#tetrigidae

photographs by Nick Volpe

【庭】ヒシバッタ

Hug a Tetrigid Day (get it?).  Anyway Pygmy Grasshoppers get short shrift (get it again?) even in the already short of shrift Grasshopper public relations field.  Not sure which species this is, but just look at that face see what you are missing by spending all your time "liking" the bling insects.  Yes, Tetrigids have depth and subtlety and all that for a set of creatures whose diet is "Eat roots of plants or seedlings, mosses, fungi, algae, organic muck." according to Bugguide.net.  Perhaps there should be a Paleo Tetrigid Diet here to consider, once everything else is gone there may still be some organic muck to lap up.  Found at the proposed MAGLEV trainyard on our research Station.  Photo by Adam Grima.

The lower end of the Alison Baird Reserve is seasonally wet, but most of the area is so flat, and has claypan so close to the surface, that it gets waterlogged each winter, from rainfall and water making its way down the Yule Brook Catchment. It’s these conditions that help make it such important habitat for carnivorous plants, and insects like these grasshoppers. Unfortunately, the various councils on the Swan Plain have so industriously built artificial drainage, and encouraged the planting of water-hungry non-native plants, that water levels in the reserve have already measurably declined. Some of the more vulnerable plants, even up in the sand dunes, have already died, and the spectacular and carnivorous Byblis Rainbow Plants are now under very serious threat, even where they didn’t get bulldozed to make way for industrial carparks.

Now that's camo! On a recent hike north of Putnam, IL I found a large number of these pygmy grasshoppers (Orthoptera: Tetrigidae). While similar to "normal" short horned grasshoppers in appearance, these adorable little critters are typically about 1cm or less. Most species have absent or greatly reduced wings, unlike their Acridid cousins, in favor of a robust ability to swim which aids in their abundance near bodies of water. An entomologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey, a former employer of mine, recently discovered a new species of pygmy grasshopper in Miocene amber that has much more developed wing structure suggesting developed wings as the ancestral trait. I'm also quite fond of the fact that Dr. Sam Heads named the new species after David Attenborough, a hero among naturalists!

MAGLEV impact site, this is something that takes plant carbon and converts it to bird food.  Orthopterans are famous for this and drive many ecosystems sometimes to outbreak levels, sometimes like this little Tettrigid (am basing this ID on my college taxonomy courses).    Picture by Cole Cheng

Please see the link :- http://mbimph.com/index.php/UPJOZ/article/view/2128