacks" as sounding boxes. That species is now commonly referred to as the "white drummer".
Read more about this topic: Aleeta