Tuesday, September 20, 2011

great insect picture

 Lesly en Lydia van Kleef did send me this picture of a great insect that we saw on the Kotowa coffee farm.
Yes , it is not a bird...but it has wings!!
What is it.....an answer of Dane Wade....The insect is in a group whose common name is bush crickets. The taxonomic 'Order' is Orthoptera (within the HUGE 'Class' Insecta)- includes Grasshoppers, Crickets, etc.
Bush crickets are separated from the other Orthoptera mainly by their long/ very long antennae. They are tropical. There are MANY SPECIES of them in the tropics, almost none in cooler, temperate zones. While there are a fair # of grasshoppers and cricket species in the tropics, they are more numerous in temperate zones-- Europe, the US.
Bush crickets can be very colorful, like your photo, but the coolest ones are the ones that are so cryptic, so well camouflaged, that they can almost 'disappear' on whatever substrate they live on--- like a woody tree trunk, an epiphyte-covered treetrunk, etc.
Your photo is a female-- easy to tell that, as only the F's have that long pointed apparatus protruding out from under their abdomen, called an ovipositor. and used to insert into a substrate (the soil, a fruit, a leaf, soft wood, etc.) and lay their eggs.
There are many 100's of species of bush crickets. They provide much food for birds (and mammals, and reptiles, etc)   THANK YOU, Dan!!

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